Would You Do What I Did?

I haven't spoken to my birth father since 2002 or early 2003.  I don't use the term birth father to indicate that I was adopted.  He and my mother were married when they had me.

I was two or three months old when he met and manhandled someone who immediately had him arrested for said manhandling, but later went on to have two children with him.  They married a few years later and are still together to this day.  She is my beloved Wicked Stepmom (the name she gave herself).  I am her Sweet Pea.

I am 40 years old and I am someone's Sweet Pea.

Birth Father was mostly out of my life from when I was four or five until I was 11.  From what I can gather, it was probably a combination of lack of effort on his part and lack of willingness to deal with any confrontation on my mom's.  Maybe, too, it was fairly common then for children to simply take on the new husband's last name and sweep that other dude under the rug.

He didn't really become part of my life until I was old enough to drive from where we lived, just east of the LA county border to where they lived, just north of the US/Mexico border.

Eventually (right after I moved back to San Diego), he moved their family to the deep south.

He has spent most of his life since then as a truck driver.  Every few months he would find his way to my neck of the woods.  By then, I was divorced.  Corey and I had our own place.  We would go to the truck stop to pick up Papaw and either get a meal out or bring him home.

Corey adored his papaw.  Pretty sure the feeling was mutual.  And I loved having him in my life.  We used to just chat, sometimes for an hour or more.

I had him and I had the father who raised me and life was good.

Birth Father has a long history of problems.  Lying.  Cheating.  Anger.  Never having lived with the man, I never witnessed it, and by the time we had become so close, those stories were in the past.  Troubling, but old.

Then he got caught cheating on my beloved Wicked Stepmom.  Again.  And it had been going on for an extended time.

Over a decade.

I was done.

I don't believe that saying, "You can't choose your family."  I chose the man who raised me.

Birth Father and I never discussed it.  I cut him out and he accepted it.  I just cannot tolerate people who willingly, knowingly hurt others simply to satisfy themselves.  Wicked Stepmom chose to stay for her own reasons, and I credit her with a strength to do something I could not do.

Just last year, at age 62, he was arrested for assaulting at least one family member.  As I've mentioned before, they are the Jerry Springer side of my family, so I never tried to gather all of the details.  Because of the fiasco, I'm pretty sure he was mandated to attend anger management training and counseling.  I can't imagine he would have ever gone otherwise.

Wicked Stepmom and I talk at least a few times a month.  Every once in a while she mentions her hope that I will come around.

Here's how the most recent conversation went:

"Your dad and your brother are emailing.  They seem to be getting along real well."
"I know.  I saw something about that on Facebook."
"Three down and one to go."
"Yes, but it's my understanding that the man is still a rat bastard who has never acknowledged what he's done, nor apologized.  He's never reached out to make amends to anyone.  I choose not to have that sort of person in my life.  I have enough to deal with."

She agreed with me.  It's not like I'm the crazy one who's holding out for no good reason; they all know they're fucking nuts, but they're sticking together anyway.

That conversation was on Monday morning.  The next day I received an email from Birth Dad.  It's not the first one I've received in the last eight or nine years.  He has forwarded religious and political humor emails.  (That is a family trait I hope my kids never pick up!)  Last year when Wicked Stepmom was struggling to send emails with photos, he helped her out and forwarded a few things.  Never any sort of note.  Nothing.

Yesterday's email was a bona fide personal note.  His sister had died the night before.  She'd had a stroke a few years back and never recovered.  He hoped we were well and sent his love to us all.

Ugh.

What am I supposed to do with that?

I cannot believe the emotions it brought up.

Over the past few years, especially as I've heard about his various health conditions, I have wondered how I will feel when he is gone.  It wasn't "how will I feel when he's gone if we don't find a way to reconcile?"  The man has had 63 years of lying, manipulating and bullying.  It's not like he's going to change that much.

Hearing that his sister had died brought that right back.  Made the reality* feel more real.

*I don't understand why people talk about the possibility of death as if there is some alternative.

Not only that, but taking eight or nine years to write those few simple lines says to me that it took some courage.  When it comes to that level of putting oneself out there, I'm a veritable sucker.

I talked with Nance and Tom and asked what they thought about it.  Nance's thought was that it was god working in mysterious ways.  I'm not religious, so there's not a lot I can do with that.



I asked Heather, too.  Of all my friends, she is the most likely to have a situation close enough to feel like she can relate.  She thought I should respond mainly to avoid future drama.  She is from the south, so maybe that makes sense from a Southern perspective.

Personally, I felt like a response was in order.  I don't want to try to out-jerk the jerk, and I cannot otherwise justify not responding.  So I did it.  I could not bring myself to leave the opening that Tom suggested.  However, I did tell him how to find a cache of low quality cell phone videos of the girls, which in some ways seems to have had the same affect.  Two emails have followed.  Not the sort that would necessarily require a response under regular circumstances other than to maybe say thanks.  I'm so far behind on corresponding with people that the thanks wouldn't normally come for another few weeks.

It's hard to know where to go from here.  It's not a place I've been before and I don't see the clear best path.

Once upon a time I did severely limit contact with my oldest brother.  He was going through this druggie/asshole-ish phase that I just couldn't have around my son.  If he called, we always talked.  Sometimes went better than others, but I was never not there for him.  I was pulling for him and held my breath when he started talking about leaving certain friends and activities behind.  My brother didn't ever seem to me like the lost cause that I figured Birth Dad to be.

So I am wondering, would you (at any point) do what I did?  What would you do?

Jerry Springer, Wherefore Art Thou?

I'm just gonna lay it all out there.


Temper tantrums are many things, including annoying, scary, loud... and did I mention annoying?  I've had to deal with a few lately.  Here's the real problem:  Mad is not having them (oh sure, she occasionally gives it a go, but she's too good a sport still to keep it up).  No, it's Corey.


One of the things we do when he's losing his mind is send him out of the house for a walk.  When this happened the day he got suspended, he first tried to kick down the gate on one side of our house.  The other night, after we had to call a family meeting... and included Lisa and her family (in front of whom Corey was a perfect gentleman... so don't tell me he can't control himself), he tried beating a broomstick on the ground to break it.  He was out in the front yard and, yes, neighbors were watching.  When that didn't work, he tried smacking the side of the house.  In both cases, I quietly but firmly asserted that if he destroyed anything, I would call the police.  Meanwhile I'm thinking "Please don't make me call the police!"  That night I had to send him out three times.  The last time I told him that if he so much as tripped on a stone on his way to the sidewalk, I would make the call.  (Yes, overly dramatic on my part... *sigh*... I know.)  Upon returning he seemed remorseful and we ended up on a semi-polite note.


Since then, things have been like a magic carpet ride, but without the psychedelic colors.  At the moment, Corey and Lisa can only see one another at school until they each start making better decisions (I'll let your imaginations fill in the reasons why).  Even though she's part of the problem, I'm hoping that Lisa is part of the solution, too.  I saw her last night.  She apologized for having Corey in her seventh period (he doesn't have one; why the teacher let him be there is still unfathomable) and then taking him to an after school sewing class (because yeah... Corey had an unfulfilled desire to make a bag that attaches to the side of a table... who knew?!).  I've talked with both of them about helping one another make the right decisions so they can be together.


The adults in Lisa's life are all fabulous in their own ways.  We are bonding over the kids, but they are typically not my type of people.  For example, the people I refer to as Lisa's parents are really her aunt and uncle.  Except that the man I thought was her uncle is really her aunt/mom's boyfriend.  This was made clear last night when Lisa's uncle accompanied her over to my car to apologize. 


Don't worry, I pulled it off and he never knew I spent 10 minutes wondering if this was the boyfriend I'd heard about.  It was kind of fun trying to explain it all to Tom later.  He has requested a chart.


Corey, as it turns out, is not the only Jerry Springer Fan Club member in my family.  Here's a little white trash history:


My mom and her first husband, Russ, had my brother and I.  This was in the sex, drugs and rock 'n roll age (and no, I'm not lying when I say my parents almost named me Pebbles Flint Stone).  Eventually Russ met a 17 year-old girl named after a piece of fruit.  Russ and his best friend, Craig, handcuffed said girl so Russ could kiss her.  I was about three months old.


To her credit, Fruit Girl had him arrested.  To enter the JSFC, she also pretty much immediately fell in love and soon after was pregnant with her first daughter.


At that time, Craig was married to his second wife, Darlene, a crazy-ass yotch who bore him a daughter and a son.


Somewhere in the drugged and boozy haze, Craig and Darlene divorced.  He got the kids (for a man to get full custody back in the early-ish '70s was insane, so imagine what Darlene was like).  Mom and Craig hooked up (the order of things varies depends upon who tells the story).  I was two or so.  They married when I was five, separated when I was 13, got back together and divorced two years later.  Despite some pretty lame-assed decisions on his part, the man has always been there for me.  He is Dad.  His daughter is my sister and one of my best friends.  His son is... well... I refer to him as my stepbrother and leave it at that.


I mostly didn't see or hear from Russ when I was a kid.  There was once at age 5, once at 11 and then he started coming by whenever he was in town when I was 16 or 17.  I was kind of excited to have him in my life.  His wife (the fruit woman) calls herself my Wicked Stepmom.  She calls me her Sweet Pea.  I love her like an aunt or an older sister.


Dad remarried three days after his divorce from Mom was final, and the new wife wasn't exactly keen on having his ex-wife's kids hanging around.  It didn't stop him from rescuing us all when we were in a bad car accident, though.  Or when my crappy little car was stolen and taken on a high speed police chase.  Again, always there...


His wife slowly accepted me.  In a soap-opera-worthy turn of events, she saw that I am devoted to her husband and, because of him, to her when she, her two daughters and their five kids were in a multiple-rollover accident that almost cost Margaret her ability to walk and almost took her grandson from all of us.  (It took me three tries to over two weeks to get all the blood and debris from her hair... or at least from the part she wasn't resting on.)


Margaret is the woman who watches Madelyn every day.  Today she told me (again) how she always tells people she's so lucky to have a granddaughter to watch who is such a joy.  We don't know what we'd do without Margaret.


For a while I felt as though I had two dads.  Some people might call one Dad and the other Father.  I tried that mentally and it didn't work.  With Russ I vacillated between Russ and Dad.


As I got to know more about that part of my family, I was put off by the lies Russ had told over the years.  We always thought he had a Purple Heart because the helicopter he was piloting in Viet Nam crashed... or because of something to do with shrapnel.  Compare that to the truth:  The jeep he was driving (badly, as per usual from my experience) in Japan rolled into a ditch during war time.  Those surgeries at the VA?  Yeah, he has a medical ass problem.  There are more lies that span his entire life.


Somewhere in my early adulthood I learned he was having an affair.  Wicked Stepmom was shattered, but they were able to reconcile.  Seven or eight years ago he admitted that it had never stopped and it wasn't going to.  Wicked Stepmom has her own reasons for staying; some from necessity, others are, I'm pretty sure, required to maintain membership in the JSFC.


Russ and I haven't spoken since then, but I talk with his wife 1-2 times a month and keep in touch with one sister via Facebook.


And here's where it gets weird (I know!)... tonight I received an email from someone I didn't recognize.  The subject regarded something I'd gotten from other people, though, so I opened it.  It was from Russ.  No personal message... he was just forwarding something that everyone else in my family had sent around.***  Maybe he's working on a JSFC coup... a takeover of the presidency or something.


***That's another family trait of ours.  If my aunt sends something to Mom, Bro and me then Mom and Bro will send it to all the same people, plus some of their friends, who are also my friends.  Each and every one of them apparently fears I might have been left out.  Sometimes things make two full rounds!