The subtweet to end them all.
No, I haven’t been drinking. Sleep deprived, yes. Not drinking. (I actually do math or I write, or both, when I’m soul-wounded.)
Here’s the story: She ran away to the far side of the continent because our parents stopped being parents when she was 6. The parents were bored being the adults, and they only stayed together for another four years because they were each other’s best source of drama.
(They still are. Divorced for longer than they were married, and they still care more about who the other is fucking than who they’re fucking.)
The parents’ subsequent spouses were in fact more awful than the original pair, and I couldn’t take care of her. I wanted to, and I couldn’t. Six years older, paying for every dime of uni on scholarships & 20 hour work days and praying the Feds would approve my Pell, because my parents ruined my credit before I turned 15?
I ran away to college at 16. And stayed gone even when I literally could not afford both rent and 1000 calories a day. Middle sib ran away to a boarding school (the discipline-problems-of-the-rich-&-famous schools need someone willing to take a scholarship for being the dorm monitor type of boarding school.) Baby sis ran away by sneaking out, staying out, then leaving the day after graduation with a wet EMT vocational diploma. That’s how bad it got. We’ve got 8 ACE scores. Our molesters weren’t in-house? Nor was the drug use? Those have got to be advantages, right?
Child support? No, there was never any. For any of us. Because the courts let people get away with that shit back in the 90s. Like a pair of Cluster B semi-sociopaths with one gambling addiction and a compulsive shopping habit, edging into white collar crime, could write any check that wouldn’t bounce anyway. (How do you think I learned about money laundering? Books? Only to identify what I’d already seen and make it all hang together.)
So, she ran to the far side of the continent, with her best friend; two girls, worked crap jobs near military bases (it’s what we knew), and hooked up with some of the lesser specimens because freedom is intoxicating, and lust tastes like love when you’ve been starved all your life.
She graduated in 2000. Yeah, you see it coming, too.
It was whirlwind courtship dictated by ship date. They look cute and way too young in their wedding picture from Walmart, but he was shipping out, and he was mad at his mother, so wanted to make sure if he died, someone else got his pay out. At least she wasn’t pregnant when he left for Iraq.
First leave, though? Oops. Well, turned out she was good at being a single mother. Figured out base child care, ran housing, found a job she liked, partnered up with another friend to have their babies together... And she loved that baby more than her own life. Because she didn’t think she’d have another. (We have, as they say oh so delicately in the South, female troubles.) And so did I, and her grandmothers and everyone who ever met her.
True story: We took that baby to a Chicago dive bar one night because we needed to find a place that was open and served food, and that was it. The bartender was not keen on having a baby in his bar, but when I paid, he told me I could bring back my baby any time I wanted, because she was such a good baby. And she totally was. Every single day. Is. Please let it be is.
I say he was broken before they ever met, long before basic, but she swears he came back from some subsequent deployment broken. Okay, sure. They did hide the PTSD from the PTSD specialist sibling for a looooong time though. Just saying. I think she did what most emotionally abused and neglected girls do: we either fix our heads and marry the opposite of what we had growing up, or we marry the same fucking thing, and try to fix their heads. It’s psych 101, but it’s trope because it’s more true than not.
Whatever: he was broken when he came back, however he got that way, and he hated how good she was at being a single mom. She’d built a life for herself? He demanded they move, near the awful parents who drove him into mil life. She tried to get him to consider moving to where she came from. He claimed he was too Southern to survive Arizona. And that’s how they ended up in Jaw-ja. Where he started collecting guns, listening to Beck and Limbaugh and militia, hoarding gold, all if it. For all I know, he’s half a dozen of the trolls I’ve blocked.
Fucking Magat hell. Where my sister, who would be Senior Management in any other place, is still running the shipping, and the training, and the phones, for a small biz that doesn’t give her raises. $13/hour. Because structural misogyny and what he’s done to her head...
Oh, and he’s never been involved. Worked swing shift when possible, so he never had to see his children. What little he did? It was more than my sister remembered our father doing, therefore it was being a great, involved parent. It wasn’t even bare minimum.
So, my baby girl is brilliant. Really, not just her doting adults say so. Keeping her challenged is the hard part, and we’ve been pushing for challenges because too easy is as bad as too hard. She was born snarky and built the vocab for sarcasm by age 3. Robot girl, walked into her Magnet school.
3 years ago, my baby developed a crush on another kid in her Magnet school. Who was not the same race. And her pre-Magat father went apeshit.
Nothing would suit him except a survivalist house, out in an all white neighborhood, that they couldn’t afford, except if they rented their in town, paid off, convenient to all jobs and school house.
He built the McWhite McMansion so his daughters would be kept far from the kids of color, put them in stifling schools where they wouldn’t be taught anything like independent thought, and expected them to just stay home when they weren’t in their awful schools.
And my sister would have to commute a couple hours a day, or quit working. Either suited him – he’d either alienate his children from their always absent mother, or have a stifled wife dependent on him.
And then he moved his mistress into the paid off house. Didn’t even pay rent long enough to make it look legit. And then came the divorces, where the Magat, gun-humping, gold-bugging racist shit refused to sell either house, and demanded my sister take responsibility for the McWhite McMansion (which she hates) as a condition of child support and property settlement.
There are no ATVs in the interior neighborhood where the paid off house is. There aren’t even riding lawn mowers, except at lawn service companies. They went from a walkability score of 87 to one of 2, and that was his plan. To keep control over my sister and my nieces. Because he’s a waste of molecules.
The middle of nowhere does have ATVs/UTVs, and someone gave the keys to a teenager – not my niece – on a wet, freezing, school night; after dark, where there are no street lights.
Mt niece and her friend got t-boned. My niece got thrown. Think human cannon ball. There’s almost no chance she can survive.
Because of the racist, paranoid, broken piece of trash couldn’t bear the idea of a daughter in love.
And if he’s reading this: it should be you dying. Because it’s your fault. If you could keep your dick in your pants, if you could let your child be her own person, if you’d let them have the city, or you sold that monument to your ego... She’d be fine right now.
Do your remaining daughter a favor. Pay her child support and go away forever. Never come near her again.