A Mother's Day Surprise!

I'm going to fast forward quite a bit here as my purpose for this blog is not to abide by the rules of chronology but to simply share what's on my mind at any given moment.

My adoptive-father, Greg, left us shortly after my eighth birthday. Without preamble, he gathered my mom, brother, and I together for a Mother's Day surprise. I don't remember every detail, but I recall being with everyone in my grandfather's wood shop, which my father frequently used for crafting and whatnot. We entered the wood shop thinking that he had made something beautiful for my mom when in reality, there was no significance to the location and apparently he forgot what day it was (seriously, who leaves their wife on Mother's Day?!). When we left the wood shop, we were a broken family; perhaps we should have all filed back into the shop to be glued back together with wood biscuits and held with clamps until my parents could work out their problems.

At this point it's important to note that my brother and I had no idea our parents had any problems to start with. All of their disagreements were apparently done in private. We never heard them raise their voices toward each other. We never felt any discord in the air. So my father's decision to leave was quite shocking indeed.

So that was it. We went back home and he packed his things and left. We hardly saw him after that even though he only moved down the street. He left us for another woman and her two children.

His mistress would call our home while our mother was at work and harass me and my brother, only eight and nine years old, respectively. We would huddle together in the corner, holding each other, crying, because of the awful things she would say.

After our dad left, Mom went off the deep end. She would leave for days or weeks at a time and we were left to fend for ourselves with little-to-no food. Because it was summer time, we couldn't rely on our school for breakfast and lunch so we began to depend on friends and neighbors for sustenance. That led to entirely different problems...