It started on a day in late May. The day after my mother’s birthday, in fact.
While we carried on our lives in the normal fashion, working, going to school, and looking out for the health and happiness of two young children, the two of you began an affair.
The details are still forthcoming as to how it began, but everyone knows at the end of the day that doesn’t really matter anyways.
The truth finally came out on July 4th, on a day people spend with their families, mine was finding out that the normal we’d been living was never going to be our normal again.
My mother has been married to my stepfather for nearly thirteen years, a man who became in effect my stand in father because my first turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, at least in those days, but that’s neither here nor there.
The story should end here with “and they all lived happily ever after” but the fact is it doesn’t, and we didn’t.
I spent many many years quietly hating my stepfather, and even more loudly hating him. At twenty-five he was not equipped with the skills necessary to relate to or raise a nine year old girl. At eighteen my presence in the Sanderson household came to a rather volatile end, and I got to quietly dealing with all the unpleasantness that happened between nine and eighteen.
Life and it’s unpredictability found me back in my parents house at the age of twenty one, pleased to be in the consistent company of my delightful, charming and intelligent younger brothers (which if you ask me were the best thing Larry did in those thirteen years), but once again in the close proximity of a man who took joy in making me cry the last time we cohabitated. In the three years of my absence, I found him to have become a quieter man, and the fact that he was no longer drinking didn’t hurt either. So for the sake of my mother and my brothers I dug in my heels and made a concentrated effort to tolerate him, occasionally even taking joy in his misguided theories about life and the universe and his wandering tumor.
It took effort on my part to get to where I was in my relation to him, it was work not to completely detest him. I’m pissed. It was such a wasted effort. Nearly thirteen years of my life I watched my mother patiently wade through all of his bullshit, to stand by him while he took his sweet ass time figuring out his family was more important than the drugs and alcohol his system constantly craved, I endured every power trip he went on, screaming at me that he was an adult, and telling me on more than one occasion that it made him happy when I cried from him yelling at me. I took the myriad of inappropriate names he called my mother and I and stored them away in the deep recesses of my mind because I was trying hard to get along with him these days. To the back of my mind also went the times he screamed at my mother because I happened to be on the phone with my biological father, his constant hair pulling, the times he told me my ass was getting big, the time he almost punched my boyfriend, the night I left home and all the times I had to stay home to watch my brothers even though he was also home because he was entirely incapable of caring for his small children.
Wasted. All of it.
And you. Well, I’ve saved you for end of course, because for you, I have no sympathy.
I don’t know you, you see, and so as far as I’m concerned you have no redeeming qualities and one really damning quality:
You caused my mother and my brothers a lot of pain.
I don’t know where along the line you decided that your desires were more important than the needs of an entire family, but you are wrong. I asked you this the one time we spoke, and you didn’t have answer for me, but of course, how could you? There is no defense for your actions. It does not matter who pursued who, you had the facts. You knew the man in question and you knew he was married. You also knew he had young children. All of this was right in your face and when decision time you decided that you were more important.
Surprise, you were wrong, and how long it will take you to realize that remains to be seen, but when you build a life around lies it will eventually come down on you.
–I did not post this as soon as it was written.
I was right though. You lost.
Behaving Badly 
