I wouldn't have thought that a fizzy drink that is supposed to make my muscles strong and work better could affect my sinuses, but it does. Or rather, the lack of the fizzy drink has affected my sinuses.
The back of my throat has that dry feel that presages a bout of sinus infection, or possibly a cold, but it couldn't be just because I didn't mix up my fizzy vitamin and mineral drink for the past two days. Could it? Maybe it is the reason. Time to stop being lazy and mix up a double dose this morning. If it keeps the germs at bay, I'm all for that. I don't like being ill, except when I need a reason to take a day off work.
I was reading tedwords's post about his in-law and outlaw problems with his son-in-law and it reminds me of a similar situation with my eldest son.
Dred Scotty has been a trial since day one. He preferred strangers to me and spent his formative years lurking about and collecting information to feed to my mother so she'd get angry and slap me in the face. His reasoning was that whatever he did was copacetic because it paid me back for punishing him when he, say, climb out his bedroom window on a phone cord after stealing money from my purse to buy a toy I had forbidden at 6 AM or getting up in the middle of the night to pile chairs on the table after pushing the table closer to the door to the kitchen, which was locked with a hook lock to keep him out of the kitchen and away from the gas stove. He still managed to get the door unlocked until we padlocked it with a key lock. That thwarted his middle of the night and wee hours of the morning rambles and kept him from burning the house down so he went back to sticking wire hangers in the outlets to try to start fires and shock the crap out of his hand. As I said, Dred Scotty was a trial.
He continued to be a trial as he played my mother and I off against each other, working through her to control things because I know how he works, like the time he claimed a teacher had sexually assaulted him when the teacher didn't even know who he was, a fact I became aware of when I stormed into the principal's office to have the teacher fired and brought up on charges. The abuse claim came about because he had given Dred Scotty detention for wandering the halls during classes without a hall pass. Yes, my son, is a devious and manipulative fella at best, and you don't really want to know his worst.
He broken into my apartment twice to steal things to sell because I wouldn't give him any money, the last time stealing my first computer on which was kept (password locked, of course) all of my writing and journals transferred from paper. He didn't know the password and no pawnbroker would touch it, so he tossed it in a dumpster "somewhere." All that work, and a couple of books, gone with the foulest of winds. He stole my tool box and money and the usual things one steals when he's deep into the drugs, even stabbing himself in the leg with a pocket knife to prove that he had been mugged and that's why the radio was missing from my car, which I had loaned him to go out looking for a job. I didn't believe that for a second and he finally admitted to it.
I cut him off financially and seldom heard from him unless he was in dire straits, turning on the tears and that tone in his voice that said he just couldn't take it any more. He should've been an actor. He would have had a couple of Oscars and a few Emmies by now. I was adamant. This ATM was closed for business until he grew up and took responsibility for his own actions, and I was not about to be his ATM as long as he only popped up long enough to get money from me. The ultimatum was simple: Either have a relationship with me or stop asking me for money.
Cut to now.
In January he contacted me by letter and sent me pictures of his children and his wife. He was married again (for the third time) and had a beautiful set of fraternal twins, Connor and Sierra. We wrote. We talked. He didn't ask for money, but then I made a mistake. I sent the twins a really nice gift of clothing for their first birthday. I was happy for my son and not a little surprised when a letter arrived with an installment on some of the money he owed me. Then everything fell apart.
His wife Aldonza, a recovering alcoholic, was drinking again and he was drinking with her to keep her company, and covering up the drinking. He can't drink because it's a direct route to drugs, alcohol being his gateway drug. He had his back surgery and returned to work too soon and ended up with more problems. Aldonza got a job and soon lost it because she was ill, but the truth was she couldn't make it to work because she was drunk on too many occasions. They were in trouble and asking for financial help. I refused to help them out that way, but I did send two cases of diapers for the babies, and I kept sending them every month, something I stopped after Aldonza lost the children when she was found drunk and the kids running around the house dirty and getting into everything. She was charged with reckless endangerment two days after Dred Scotty went into a church rehab program to get sober again, falling off the wagon after four years clean and sober. We don't even want to talk about Aldonza's wagon, and it can't be completely blamed on her mother and father, both of whom are career alcoholics. At least her parents managed to keep their jobs and their children, although they did pass down the alcoholism like a bowl of stuffing or cranberry sauce at the Thanksgiving table.
Aldonza was supposed to go into a 90-day rehab program to get back her children. In the meantime, her stepfather took her car, a car she and Dred Scotty had paid for and on, even though stepdaddy's name was co-signer on the loan, which was not in default, and Aldonza took Dred Scotty's car so she could run the bars at night. She was even caught hanging all over some guy she swears she's not having an affair with and denies that the blatantly sexual text messages and pictures of the fella's not so privates were on her phone (she forgot to delete them when she took Dred Scotty's phone and lent him her phone to call someone). What seemed idyllic and working, with a few minor snags, turned into a full fledged five-car pileup on the highway to Hell.
True to form, Dred Scotty called me for help crying -- that snotty-nosed, hiccuping kind of crying -- that was supposed to soften me up. Some friend of Aldonza's was granted guardianship over the twins and her daughter from a previous liaison was with her mother and stepfather, who just couldn't deal with taking the twins, too. I'd rather mummy and stepdaddy not have the twins and infect them with alcoholism, not that it isn't a possibility if Dred Scotty and Aldonza ever get it together and put their family back together, a possibility that grows dimmer every day since Aldonza moved in with the bar guy that she wasn't having an affair with.
Their lives couldn't be more of a train wreck or highway to Hell pile-up than it is, and my son will be 38 next month. Holy hopping hell toads on crack.
It just doesn't get any better than this, unless you add in my larcenous younger son Ajay and his equally duplicitous wife Jack-em-all, but that's a tale for another time.
Even though I seldom talk about really personal matters, I do have them -- in spades.
That is all. Disperse.
No comments:
Post a Comment