Table of Contents

5/10/04

Hi, son.

I love calling you “son”. It’s proprietary, a little, but also a point of pride for me. You are my beautiful, strong, smart, adorable son. I have to laugh because sometimes when you get in trouble, and I call you “Son!” you look at me and yell, “Not son! Name Taylor!” You get so mad sometimes! It’s cute though because your face gets all twisted up and you make faces. No idea where you get that from.

Yesterday your Aunt and Uncle No N gave me tulips for Mother’s Day. I had just come back from dropping you off with your dad, and was feeling sad because I missed you, and No N came walking in the house with a vase full of tulips, a card, and a stuffed mama and baby rabbit. No N doesn’t celebrate holidays, so it meant a lot to me that she thought of me and knew that I was a little down, and got me some flowers.

Later that night, as I drove home in the dark with country music making me melancholy, and my flowers strapped in your car seat like precious cargo, I thought a lot about this diary that I am writing for you. I hope that you like it and appreciate the opportunity to get to know me a little more as a person, and not just “Mom”.

I wonder sometimes, when will I give this to you? On my deathbed? At some major turning point in your (our) life? Will I give it to you in my will? I don’t know. I think that when the time is right, whether you are a teenager or a grown adult, I will just know when it’s time.

Back to the story:

BBA was the start of my fall with PK, at least as I saw it. What I didn’t see at the time, was that the fall started a long, long time ago…I was just too stupid and blind to see it. After that point, I started to be insecure all the time. I was sure that when PK went out, he was going to meet her, or someone else. I lived in a constant state of jealousy, insecurity, and rage. A quiet rage. While we lived at his parents’, we never had a loud argument. There was just a lot of whispering angrily in corners, silent treatments, and just bad feelings, all the time. I can’t even describe what a trap it felt like – I had no friends, nowhere to go, no job, no money, no way to get home.

PK had proposed somewhere along the way. I can’t even remember how he did it, so obviously it was not very memorable. We had talked about it and talked about it, but finally we decided to set a date. When I told No N today that I actually did marry PK, she asked where my brain was. The truth is, at this point in my life, I don’t think I had one. I didn’t have a proper engagement ring, so my mother sent her ring that my father gave to her when they got married. Ironically, I lost it even before the wedding in three feet of snow. You would think I would have taken that for a sign.

So my mom sent me another one (this is where multiple marriages come in handy) and I lost that too while bagging groceries. Someone got a nice surprise that day. (As a replacement, PK in his infinite generosity bought me a stolen cubic zirconia that was bigger than my knuckle for fifteen bucks. And boasted about it, no less.)

We finally decided to move out. It was my first place, ever, and it was ours. I was filled with delusions that this would make everything better – I would be the best girlfriend ever! I would make his house so clean, so comfortable, and cook so well that he would want to stay home with me instead of going out all the time.

Unfortunately, not so.

If anything, he started going out more often – we lived only a few blocks from “downtown” ShitFuckTown.

Our first night in our new apartment, he went out “for a couple of hours” and never came home. I woke up at 6:00 AM alone in bed, in our new apartment. Something inside me snapped. I was SO tired of this. How could he do this to me? I was pretty much hysterical.

Didn’t he care about me at all? The answer was, of course, that I let him do this to me. I had no self-respect. I allowed him to treat me with a complete lack of respect, of interest, of even basic courtesy – and told myself I was lucky that such a strong, good looking man loved me. This is the saddest part of the whole situation – to me, the situation I was in, was called “love”.

6:00 AM. I am walking around down town ShitFuckTown, seeing if he is crashed somewhere, if he is wandering around with his friends. We had no phone yet, so I walked to the nearby Safeway and made two collect calls: one to SpiritCrusher, asking her if she had heard from him, and one to my grandmother, asking for a bus ticket home. My grandmother called SC, and SC talked her out of it, saying that I was hysterical and that PK would calm me down and everything would be OK. All of this with the implication that I was a silly little girl looking a gift horse (her son) in the mouth.

Eventually I trudged home at about 8:00 AM. I was cold, hungry, scared, and dreading when he came back that I would tell him it was over. I was so confident that I was going to do it. I didn’t think he would even try to keep me there…he barely noticed I was around as it was.

Apparently he liked having a live-in housekeeper more than I realized, because first we fought and I screamed and I threw the engagement ring at him (I had always wanted to do that, just once), then he started pleading. PK was always really good at that, and I am a softie. He would beg and beg and promise never to do it again, and I believed him. Worse, I let him believe that all he had to do was apologize and make an empty promise and I would put up with this forever.

Next: chapter six.