His oldest son is three years older than Amanda, his younger son is Emilee's age. The three younger kids weren't in school yet but his older son was in first grade.
NY didn't have a job lined up when he moved so I was the only one working. I didn't care though, I was happy to do it. I was working three different jobs but the time seemed to fly since I was so happy.
He opened doors for me, danced with me in the kitchen, played with the kids outside. He made me happy and because he made me happy, I fell in love. I loved him for how happy he made me, how good he was to my girls and his boys and for how much my life had improved since we had gotten together.
The "honeymoon" was over about two months into the relationship. His other side started to come out. Suddenly, he wasn't coming to bed with me anymore. He would stay up on the computer all night. I would wake up at three in the morning and he would still be out there. He'd be playing SIMS and saying he was looking for a job. I told myself that once he started working it would go back to normal.
You see, when I had found him, I barely got online anymore. There didn't seem to be a reason. Sure, I checked my email and when he was using his computer I would hop online for a few minutes on mine, but I was finished chatting away the night.
And now that he was staying up all night, he wasn't getting up in the morning any more. He expected his oldest son to get himself up and on the bus. Almost every morning, I would get up with him and help him pick out clothes and make sure he had all of his stuff for school while NY slept in the other room. I was shocked that he considered a child of seven old enough to get himself up and to school unaided. My kids hadn't started school but I know my mom got us up until we were in our teens.
He did get a job a few months after we moved in together. It was, of course, in San Antonio which at the time was a forty five minute drive or so. He didn't care, he was from New York, apparently this was nothing compared to commutes he had before. I was just glad he would be working so that we could go back to normal. We didn't.
He still stayed up half the night fucking around on the computer. Then he would over sleep and be late for work. Instead of blaming this on the fact that he stayed up all night, he blamed it on the drive. He said it was too much driving and it was making him tired. He said we needed to move to San Antonio so he could be closer to his job. I said ok since I was still hoping we could go back to how everything had been when we first moved in together.
Before we moved, he told me about this girl that worked in the factory at the plant where he worked (he was in payroll and human resources). He said he was concerned about her because her husband was hitting her. He said she had come and talked to him and he had encouraged her to leave him. She had said she was scared that he would find her and their kids. I told him that I thought it was awesome that he was trying to help her get away from her husband since he was abusing her.
Then, he comes home early a few weeks later. He opened the door and set his stuff down. I was vacuuming or something in the living room when he came in. He looked in my eyes and crossed the room and just hugged me. He stood there and held me for like ten minutes and didn't say anything. When he let go, he was crying. I had no idea what was going on. He told me that the girl had tried to leave, she had went to pack all of her things and her husband shot her and a cop and killed them both. He said that he wasn't going to take me, the kids, any of it for granted any more, that he loved me and he was going to pay more attention to all of us.
And he did, for a little while.
It was about a month before we found a three bedroom apartment in San Antonio. I had been packing for weeks and getting utilities turned off or scheduling them to be moved to the new place. Then, all of a sudden, he says maybe we shouldn't move in to the apartment together. Maybe I should stay and he and the boys should move. I was devastated. I mean, I knew that everything hadn't been perfect, but I thought it was because he was stressed about working and now "driving". But the fact of the matter was that I had to move. It was too late to change my mind. We had our first huge fight. One of those fights where you yell while you cry. It ended with him apologizing, saying he was just scared and that he hadn't wanted to take me away from my family.
He moved before I did. He took his clothes and some of his toiletries and then drove into San Antonio and left me to pack up all of my stuff and the kids stuff and the rest of his stuff. He said he wanted to stay at the apartment since it was closer to work and since I wasn't working anymore, I would have plenty of time to move everything. I wasn't mad that I was left to do the work. I am the kind of person who would rather do the work myself then have to come back and do it again. What hurt me was that it didn't feel like he and I were an us. It was always separate. We weren't moving together. He was moving and then I was moving with the kids. It was all very blasé.
But I cooperated. I didn't want to cause an argument over something so minor.
A week or so after he "moved" I had the kids and I moved in. It was after the kids and I had gotten there that the first sign I had made a mistake came to light. The place we had rented was a two story town house. There were two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs and the living room, wet bar, kitchen, laundry room, third bedroom and second bathroom were downstairs. He wanted to put the boys downstairs and all the men in the house would have the downstairs bathroom. The girls were in the room next to ours upstairs. This being decided, all the kids ran upstairs to check things out. When they ran back down, NY stopped them and proceeded to tell them that this was his house and that they weren't to mess it up. Basically there were two points to this little chat with the kids. The first was that they were more or less guests here and that he wouldn't tolerate any messes. The second was this was his house. As in, not Kate's. He wanted to make sure everyone, myself included, understood that.
I remember standing there, next to the carpeted stairs of my new home wanting to pack everything and leave. Who does that? Who takes the fun out of moving into *our* new home and squashes it? This wasn't what I wanted for my girls or myself. You know when you were a kid and you went to a friend's house for a sleep over? And it sounded like so much fun the whole week while you planned but then you got there and suddenly you wanted to leave. It wasn't your house. You wanted to call your mom and ask her to come get you and you felt like crying because you had made the wrong choice? That was how I felt. But it was too late to change my mind and I was too old to call my mom.
next...
Labels: History Lesson
