Two years later...

Last weekend was "Senior Night" at our last home football game.  Sissy, now a senior, has been the cutest cheerleader on the side lines for four years.  It was her last game.  Our school tradition is to announce the senior players, cheerleaders and their parents one by one before the game to honor them.  Sissy asked that Wilson, my loving boyfriend of two years, her brother Boo and myself to come down on the field with her.  I knew this was going to be one of her hardest moments since losing her father.  When he was charged with her molestation she requested a No Contact Order.  Last year she added four more years to it.  She says she never wants to see him again.  She is hurt beyond words by him (and his family that supports him), but I know at times like this...when she should have had her daddy standing by her and I on the field, his absence glaringly screams "The man that should have taken a bullet for you has hurt you beyond repair".

Still, I was surprised when she wanted my boyfriend to be on the 50 yard line with us.  But, Wilson loves my Sissy....she is easy to love.  Sissy loves Wilson, something I never thought could happen...her letting another man into her heart...after the horrors her father put her through.
 
Another parent snapped a picture of us that night and sent it to me.  Boo and I are hugging Sissy.  Wilson, standing next to me with his arm around Sissy and I gazes at her like she is the most precious girl in the world. (she just so happens to be).  I saw the love in his eyes....and it scared me.

I have been planning on moving to his town after Sissy graduates.  He lives 5 hours away across the state.  We have taken turns making the drive to see one another since we met.  He has asked us both to come live with him before she sets off to college.  The love he has shown me since we first met and the support he has given throughout our ordeal, not only made me fall in love with him, I am  knocked out, flattened, thrown down, madly in love with him.  But....we haven't spoke of true commitment.

  His marriage of 19 years ended very badly before we met.  He nursed his ex-wife through two bouts of breast cancer...then she left him.  Foolish me thought....someday we will both heal and want that for each other.  A real marriage.  True love, honesty, commitment. A real prince of a man that would do anything for Sissy and I and never hurt us.  Seeing the way he looked at Sissy the other night, I thought to myself...Oh no....I don't really know where he wants to go with this.  I can't let Sissy and myself get attached, dream of a future if that isn't what he really wants.

It isn't.  I did it.  I asked him if he ever saw himself marrying me.  He doesn't.  Now what?

Once upon a time...

“Dad touched me inappropriately.”  My vision blurred as I attempted to read the text again.  I held my cell phone in my shaking hand….not wanting to believe.  My 15 year old daughter Sissy had just “texted” me the reason she had been so angry at her father in the last few weeks.  Just the week before Bill, my husband while working together with me in our beautiful yard,  was stung by a bee.  His reaction was so strong that we realized he had suddenly grown highly allergic.  The doctor prescribed him an epi-pen.  After giving Sissy the instructions on how to use it if dad was ever stung again she asked me “Mom, is that epi-pen good for just bee stings or will it help get the stick out of his butt?”  Though my daughter’s wit made me proud, I knew she had been increasingly upset with her father recently and he seemed irritated at her all the time.

  Teenagers seem to feel more comfortable jabbing their feelings out with their thumbs onto a tiny keyboard rather than speak face to face these days.  I thought I would open up a dialect with my teen through the cell during a long Saturday morning car ride to my nephew’s wedding two hours away.  I thought that her recent disregard towards her father was her way of rebelling, of being a typical teenage girl.  She was anything but a typical teenager.

   From a young child, Sissy was more kind and sensitive then her playmates.  I still giggle when I watch an old video tape of her that I secretly recorded while she watched her favorite movie “Grease”.  Two year old Sissy stands on a chair giddily jumping up and down while Sandy cheers at a pep rally in the movie.  When the scene changes to Danny seeing Sandy for the first time since “Summer Lovin” and he proceeds to be rude to her, Sissy runs to the TV and turns the sound down.  Even at that age, she couldn’t bare to see others, albeit a movie character, get their feelings hurt.  

She grew into a kind, beautiful, sweet, bubbly cheerleader herself.  Actually, quite a lot like Sandy from Grease.   She did well in school.  She was loved by many of her friends and teachers.  Our peers were envious that we didn’t have to deal with “normal” teenage issues such as breaking curfew, talking back, drinking etc.  Her father – a well respected teacher and coach in our small town -  and I commented to each other repeatedly on what a lovely girl we were blessed with.  Then how, I sat there wondering, could he have done this to our princess?

I sat in the car, all dressed to the nines, high heels, fluttery dress, hair in curls.  Bill is obliviously singing to Def Leppard, while I am still holding my phone, shaking, tears dropping on the screen. 

“Turn the car around Bill." I say "Take me home.”  

I've got a slippery grip on sanity...

I am 43, living in a 100 year old cottage that frequently has small, brown, gross centipedes crawling across the floor.  I live in this old, tiny house with my 17 year-old daughter, Sissy, a Pomeranian and a emotionally needy Siamese.  My ex-husband, Sissy's father molested her two years ago.  We left him, he went to jail for a while, and Sissy never wants to see him again.  His family blames me.  Sissy's grandparents and aunts from his side have nothing to do with us anymore.  We are barely scraping by financially month to month.  My boyfriend of two years told me yesterday he never planned on marrying me.  I have a blood clot on my butt that happens from stress (lovely, I know but hey....that's what's happening today).  I carefully sit here waiting to go to the doctor to have it painfully removed.  (It happened when I kicked Sissy's dad out so I already  know the drill)
Today is the first day in two years where I finally am feeling my sanity slipping away.
Did you know that there is a place your brain tries to go to when the world presses down to hardly on you?  I do now.  I like that place.  It is kind of like a little vacation in your mind.  It is truly like a secret hiding place, warm and comfy in your head where you can go to get away from the pain.  I liked being there and wanted to stay.  But then a vision of Sissy's smile broke into my hiding place, and pulled me back out.  I can't go "bye bye" now.  There is a beautiful girl with a broken heart that needs her mama.