TVStocks, MusicStocks and Life

Let me explain.

I grew up without ever meeting my father and my mother lost custody of me and my half brother when I was 3. I was raised barely knowing her and would see her about 6 times a year.  I was adopted by my brothers father.  That didn't work out well.

She regained custody of me at age 14.  She worked at a bar and hooked up with the owner, 25 years her senior.  She disrupted his marriage and managed to become his main squeeze.  Over the next two years they opened many new bars but gambled more money than came in.  

I really never saw them because their hours were late.  They did take me to St. Pete for summer break for several years in a row.  I enjoyed that.

I went to 13 different schools as a kid.  As you can tell I'm leaving a lot of the details out so I can get to the point of my post.  By my senior year they had moved 60 miles away but came to Indy to work.  They wanted me to go to school in Brown County, but I wasn't going to school number 14.  They got me an apartment across the street of my high school, so I lived alone my senior year.  I was a responsible kid, but that was a pretty cool year.

After high school I was told I was moving down south.  I was a lost soul, college was never an option because nobody in my very small circle of relatives ever went.  I lived with them in the middle of nowhere for about a year.  I got an opportunity to make $8.80 an hour pulling auto parts for NAPA  (back in Indy) at 18 years of age.  I took it and managed to rent a room from my best friends mother.

Back to my mother, the gambling had caught up with them in just 5 short years.  They lived like big shots during this time.  Riverboat twice a month, Vegas once a month, bookie cards... You name it.  They didn't pay federal taxes and their employees stole from them left and right.  They had poker machines in their bars and would frequently get raided and go on short trips to jail.  They made a fortune, but all the above factors destroyed their chances at being wealthy bar owners for the rest of their days.  They got rid of it all and left me to move to FL into one of their two homes there.

My mothers boyfriend (the 25 year older gent) had several pensions and SS.  They roughly bring him $4k a month.  When you own your cars and home outright, that's plenty.  My mother was nearing 40 at the time and he nearing 65.  They'd get their money first of the month, gamble it away and be broke the remainder.  Did this every month.  My mother took a job at the tolls to bring in more money, but then she was faced with working for $10 an hour, never having any money and living with a man she never loved.

Didn't take time for her to realize she wasn't doing it any longer.  They both had equal issues, but I credit that man for being a provider to us for those years.  He was generous, kind and today he is the only father figure I have ever known.  He'll turn 80 in July.

So she left him.  She made him sell the homes (in both their names), took a car, the dogs and her share of the money and bought a trailer in Bloomington, IN.  She didn't want to work and thought she could live off $50K for the rest of her life.  It was gone within 6 months.  She married a guy with a 70 IQ who was nice enough but an on/off employed laborer.  He was very ignorant and she was always so smart and likable.  So she ended her 5th marriage (keep in mind she never married the only man I ever cared for as a father), sold her trailer and bought another in Darlington.  Very close to her parents and where she was born (Crawfordsvile).  

The next year she lived in squalor.  She finally went back to work bartending, as little as possible so she could smoke weed and eat hot fudge all day.  She lived her entire adult life with a man in her bed, but on November 17th 2011 she was alone.  She had a stroke and a cable repairman found her some 12 hours later.

She is now paralyzed on the left side of her body.  She has lived in three nursing homes and amazingly is now in Assisted Living in Carmel, IN.  She is 55 and hasn't a penny to her name.  She paid little into SS because a lot of her jobs were waiting tables.  The tax payers cover her costs to live.  She has food, shelter and $52 extra a month.  She also has all of her memories and the mind of a 14 year old.  

My brother won't have anything to do with her, the grandparents are in their 80s, my uncle is a drunk with nothing to his name, so my Aunt and I take turns.  I'm 20 minutes from her, I see her twice a week to bring her denture products and fast food.  

This brings me to the point, she's found god this last year.  She begs me to take her to the movies, so the last three months I've taken her and her 75 year old friend (who has scoliosis, a walker and oxygen tank) to see Son of God, Gods Not Dead, Noah and yesterday Heaven is for Real.  I don't know how to say no.  Let me tell you, that's a sight to see when it takes place.  I'm sure people think I'm a young employee of a nursing home taking these ladies out, but in truth I want to make their life a little better.  I know my mother feels guilty for the way she lived and truly thinks her current acknowledgement of God will save her soul.

Now, to my point, all these religious films all of the sudden are really interrupting my life.  It takes five hours from the time I leave to the time I drop them off (if we don't get food after).  I do it on Saturdays, so that drains a lot of my free time with my girls.

After all the years of wrong (and there is so much I'm leaving out, like the fact she called CPS on my wife because Meadow got sick at six months old and had to go to the hospital to put on weight), I can't just abandon her.  If it was me in there I'd take my life, but I feel this is the new normal for me the next 30 years.  I'm 35 and have built quite an unbelievable life for us.  Things could be so much worse, but all I think about any more is when the next damn religious film with traction is coming out!  I'm Agnostic, so the films are lost on me.

No need to comment, I just felt like griping a bit.