Betrayal

The new guy at work was named Ed.  He was a cutie.
 Blond hair, blue eyes, nice bod, but not much taller than me.  But he did have a hilarious sense of humor, and I enjoyed going into his office searching for files.  He always seemed to have just what I was looking for, the missing files.  It always took me a while to tag all of them, and he would entertain me while I was looking.  I knew this would not be a romance for me, but he was a nice change of pace.  Not that he wasn't trying to entice me to go out with him, but I just wasn't ready for any complications in my life.

Soon it would be Christmas, and I was buying things for my kids and hiding them.  Living at my mom's was always a challenge; she didn't know the meaning of the word discipline, and I was hoping that she would keep them out of her room and away from the gifts.  She pretty much let them do as they pleased, and when I tried to make them behave, she would undermine me.  My biggest complaint was that she and my brother would load them up with candy; I'm not talking about a mere candy bar, I'm talking about bags of candy.  Candy before dinner, candy after dinner, candy all of the time every day.  I asked them to stop, but it fell on deaf ears.

Glen and Jeff were going to daycare not far from where we lived.  The two owners of it, Penny and Carol, had just opened it not too long before we moved to Dallas.  It was a good thing and a bad thing.  It was good because they were crazy about my kids and treated them very well.  It was bad because of their attachment to them; they would let them get away with murder.  That wasn't a problem with Glen, who is generally very well behaved, but Jeff was a holy terror.  He had just turned 1 in November.  He was The Worst One Year Old in History.   He was pretty much uncontrollable, wild as a bat, and mean for a kid that young.  I hated to take him anywhere. He would embarrass me almost to the point of tears.

One morning when I dropped them off for school, Jeff wasn't feeling very well.  Penny and Carol would allow sick kids to come to the daycare as long as they didn't have anything highly contagious.  They had cots, and the kids could lay down and sleep and be quiet.  When I picked the kids up that day, Jeff's cheeks were kind of rosy looking, but he acted fine, normal.  After we got home and took their winter coats off and got them settled in, I went to the kitchen and heated his food up, and brought a bottle with me.  If I got him settled down a little, it would allow me to do other things that I needed to do.  I was holding him in my lap, getting ready to change him and his eyes rolled up in his head, and he went stiff.  I thought he was dead; I started screaming and crying.  My mom ran in and said he was having a seizure and grabbed him.  I was scared beyond scared.  I ran next door, the lady that lived there was a nurse, she ran back to the house with me.  She said it was indeed a seizure and that he had a high fever.  She took him from us and ran to the kitchen with him, his seizure was over, and now he was crying.  She held his head under the faucet and ran cold water on his head, pulled his clothes off, and sat him in freezing cold water.  Now he was really screaming.  In just a few minutes, his temperature started dropping, and soon he was fine.  She went home and brought a stethoscope and some other tools of the trade with her and examined him.  She said his throat was a little red, but everything else was normal.  She said that he was just one of those people who ran extremely high fevers, and he would have to be watched for it the rest of his life.  After it was all over, he was fine and back to normal, but it was the scariest thing I had ever seen.  By morning, he was his normal, overactive self.

On Christmas Eve, Mike showed up.  I guess my mom and he had been secretly talking on the phone.  I had been saving my money to move away from my family's bad influences, and I guess they disapproved of my plan and brought Mike back into the picture.  It was absolutely the worst thing that they could have done.  I was furious.  How dare they invite him back, and how dare he walk in like he belonged there.  My Christmas was ruined.  He didn't even bring the kids any presents.  Glen kind of shrugged him off, but Jeff was happy to see him.  Jeff was always crazy about him; I don't know why it's not like Mike ever paid much attention to him.

I wanted to get in the car and take my kids and run away with them.  Oh wait, I didn't have a car, I was a prisoner again.  This was the worst thing possible that could have happened to me.  I knew that there was no hope for us, I was looking forward to never seeing him again, but here he was.  I wasn't social, I wasn't nice, I was shaking, I was so mad.  I wanted to disown my mother; why would she disregard my feelings, and what about the kids? They were better off without him beating on his mother.  She hadn't considered that he might kill me, and then what would happen to my kids.  What a fool, she lost all of my trust on that day, and things would never be the same with us.

I had just been thrown back into the lion's den.  I had to figure out what I would do to get out of this mess, but it looked like there wasn't much hope.