Why I Stayed

Untitled Part 1

I don't blame Tim for introducing us or encouraging us to get back together that day. I couldn't explain all this to either Tim or Beth, because my communication skills and self-awareness were barely developed. Still, I wonder how different my life would be if I hadn't called Jay and reconciled the next day.

Peter, the early 90s

To understand my state of mind at the time I met Jay, I must explain quite a bit about my family dynamics.

Mom divorced Papa when I was five, and we'd moved in with our maternal grandmother, Grandma Ann, in a single-wide trailer in the middle of nowhere. Mom worked full-time in a town about thirty minutes away, and Grandma didn't have the energy to chase around three small children, so we were mostly left to our own devices. It was a cramped space, so we spent most of our time outside or reading books or playing with Barbie dolls on the floor. We were practically feral, running through fields and swimming in ponds and digging in ditches and riding bikes down country roads. We built a clubhouse out of old tires and a tarp. I have few memories of wearing shoes. We all had long, thick hair, and I distinctly remember screaming and fighting as Mom tried to brush it after a couple days of it receiving zero attention. We had no hot water, so Mom heated kettles of it on the stove and carefully carried it down the hall to dump in the tub for baths. We three kids bathed together to conserve it.

After a few failures to launch, Mom finally moved us out of Grandma's when I was 11, into a big house in Fayetteville, NY. We each had our own bedroom, if you counted the laundry room as a bedroom (which we did). Mom still worked full time, so without Grandma Ann there we had no adult supervision whatsoever. We played at the park on the way home from school instead of doing our homework. We brought home kittens and had friends over without asking. We made messes and climbed on the roof. We built clubhouses out of scraps we pulled from the shed. We covered our walls floor-to-ceiling with posters hung with duct tape, which peeled the paint off. We listened to loud music. We broke a window once. We fought, formed alliances, and reconciled. Overall, we behaved exactly as one would expect from three unsupervised preteen girls. But we were good students, and we did our homework (eventually) and we cleaned our rooms (sometimes) and did our own laundry and cooked our own meals. We wrote stories and drew in our spare time. We were three Pippi Longstockings, playing adults.

In the early 90s, my divorced mother met Peter. I have no way to describe my life with him without making him sound like a bad children's literature villain—unbelievably terrible in the stupidest, laziest ways. After knowing him for over twenty-five years, I can say with conviction that he never did anything good without offsetting it with emotionally abusive behavior the rest of the time. The best thing he did was help create my four youngest siblings, and even that was 90% done by Mom. I couldn't think of a single thing that he did that wouldn't be standard practice for a parent or that Mom wouldn't have done more effectively without him. I have wracked my brain trying to think of anything he did selflessly at all. Alas.

When I was in the fourth grade, my sisters and I had gotten an inkling that something was going on when Mom was getting home later and later from work, sometimes even after we had gone to bed. So, before we even knew he existed, we were resentful that he was keeping our mother away from us when we hadn't seen her all day. I would later learn that Peter worked with Mom and had asked her out several times to no avail, until he finally harassed her into going on a pity date with him. Mom had been divorced for five or six years by then, and I imagine she was struggling with loneliness. Peter was no catch, but she later indicated that she felt like she didn't have much choice because he was relentless. Rather than report him to HR for sexual harassment, she agreed to go on one date with him. Being the bad kind of non-confrontational, Mom was never able to say no to him again, and they were suddenly a couple.