I SHELTER ANN
When my father and Ann broke up, Ann came knocking on my door. She said she needed a place to stay until my father moved out of the house. I let her stay.
I do not understand why I did let her stay. Just as I do not understand why I did not go back to Aunt Jennie's house after the fire.
I let her stay! My son had to sleep with me, as there were only two bedrooms in my mobile home. After a couple of weeks went by, she asked me to testify in court for her at the divorce hearing. I told her I could not do that.
She then moved out and testified at the court hearing that I was an unfit mother. She said there was cat poop under my son's bed. The so-called “cat poop” was a hairball.
Ann was pure evil.
DEATH OF A STEP-FATHER
During my first year in the Police Department, there was a murder of a step-father by his step-son.
The step-father had been hitting this boy’s mother and was chasing her down the hallway. The boy shot his step-father and killed him.
I was involved with this case, and I remember the pictures that we took of the crime scene, including the dead man. I remember wanting to console the boy, but I could not, as I was officially involved with the case.
Sadly, within a couple of years, the boy was killed in an accident.
I remember making a promise to God when I had my own son: I would not hit him, and I would never drink. I have kept those promises.
ABANDONNED BABY
One night, when a fellow officer was on duty, he received a call that people were hearing a baby cry. The officer went to investigate and found a newborn baby girl in the woods behind a number of houses in the development. At that point, more officers were called in to investigate and try to find the mother who had done this.
I was paired up with the officer who was, and still is, my friend. All of us went through names and locations of mothers-to-be in the area; we located and interviewed them. At the same time, we had to interview the people in the houses that bordered the wooded area where the baby was found.
At one of these houses there was a young girl who was visiting the people who owned the home. I don't know how I knew it, but I knew it was her baby. After we left that house, I asked my partner to go back to headquarters so I could talk with the Chief, which we did. I told the police chief my suspicion and asked if I could bring the girl to headquarters. He said he did not think it was her, because she did not look like someone who just had a baby.
To make a long story short, I brought her back to headquarters and interviewed her alone in an office. She quickly admitted she had given birth in a bathroom, stating that the baby was not alive and she had put it in the woods.
That night we had a very severe thunder-and-lightning storm, which somehow that baby lived through. People heard that baby crying! My question is: why didn't one of them go get that baby? The baby survived, through the grace of God.
AFTER DIVORCE
After I left Marty, I started dating–
off and on–
a man from where I worked. My neighbor, who lives right behind me, also works for the same company. That neighbor was a service technician, so that he had a service truck with the company name on it, which he would park behind my place in our common driveway. It looked like my date was staying overnight, which he was not.
It took me awhile to figure out why certain people in town would accuse me of having sleep-overs with the man I was dating. That pretty much set the tone for the next few years. I was accused of everything that certain people can imagine. Only the few people I was close to in my life, including the wife of the man who parked the service company van behind my place, knew I was not doing anything I was being accused of.
As time went on, my neighbors, the service company man and his wife, would take me out with them once in awhile to get me out of the house. That was nice!
During the next few years my life was pretty much routine. I worked from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., so there was still time to take my son to the local swimming pond, which we both enjoyed. In the winter we went tobogganing and ice-skating.
We went fishing in the river once. I would not put the worm on the hook, so I used bread. Within a few minutes, my son, Marty, caught an eel, which then wrapped itself around my son’s legs, leaving slime all over his pants. I could not stop the eel from wiggling, so it went back into the river with our fishing pole, and we walked back home. End of fishing!
My son would go to his paternal grandmother’s house almost every weekend. This was to make it so that our son would have time to be with his father. Many years later, my son told me that he hardly ever saw his father during these visits, but he wanted to go to her house so he could play with his friends just up the hill from his grandmother’s house. His father would bring Marty back on Sunday nights, and I never knew that Marty was not with his father until many years later.
I never told my son that those weekends were mostly lonely times for me. This was another time in my life when I thought I was doing the right thing.
Some time later, during those years, I met a woman who had the same situation as myself: divorced, with a son. We kept each other company for many years–
going to movies, dinners, and talking. We were the best of friends.
For pretty much all of the next 13 years, I dated Bruce, the man with whom I had worked. We would break up occasionally, as he was unfaithful, a run-around–
always looking for something else: younger, prettier, taller, shorter, thinner, fatter. It really didn’t matter much, as he once told me he could find something beautiful in every woman.
I bought a plot of land and moved my mobile home to the plot with the intention of some day putting a house there.
During this time, my boyfriend and I decided to go into business of the delivery of fuel oil to homes and businesses. In order to do that, I put up–
as collateral–
my land and my mobile home, so that he could buy a delivery truck, which he did. I had a full-time job, so I would do the business books after hours. The business was doing well, and our business phone was installed in my home.
We had a service man who was a heavy drinker. I remember many nights of getting calls for a furnace that was not working and having to go from bar to bar trying to find this man. My partner would be up at a friend’s hunting camp upstate while I was trying to keep the business together. You would have thought I would have been smarter by this time, but no…I thought my partner would be growing up at any moment, so that everything would be fine.
That never happened. Bruce kept running around until he thought he had met the love of his life. She was much younger than he was.
I had been able to put a house on my land, but as the business was in both of our names, the bank required that both the land and the house have his name on them also.
So, in the end, he got his girl, and I had to sell the house and the land to pay him off, as his name was on the deeds.
What I just wrote is putting 13 years–
and many tears and many heartaches–
on a few pages of paper.
The holidays were very hard for me most of those years. I would have Christmas on Christmas Eve with my son, and he would then go to his grandmother’s on Christmas morning. This was by my choice, not required by a or by anyone else. I thought my son should have Christmas with his father and his father’s family, as my own family really did not include me. I could have visited my Aunt Jennie, but she had her own children and their children.
It worked out well for the Police Department, as I would always be the one working on Christmas day.
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We are serializing the memoir by Mary E. Seaman and myself, Kidnapped Twice: Then Betrayed and Abused, published by Outskirts Press and available in paperback and ebook formats from Outskirts as well as from amazon.com and other on-line booksellers.
It is particularly appropriate for this month, as April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month.
My writing-coaching-editing site is http://writeyourbookwithme.com.
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