So, Christmas Dinner in a nut hut was interesting for sure. Remember that lady with the "dog", well she tried to feed it part of the inedible slop they called our holiday feast.  I have had microwaveable dinners that would have put this meal to shame. She even asked the orderly for another one for her dog. They were nice and humored her. The "dog" was covered in cranberry like substance by the end of it. Good times had by all. So first holiday in this dump is in the books. Today we got to talk about how our family visits went in group. I got told to stop being negative by our lovely group leader. He has no idea what my family is like. Dude has no room to tell me how to feel about them. I should be "grateful" that I had a visitors for the holiday... Yeah, I will try harder next time buddy. Anywho...on with the story of the shitshow that is my life...

The ”new” Man in mom’s life – It didn’t really take super long for mom to move on surprisingly. She went from the morning widow to the party girl pretty quickly now that I think about it. At the time I didn’t really understand the gravity of what that meant to the other people in our family. I just knew that all of the sudden we were spending a lot of time over at her new boyfriends’ apartment. He was carpenter and I didn’t really know this at the time, a drug runner and alcoholic. My sister and I would hang out in the living room or in the yard playing with action figures or watching cartoons while mom and the new boyfriend would get loaded and have all day fuck-feast leaving us to fend for ourselves most of the time. They would emerge from the bedroom once and a while to feed themselves and sometimes us. Most of the time we lived off a diet of cereal. And if the milk ran out, dry cereal. This soon became our new normal for a while. I guess it must have been during the summer following my dad’s death because I don’t recall going to school during this time at all. Once the insurance money and my dad’s death benefits started coming in for my sister and I, mom started shopping. Since we were both underage, she got our monthly payments too. She bought herself a sports car and started looking for a house. She said it was just too painful to live in the house dad had died in. By this time,she started telling my sister and I to start referring to her new boyfriend as dad. Keep in mind our dad had just died that spring and she was asking us to call a man we hardly knew dad within months of his passing…Totally normal right? I didn’t really like the idea of it, but I was 7 and really was not allowed to tell her no, like ever. It wasn’t until later that I found out that she had known this new boyfriend since high school. She and my dad had been friends with him and his ex-wife. My mom met him on her first day of high school when she had moved from out of state. He was serving detention in the admin office and helped register her for school. She would later refer to this as their “cute meet” and recall that even back then he was the little trouble maker. How fucking charming… Yes, roll your eyes, I sure the fuck am. Ironically, the divorce happened right around the time my dad died. Apparently, this was quite the scandal in our small conservative town. This fueledthe rumors that she was part of plotting his death for insurance money when the two got so close following his death. As a result, my cousins and most of my dad’s family stopped talking to us because they did not find my mother’s behaviors or associations to be appropriate for the recent widowed mother of two. Her shopping sprees and partying didn’t do much to change their mind about that either.

Next Chapter: Entry Four