firegirl789

Is that we can’t benefit from it until it is too late.

Today, the day before Mother’s Day, my sweetie and I went to his mothers house to drop off flowers for her and his younger sister who also has a child. I don’t celebrate Mother’s Day with my own mother as: 1) she is out of the country and 2) she abondoned her children in a drugged out haze and was deported from this country.

The house was empty, but he got in anyway (in ways I don’t want to discuss) so we wouldn’t have to leave the flowers out front. We also took along some sodas because we know his family is having a hard time and are always out of such things.

Once inside we found the fridge open to the air, but no light on in it. The house was warm from no air conditioning, and there were oil lamps on the living room tables. The electricity was out. Not just out, but had been out for some time. Long enough for them to have gotten rid of all the perishiable food and to be using the fridge like a pantry.

We had never even gotten a call.

I know that we have our own money problems. There never seems to be enough of the stuff, but our money problems involve bills all being paid on time and not having enough money to go to the movies. This, this was something else. They should have at least called us.

We waited for a bit, then came home. An hour or so later the phone rings. My sweetie was hoping it was his mother so he could find out what the hell had been going on. It wasn’t.

It was my dad. Daddy was calling, in a rage, about my brother. The one I have disowned for the time being. Apparently my brother not only did not pay last months rent as he should have been, he snuck out of the house as soon as my father was not in the living room.

Mind you, on Tuesday, my brother is going to Orlando for training before shipping to Iraq. This may be the last time he sees my father for quite some time. And he sneaks out. Dad was livid, but not surprised. Not surprised at all. He says he expected it, really, but he had hoped it wouldn’t play out like this.

Two families, two twisted trees turning in the wind (alliteration!), and the bitter fruit they bear.

Sometimes I wonder, with such screwed up childhoods, how my sweetie and I ended up so…Normal.

You mention that I have turned my back on my family, yet the only occurrence you can come up with as a betrayal is my leaving Florida.

Moving away from home is not a betrayal of my family. I still love my family and support it in any way I am able. I admit that my leaving could have been done in a more mature fashion, but I was nineteen years old and ready to spread my own wings. I had found what I truly believed to be true love. To date my instincts have not disappointed me.

You speak of the sacrifices Sissy had made to help me over the years, and it is true. Because she loved me, she was willing to open her home to me, to help me through hard times.

You ignore that I never free loaded, I was always working and contributing to the household in whatever way I could. I was always giving back everything needed, and sometimes only wanted, because that was my family and their happiness was paramount.

You, the one she has had to kick out of her home on more than one occasion, are trying to speak down to me? The only time I ever chose to keep something for myself was in the name of love, love that you can’t understand.

Real love is selfless.

Real love will give anything, ANYTHING, to see the object of their affection happy. Not satisfied, not surviving, but happy.

You can’t know what it is to love someone more than yourself. You don’t know how your heart is torn to bloody shreds at the very thought that you might have inadvertently done something to upset them. You don’t know what it is to be loved back that way. Because you can’t love anything more than yourself. You aren’t willing to sweat, toil, and bleed for another person. You aren’t willing to give up every thing you know and love for the chance to spend just another day with someone else. You won’t suffer and be glad of it so that you can please someone else. You can’t love.

You think you love someone, I have seen you. You are willing to play at love and affection. Yet when push comes to shove, your girlfriends are always too much work, your wife was too much work, your family is too much work, keeping up the facade of love is just too much work for you.

Because you have never really loved another. You need that affection your girlfriends give you because you want love. You treat them badly just to see if they will love you anyway. One day you will come across someone who will spark true emotion in you and you will understand how silly your words today are.

Sacrificing everything for love is not a betrayal of your family, it is the creation of a new one.

The hurt feelings from my leaving four years ago have been gone for a long time. In the light of the obvious and blinding love Marshall and I have for one another no shadows of doubt can prevail. Not for anyone who had ever loved with everything they are.

A mother who loves her children as Sissy does can’t help but want that same love for the people she cares about becasue she knows what it is to suffer for love, because everyday she gives up somthing so that her kids can have instead and she is glad to be able to do so.

A father who gave everything for his kids like Dad did will always understand what has to be sacraficed in order for love to flourish because he fought for years for the right to do so.

A woman who left behind all thst she knew and loved as I did knows that love trancends something as paltry as miles because my love for my family stretches across states.

A shallow, self-centered boy such as yourself can’t understand something like this.

You have never felt it. You have never known in your heart that you would give everything, everything, to know that the person you love is well. Even if it means giving them up.

You can’t do that. And until you can, you will keep playing at love and wondering why no one who really knows the emotion takes you seriously.

Because real love hurts more than a frivolous tattoo and it is a pain you will gladly bear.

My family is supposed to be coming up to visit me this weekend. I was so excited by this. I was re-painting my apartment and in a cleaning frezy! This will be the first time any of them have come from Florida to South Carolina to see me. I wanted to make a good impression.

For the past few days there has been rumblings about problems with the trip. Of course, not living there, I have no idea what is going on.

It started that my father would be coming up along with my two brothers. Then it turns out my (older one) brother wants to bring his new girlfriend along for the ride. This didn’t bother my father right up until my brother made it clear that he actually wanted it to JUST be him and his new girlfriend.

Let me give you some back story to this. My brother is still married to a woman. They married last June and seperated a couple months ago. My brother had a girlfriend already lined up. So, ok, now he is seperated and in the process of a divorce, and he has a girlfriend. While I may not approve, it is obvious to his wife that they are not going to work out so it is almost not cheating. Not my place to judge though, as I am still “living in sin” with my own “common-law husband”.

Except he cheated on his girlfriend. With his wife.

On top of that, his new girlfriend has four children that he can’t stand. He only goes to spend time with her after they have been put to bed and he leaves when they “start annoying him”.

He doesn’t spend anytime with the woman as a family at all. Yet he brags to me that she is going to wait for him while he does his tour of duty overseas. So I ask him, “It must be serious if she is going to wait for you. Will you be marrying her?” His reply, “Oh, no. Naw, I don’t want to marry her. It’s not that serious.”

Not that serious? Then why should I want her included in my family gathering? Why would I want to meet her and get to know her if she is just another passing fling of his?

Even then, I didn’t mind it. My brother always has his girlfriends and I have learned to smile but not bother remembering their names. I am not being trite here, I am serious. By the time I learn his girlfriends names, he has usually replaced her with another. More than once I have embarssed myself by calling his current girlfriend by the last girls name. I gave up.

Hell, even his marriage didn’t last a year. He does not have the best of track records here. But I am getting off topic.

So he tells me that it will just be him and his girlfriend, and Dad talked him into bring our brother. I figure there has to be a reason for him suddenly excluding our father. Probably they are fighting (they always do at the worst possible times).

No, it turns out that my brother just can’t be bothered to wait a few hours while my father completes his dyalisis for the day. Except when I talk to Daddy, he tells me that he scheduled himself to do his treatment the day before so that they could leave on my brothers schedule rather than the original one agreed upon.

One might suspect my brother was just reaching for an excuse to exclude his family from this trip.

That is because he was.

Turns out he wasn’t really making this trip up here to see me for one last time before he goes overseas. Turns out he and his girlfriend just needed an excuse for a road trip. The real reason he didn’t want my father and other brother along is because Dad wants to get in the truck and drive straight to South Carolina. My brother and his girlfriend want to stop and sightsee and do all the ho-dinky roadside attractions that make any road trip worth it.

Except it isn’t supposed to be a road trip. It was supposed to be the first time I met my youngest brother and my goodbye to my enlisted one.

I had words with him. Some of which included me telling him that I didn’t want to meet his “fuck-buddy” I wanted to spend time with my family.

I reget that comment. Not because I didn’t mean, but because it was an insult to what might just be a perfectly wonderful woman. She obviously cares for my brother enough to wait for him so I am led to believe that, to her at least, it isn’t a relationship just about sex. It is more.

But to hear my brother speak of it, it is nothing at all. Just another one of his flings.

Still, I apologized. Oh, not to him even though he received it. I apologized for my insult to her. It was uncalled for. But I told my brother that he needs to grow up and get his priorities straight. He is eager to abandon the man who raised him, who took him back in after his failed marriage, and who puts up with all his crap. He is happy to use his older sister as an excuse to ditch his girlfriend’s kids for a weekend and meander about the country. He treats his younger brother as an after thought and a burden.

For years I have told myself that he acts this way because he is young. But he is only a year younger than me. There really isn’t an excuse for this kind of behavior.

Perhaps, if this was the first time he had done something truly outrageous and offensive to his family I could have blown it off. But this is a habit. This is tradition. Everyone knows that to help my brother in anyway is to set yourself up for disappointment, and that is sad.

So I have broken up with my brother. I have asked him not to contact me any longer. I have told him that I love him and that I will be praying for him during what is going to be a very hard time (all of his past misdeeds have begun to catch up to him and he had recently found himself in quite a bind of his own making). I also advised him to speak to our father regarding his troubles and for once, take the advice.

He replied with scathing remarks, but I expected that. I wasn’t exactly peaches and cream in my own goodbye.

But I hurt. No matter what, I love the boy and I hate what is going to happen to him if he doesn’t straighten up real quick. And I fear, no I know, in my heart that he won’t.

And I hate myself a little for praying that the bad things he is going to be forced to endure will teach him something.

Thanks for listening.