My Former Step-Daughter.....

While you are reading this post I am probably finishing up dinner on the cruise ship. Not a fair trade, but that's the way I roll.

In a previous wifetime, I had a step-daughter who was only 6 years younger than I. We were friends of a sort, mainly because she wasn't the kind of person you could afford to have anywhere but close by your side. Certainly you didn't want her behind your back.

I tried to fit in with their lifestyle, really I did. I just couldn't sustain it.

I'm not going to be too specific with details, because I don't know how technically savvy she is, and she would be more than happy to come and cut my throat for me. Even after all this time.

She got married the first time at 17. Her mother was wise enough to refuse to sign allowing her underage daughter to get married, but her father (my ex) was far from wise, and he signed. That marriage lasted right around a year.

Then she married the ex-husband of a friend of hers. Apparently the "friend" couldn't stand being married to the guy, but she thought he might be good enough for her friend. But before that marriage took place, my step-daughter got pregnant. On purpose. She named him after her husband's father and her own father, and she called him by his initials. That's a popular thing here in the South. Perhaps in other parts of the country too; I'm not sure.

Side note: Hubby's father ONLY had initials. Hubby says they were too poor to afford a whole name.

Side note #2: My uncle's brother ONLY had initials too. When he went into the Army, they said he couldn't have just initials, and they made up names for him.

I don't remember how long marriage #2 lasted. She ran away from home, took her son and hooked up with some other dude, and they moved to Florida. When she had pawned all their possessions and still ran out of money, she came home.

Marriage #3 was to another ex-husband of a friend, or at least an acquaintance. I don't remember how long that one lasted either.

Marriage #4 also resulted in divorce. The papers were drawn up, and she went to serve them on her husband herself. In her words, "I made sure I was looking FINE when I went to serve them papers." That's the night her second child was conceived.

When the baby was born, she gave him the same last name as her first child, which was the name of husband #2, even though he had nothing at all to do with this child. In her words again, "I ain't gonna have a bunch of kids with different last names like some kind of trash." She was decent enough to give her son her father's name as his MIDDLE name. Apparently it isn't trashy to have children with numerous fathers; it's the LAST NAMES being different that makes you trashy. Thank all that is holy she had her tubes tied when that child was born.

She married for the 5th time after her father and I divorced. That was before she turned 30. I don't know if they are still married, but I had a friend look up her son's info on the county school database a couple of weeks ago because I'm nosy like that. Husband #5 is on the list of people NOT allowed to pick her middle school son (the one with the stupid names) up from school.

I went out with her a few times when she was between husbands. Once when I went to pick her up, she discovered her tire was flat. She was convinced that one of her losers had slit her tire on purpose, never considering that it might have JUST BLOWN OUT or something. So she went looking for him. We found him in a bar we had both been to a number of times, and she proceeded to make a huge scene. The man who asked us to leave and escorted us to the door had been one of Sweet Girl's t-ball coaches.

How. Em. Barr. Ass. Ing.

She knew her father's flaws, but she tried her damnedest to be just like him. He had the little man's syndrome, acting like a billy bad ass, and she was/is just like him. She told me on a number of occasions that she didn't know why I stayed with him. On the night he went particularly crazy and shot up our house (we weren't home), she said to me on the phone, "You've got to leave that bastard. He's crazy!"

It's strange to me that in all these years that Hubby and I have been married, I have never run into this demon girl. I mean, it's a small town. We only have one Wally World, and isn't there where I would be most likely to see her?

Shudder.

If you stumble across this blog and recognize yourself, rest assured that I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT YOU. Isn't it amazing the coincidences that occur in this world?