After my mom had left my dad, the elders came by pretty regularly. They wanted to remind her that she needed to return to her husband because she didn't have grounds to leave him. Before all this we had so many family members over all the time, cousins and friends our age, but now all of them were gone. In between the elders visits and the "volunteers" that came by to study with my brother and I, we went with our dad all over the place to whichever trailer he was keeping his preteen girlfriend in, in whichever state. It was usually some abandoned place that maybe had a bed in it for him and her, and my brother and I had the rest of the trailer to ourselves, but no furniture or food.
My brother was very sick, still is. He has asthma to the point where it almost killed him, even recently. He's allergic to damn near everything, a cat can bring him to his knees almost instantly. Perfume is pure poison. He has been on medication since he was born. My dad always said he didn't need it, didn't need to go to the hospital either. A few times my mom finally made it out of the house with him and he wound up being hospitalized for days at a time.
She worked two jobs at a time to make enough to pay for the basics, sometimes it came down to peanut butter and jelly and maybe some tea for a week. My dad gets off on people needing him, so he was very slow to pay any money for child support or to help with anything, even though he was making so much money it was insane. The hall got pretty much whatever, and they kept harassing my mom and supporting him, making her out to be an idiot and just making him more and more brazen. It got so bad that she had to sell all of her jewelry just to buy medicine to keep my brother alive, between that and the doctors and pharmacist who gave her free care and medicines, she managed to make it through.
Everything finally came to a head when he was arrested after a falling out with the girls dad when she was 14. Apparently he decided to stop paying her dad to keep quiet. As soon as the news hit the papers, he was disfellowshipped and the brothers quit coming by. When you live in a town with less than 1,000 people, everyone knows everything. We went to school before we knew what had happened, and all the other kids wouldn't talk to us because of who our dad was. We didn't understand everything at the time, because when you are in it, it's not weird to you. Looking back I feel sorry for us.
That year my mom decided we were going to have Christmas no matter what. She worked her ass off to make sure that we had a Christmas. My dad was up to his old usual, no support for months. We all were staying in one room in the house because it was so cold and we couldn't afford to heat more than one room. My mom had this little tree there, probably the smallest one, and there were some presents under it, nothing big, but it was "our" first one and we were excited. Christmas Eve I remember waking up in the middle of the night and she was putting stuff out under the tree.
It's a shame you can't appreciate some of the greatest things when you are a kid. I wish I had said "thank you" more back then. Even more I wish I had the maturity to understand what all had happened and maybe then I wouldn't have gone back to the very group that had supported the conditions she had to raise us in.
She had 2 pairs of pants to wear to work, but she made sure we had a Christmas. This year maybe I'll get to give a bit of that back to her.
WLG