2nd Wives Club (6)

A mentioned before I was a child of divorce. My Parents may not have had a perfect marriage, but they did love each other, it was that they just couldn't live together anymore. Their divorced was handled with my Brother, my Sister and my best interest at heart. There wasn't any trash talking, there wasn't any he said/she said, there wasn't any putting the children in the middle. My father signed over the house to my Mother as to not interrupt our childhood any further. We were already loosing our Father, there was no need to loose our house, our friends, our school and the security we had living there. He agreed to pay a good amount of child support (but always failed to do so.........another day, another story perhaps) they put their children first during the divorce. Jim paid child support on time! Everytime!  He spent as much time with Melissa as the 1st Wife would allow, He took custody when even the 1st Wife thought it was best for Melissa, that was probably the first time that the 1st wife put what was best for Melissa during the whole 4 and half years in the court system trying to get a divorce......Yup, their divorce took 4.5 years!

Because of all this, I wanted Melissa well being put before every adult, Jim and I lived up to that. We never talked bad about her Mother in front of her, we never laid guilt on that child for loving and caring and openly talking about her feeling toward her Mother. On the other hand her Mother never missed an opportunity to do any of this. Melissa carried a lot of weight on her little shoulders, she learned quickly at a very early age what she could say in front of her Mother and what would make her Mother explode and then take it all out on Melissa. I'm talking about a 3 year old girl, having the intuition to sensor herself and to withhold emotion, she wasn't allowed to be happy when she was with us, if she showed that she was happy when returning from a weekend at her Fathers, she was punished or given the silence treatment for days. Talk about taking away a childhood innocence.........Now the Woman wants to put this all behind us? For Melissa's sake? To this day Melissa still has to sensor herself around her Mother or deal with the consequences.

Still more "Incidents" to come folks, that was only the first year! lol Jim and I have been together over 20! For the sake of spending the next month of my life chronologically putting in order EVERTHING that happened I will be doing some normal entries on the doosies and lumping some others in little blurbs.