Day Two

I cannot remember now. I can't for the life of me remember how we figured out that this man, this good man, was a junkie. That the disease of addiction had made it so that methamphetamine was more important than anything else. 

It all makes sense now. The crazy behavior, the writing checks for cash but never using it in front of me, the sores on his arm and hands, the disappearing, sleeplessness, etc etc etc. Why can't I remember? I'll have to talk to my daughter because it seems like an important detail.

We get up in the next morning....me frozen, seeing my kids in pain but being unable to do a damn thing about it because I am in shock. I am walking but cannot feel my feet. I am hearing but can't make sense of the words. The crazy texts are still coming. I hate him and the texts. I want to text back horrible things but know if the man kills himself my kids will read those texts and hold me responsible. So I don't. But I lay there, wishing he would. For the last 5 years life has been unbalanced, bewildering and sad at best. At its worst, hateful and ugly. Me angry, him being sorry. Me raging, him slowly learning how to turn that on me and deflect the attention from his behavior to mine. I remember, very close to the end, a fight...he had disappeared, he had "forgotten" we had plans to meet people for dinner. He made some comment about me and walked away. I flipped! I was here, doing what I was supposed to be doing, keeping the family together, making the hard choices, picking up the broken pieces he left everywhere he went. As he walked away the anger took hold and I ran behind him and shoved him as hard as I could. How I hoped he would fall on his face. I am not proud but I am trying to be real. I did it.

I digress. Another day of research by my poor kids, looking at emails and talking about what we should do. Son #2 remembered that our phone plan had a family to family option that allowed you to know where each phone was. He engaged it and, lo and behold, the man was in Oxnard at a massage parlor called Nicole's Spa. What goes on at Nicole's gives a new meaning to the word SPA. It was this day I learned the term "Happy Endings Massage" and wished, wholeheartedly, that I never had. Unfortunately, he was notified by the phone service that the location feature was initiated. He texted son #2, congratulating him on his cleverness and then promptly turned his phone off.

When I got in bed that night it had been about 40 hours with no sleep. Little did I know at that time just how little sleep one can actually survive on. I would learn in the months to come.

One more day to go.....