That doesn’t mean that living with David
and letting things out was easy. At times it was downright difficult. Having to
work didn’t help matters. I don’t know how many days I went to work with my
emotional stuff churning around inside of me, but I couldn’t do anything about
it till I got home.
When I moved in, it was just David,
his son, Darren, and my son, Caleb. I had no trouble with Darren living here.
After all, he worked two jobs and was almost never home except to sleep. Also,
he would have to move when his car was paid off. The real problem started when
Darren’s girlfriend, Angela, who was having trouble with her mother and her
mother’s husband, with whom she’d been living, needed a place to stay. He
wanted her to stay with us for a few days. David and I discussed it and I told him
that under the circumstances, I didn’t want her here. I was honestly afraid
that her presence here would interfere with my ability to confide in David and
deal with my emotional issues. The end result was that David told Darren that
his girlfriend, Angela could not stay with us.
Darren brought her home anyway a few
days later when her mother’s husband threw her out. It was very hard to have
her here in more ways than I had anticipated. Especially because Angela and
Darren both seemed to think they could do as they pleased and not pay any
consequences when they broke the rules. This made me angrier than a wet hen.
First of all, she wasn’t working, so
she hung around the house a lot. Then when she did get a job, she had a hard
time keeping it. In the 5 or 6 months she was here, she quit 2 jobs because she
didn’t like her supervisor’s attitude. Secondly, she tended to sleep till at
least noon and since she slept on the living room floor, this made life
interesting, especially on Saturday mornings when my son and I were home. I
finally told her that on weekends when we were home, we had lives to live and
that I wasn’t going to make any special effort to be quiet. Thirdly, Angela and
Darren were terrible about following the three simple rules David and I laid
down. They were as follows:
1. If it isn’t yours, don’t use it.
2. Don’t eat food you didn’t buy.
3. Keep your belongings in your area. Anything
left outside of your area for over 24 hours will be confiscated.
I remember the morning we told them
the rules. I had fixed breakfast for everyone to be nice and in hopes of making
things go smoother. When Darren heard the rule regarding keeping things where
they belonged, he said, “I don’t see why everyone can’t be nice and just put
things in the person’s area.”
I looked at him and flat out said, “I
am not your maid and I’m not your mother. Even my three year old son is
learning to pick up his things.”
That shut him up, but it didn’t solve
the problem.
I frequently found clothes strewn
where they didn’t belong. I don’t keep my house so clean it’s sanitary, but I
don’t like to have general clutter laying around when it’s not necessary. So, I
started picking up and hiding anything left out for more than 24 hours.
Then Angela had the nerve to go into
David’s bedroom where I keep my clothes for lack of any other space to do so,
and steal some of my things. I caught Angela wearing my best slacks which an
aunt had given to me for Christmas just a couple of months prior, and she not
only insisted they were hers, she wouldn’t give me a chance to prove they were
mine. I got sneaky and smart. I washed all of her clothes that I was holding,
as they were filthy and gave them back to her. When I saw here wearing
something besides my slacks, I got nosy and took them back and then immediately
took them to the cleaners to be cleaned as she’d worn them for at least 4 days
straight without washing them, and to keep them out of her reach.
Unfortunately, not everything she did to my slacks came out.
While I was at it, I checked her area
for other things and found one of my favorite blouses, which she’d managed to
burn a hole into and some underwear. I took everything back, washed them and
made sure I put them out of her reach.
I got out my makeup brushes one
morning to get ready for work and discovered they’d been used by Angela. My
brushes were in a case with each one in its place and I always put them in with
the brush part facing one way. When I opened them that morning, my blush brush
was turned down the opposite way. I used it anyway as I didn’t have any choice,
but as soon as possible I washed my brushes, then hid them so she couldn’t do
that again.
Another big problem was that neither
one of them could accept the fact that I was told by David that I was to treat
his house as if it were mine and that meant that I had complete authority,
second only to his. More than once when I raised a fuss about them breaking the
rules, Angela told me it wasn’t my house and just because I paid rent,
it didn’t give me any right to say anything.
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