Should I Have Stuck It Out? Part 1

I just realized that 7 years ago at this time, I was in the middle of one of the most turbulent times of my life. No wonder I've been a little off lately. This one single event changed the rest of my life. Was it for better or worse? I don't know anymore. Part of me hates myself for not sticking it out, part of me is relieved that I got to do something else with my life, so I'm just really unsure....Here's the story. I'll warn you though, it's depressing.....

My relationship with Nick, which started in high school, wasn't exactly what you would call normal. We met through a friend. I won't even get into that because it's a another story that probably doesn't need repeated and a lifestyle in which I don't even wanna get into these days. We have been together off and on since I was 16. He is the father of Brandon and even though he's not Gavin's dad, he has always treated that child like his own, even offering to sign his birth certificate so Gavin wouldn't eventually find out that his dad was a piece of shit and wanted nothing to do with him. Nick has loved me through some of my worst times. I know that if I called him today and told him I missed him and wanted him to come back home, he would drop whatever he was doing and come back.

Sounds nice doesn't it? The down side to having this person who loved me sooooo much was that he was lazy. I'm not talking about laying around watching football on the weekends or having worked so hard all day that he comes home and naps in the evening. I'm talking about a person who watched me slave day in and day out at two jobs, only to come home and find that he and the kids had wrecked the house and I needed to put it back together.....at midnight. He was home with the boys all day, so immediately when I got home, he would leave and go out with his friends or whatever it was he did back then. Ok, I say that like I don't know where he was or what he was doing. He was getting high. He is a person who believed the elaborate pot growing operation in our garage would mean that he didn't have to work again. I could go on and on with his money scams, which usually did not produce any income into our household, not that I wanted to get money that way, but at that point, I would have taken any help. I tried to help him get jobs, which he would work for a little while, but then he wouldn't be satisfied and he'd quit or get fired. Honestly, I think I tried as hard as I could in that relationship.

This last time we were together, about 7 years ago, we were really trying to make a go of things and settle down to be a family. We moved out of our duplex, me and the kids in with my parents, him with friends, so that I could payoff some debt and we were going to buy a house. We could get into a house and it would be cheaper monthly than renting. I thought at the time, us buying a house together would push him into growing up a little.

Everything went well for about 6 months. I was chugging along working and paying bills, he was doing whatever it is that he does when I'm not around. On that fateful day, we went to his parents house for a cookout to celebrate Brandon's birthday and the fact that we had found a house that we could afford and were going to move forward on it. After hanging out all day, I went back to my parents house, glad we had a good day. On the way home, I lost my cell phone, but I was so worn out, I just figured that I would look for it in the morning.

When I went out to the car in the morning to look for my phone, I found that the seat had swallowed it. When I looked at it, I saw that I had 30 missed calls and 5 voicemails. Weird..... When I looked at the missed calls and saw that they were from him, his mom and stepdad, I knew something bad had happened. The first voicemail was him, telling me he was out for the evening with his friends and that he loved me and wished I was there. The next 4 were from his parents telling me that there had been an accident and I needed to come to the hospital immediately. I went in the house and threw up, then tried to convey to my mom that we needed to go through the hospital while hyperventilating. My mom, who has NEVER been a fan of him made arrangements for a neighbor to watch the kids and took me to the hospital.

Just a sidenote our immediate metro area has 6 hospitals. I knew it was bad when I was told he was at Grant, which is our metro area's top hospital for trauma.

As soon as I walked in the door to the hospital I saw his mom and stepdad. I was hugged by them both, which was just weird because I've never seen them hug their own son or their grandchild, let alone me. We sat in the waiting room for a long time. Nobody was allowed to see him until they could stabilize him. I finally had to leave because I needed to get back to the kids. I was told to come back later that night and they would keep me posted on any developments.

Let me just say, I'm a pretty unemotional person. Maybe my mom wasn't as loving as she should have been when I was a child or something. I don't know. I just don't let my feelings show. I went and picked up the kids and tried to put on my best happy face I could for two little boys that loved their dad, no matter how big of a fuck up he was.

Later that night, I got word that he was out of surgery, but it was bad. I could come up to the hospital if I thought I could handle it. I went up that night with Tara. I don't know what I thought I was going to see, but when I saw him, I refused to believe it was him at all. The person laying in that bed weighed what appeared to be 400lbs. He looked like he would explode if you touched him. I was told that he was in a drug induced coma because he has massive internal injuries.

Nobody knew what had really happened. All they knew was that he has been in a car crash out in the country and the two other people who had been in the car had ran off and left him there. Luckily the crash happened near a house and it woke the owner up, who called 911 when he went outside and saw the wreckage. Because he has no drivers license and everyone else fled the scene, they couldn't contact anyone for quite some time. They had to take fingerprints in hope that he was in the system so he could be identified and they could call someone down to the hospital to be with him. Luckily, being a hoodlum, he was in the police database. Eventually the police found the owner of the car, who had let one of her daughters friends drive the car. They tracked down the girl and found out that they had been at a bar with several other people. Nick wanted to leave at one point, but didn't have a ride, so this girl and a mutual friend of ours were going to take him home. What they were doing clear out in the country none of us still know. This girl, who was not only drunk, but underage thought it would be funny to turn off the headlights and drive. She hit a ditch, then a phone pole at about 50 miles an hour without even trying to stop. Her and the boy in the front fled the scene because they were uninjured "forgetting" Nick was sleeping in the backseat. He had crawled into the back seat, put on his seatbelt and fallen asleep on the little joyride. When the ambulance came, he had to be cut out of the car and was unconscious.

His internal injuries were numerous. His lung had collapsed and his liver had basically exploded because of the amount of pressure on it from the seatbelt. He had head injuries, cuts, bruises the works. I had never seen anything so horrific as when I was shown that they had split him from the bottom of his ribcage to his pubic bone and had what amounted to a corset on, holding his insides in, just in case they needed to get back in there again. Which they did several times.

I went down every night when I got off work for a couple of weeks. I'd talk to him because I had heard or read somewhere that they can hear you. I took down pictures of the kids, so the first thing he saw when he woke up was them, but he wasn't getting any better. After the first couple of weeks, I just couldn't go down anymore. Between working two jobs, trying to take care of the kids and finalizing everything with the new house, I just didn't have time. I'd make it down a couple times on the weekend, but that was all I could do.

Eventually, being in the drug induced coma, between the surgeries and his body giving it everything it had, he started getting better. After about 6 weeks, they brought him out of the coma. I knew exactly what was going to happen and didn't think I could deal with it, so I wasn't there. As expected, the flipped out and started tearing at the tubes and machines that were hooked up to him. They had to heavily sedate him so that he didn't undo any of the repairs that had been made to him. His mother called to say that the pictures of the boys were the first thing he saw and in the midst of freaking out, he grabbed at them and cried. A couple of days later he was moved into the general population of the hospital, well enough to be around other people. I went and we talked quite a bit, but something was off. He wanted me to bring the kids down to see him because, let me just say this, though he was not any type of breadwinner in our family, he was ALWAYS a wonderful father. I couldn't let the boys see him like that. They were only 6 and not even 5 and I knew that it would kill them to see their dad that way. Another couple of weeks later, he was released from the hospital. Being as he didn't have insurance, they were quick to kick him out once he was reasonably well.

The boys and I had moved into our new house while Nick was in the hospital. I thank God every day for my friends and even my family during this difficult time. We had been in for almost a month when he came home to live with us and this is where it all fell apart. It was obvious that he shouldn't have been let out of the hospital. His incision in his belly had to be packed every day while it healed and no matter how many pain pills he took he still hurt. He couldn't find comfort in anything, which also meant he never slept. A man who's kids were once the center of his world yelled and screamed at them until they wouldn't come out of their rooms because they were scared of him. They weren't the only ones. I got yelled and screamed at any time I was home because I wasn't accommodating enough. This was clearly not the man that I had loved for so many years. That man would never raise his voice to me and certainly never to the children.

I put up with this for about 3 weeks, hoping every day that he would get better and we would be happy. Things just kept getting worse. The day I made him leave, he had raised his hand to hit Brandon, something that I would have thought I would never see out of him. I called his mother, who lives close and told her I was done. That she needed to come and get him because I couldn't do it anymore. She came and got him. That was the last time I saw her.

I've only seen Nick probably 5 times since that day. Two of those times were in the last year or so when we've been in court because he apparently would rather go to jail then pay me any child support. The other couple of times were in random passing because we live in the same town. There is no doubt in my mind that he still trolls the hood, seeing what me and the boys are up to, but he keeps his distance, which suits me fine.

For years I had to listen to the kids recount all the times they did things with him and went places with him. I had to deal with Gavin telling his entire 2nd grade class that his dad was in jail because he was a bad man and Brandon drawing pictures of his dad in a coffin, but eventually they just stopped asking about him. Now that they are older, we have had conversations about him and why they don't see him. It's gotten a little easier for all of us to just live our lives with out the complications that he would present. I have a wonderful network of male friends and family members who are always a huge help when one of them needs to go camping or fishing or any of those other things that I'm not good at.

What I'm honestly wondering today is.....What would have happened if I would have stuck it out?