There’s something different about her!

 Once again, I’ve been away far too long.  I hope you didn’t leave me.  🙂  

What have I been up to, you ask?  My goodness there’s so much to write about!  Are you ready??  I’ll warn you, there’s some gossip in here…

Where do I start?  

Wow, I’ve been away since Lent?  Goodness.  Well, I guess I’ll start with the whole health issue.  

My diabetes is still under control – thank God.  My LDL cholesterol is still higher than the doctor wants it to be but it’s going lower with each test, which is a good sign that I’m doing the right things.  The fibromyalgia is an ongoing issue but I’m learning to deal with it through physical therapy.  Some days the pain is horrible; other days I manage with just a few aches; ALL days I keep moving, regardless.  My weight is down to 219 and with added activity each month, it will continue to go down – hopefully to a number I can be happy with.  The new issue (heck, why not?) is my kidney and bladder function.  Did I ever mention how much I hate drinking water?  LOL!  I’ve had to cut out all soft drinks, limit my iced tea to just two large glasses a day, limit my coffee to just two cups a day and the rest is just water, water, water!  Byuck!!!   Don’t worry, I’ll eventually learn to like it.  If not, I’ll pretend to like it.  LOL!  

In other news:

We have another member in our family.  He’s Cathy’s boyfriend, Jon.  The boy’s real father will have nothing to do with him, his stepfather is in prison and his mother…oh. my. goodness!  She’s unbelievable!  First of all, she’s a drama queen.  Everything has to be about her and she has an opinion about EVERYTHING.  To say this woman can’t mind her own business or practice discretion is an understatement!  And, she’s as fake as a toupee!  

When Jon and Cassie first started seeing each other, the boy was working three jobs and hardly ever able to come over to see her.  We were impressed by his sense of responsibility but all too soon we were noticing things that just didn’t add up.  For instance, on the few occasions he was able to come visit, he’d only be here about an hour before he’d get a phone call telling him to come home and "do chores."  He was working THREE jobs but never had any money.  He’d tell Cassie how much he looked forward to taking her out to a movie or dinner but when the weekend came when he was supposed to get paid, he couldn’t afford to do it.  He just turned 20 yrs old and didn’t have a car or a drivers license.  

Then, one day he shows up on our front porch at midnight.  He apologized for the inconvenience but asked if he could crash on our couch because he was locked out of the house.  I asked him why he was out so late and he told me he had just gotten off work but by the time he walked home, the house was already locked up.  I asked him why he didn’t have a house key and he said his parents wouldn’t let him have one.  When I asked him why he was walking home so late at night; why one of his parent’s didn’t pick him up from work, he claimed it was because he "liked" walking.  I reluctantly allowed him to stay the night – making sure to keep my eye on him the whole night.  

Christmas came and it was a day he and Cathy were looking forward to for months.  We had invited to take him with us to my parents house for dinner and to meet the rest of the family.  He was so excited, he couldn’t wait.  Christmas Eve came and he called Cathy to let her know that his mother was insisting that he spend Christmas at home with his parents and siblings.  We found out a week later that he spent all of Christmas day in his room because he couldn’t stand all the arguing and fighting.  

Eventually, Jon started spending more time with us than with his own family.  By this time we knew that his step-dad was suffering from Leukemia, his mother supposedly had ovarian cancer, every penny he made at his jobs was spent paying the family bills, his parent’s "refused" to take him anywhere he needed to be, he had holes in all of his clothes and he was completely exhausted.  He was terrified that the two people in his life that he loved the most were going to die – yet he couldn’t stand being at home because at home he never got any sleep.  His younger brother was a delinquent who was constantly getting in trouble with the law.  He even beat his mother so badly one time that she ended up filing an abuse charge against him.  Of course she turned right around, then, and dropped the charges.  Jon didn’t want to be around him – he knew how violent his brother could be.  There was just so much going on!

Then, Jon’s step father was arrested for failure to pay child support and everything blew up and came to a head.  The step father went to prison for lying to the judge and Jon’s Mom went psycho.  The step father wasn’t even in prison a month when Jon’s mother was suddenly shacking up with another man.  She was going to the bars, having all kinds of people sleep in the house, was getting drunk, doing drugs, etc.  Jon couldn’t stand it any longer so he started spending more and more time at our house.  He kept saying how he couldn’t wait until his income tax return came in so he could get his own place.  Having worked several jobs – not to mention the three jobs he was working when we met him – it should have been a substantial enough amount to allow him to do that.  When it came in the mail, his mother called him and immediately picked him up to "take him to the bank."  He came back home to us with $1,000.00.  When asked where the rest of it was, he said it was in the bank.  Happy that he was being responsible, we let him have fun spending his $1,000.00 on stuff he needed and wanted.  He bought some clothes, a game system and some games.  

We invited him to officially move in until he was able to save enough money to get a car, pay for insurance and get an apartment.  At first his mother had no problem with him moving out but all too soon she started acting up again.  Within a week she was calling his cell phone, texting my cell phone, texting Cathy’s ipod, calling our house phone and any other means of communication she could use to harass him into giving back "what he stole from her."  I went through all of Jon’s things and the only thing that didn’t personally belong to him was a few video games that he bought for his step father and was going to play until his dad got out of jail.  When his mother started calling the store where he worked 12 times a day and even went to the store to confront him in person, he decided he wanted nothing more to do with her.  He returned the video games and even the cell phone he was paying for and told her to leave him alone.  Still, he ended up losing his job at the store.

Then she started calling the house leaving messages on our machine telling us crazy things like, "Tell Jonathen to erase the &%$^# that he said about me from his facebook or I’ll give him a whole world of hurt!" and "Cathy’s parents, if you knew the whole truth about what Jon and Cathy are doing, I don’t think you’d be so trusting!"  The only thing the boy said on his facebook was that he couldn’t stand what his mother was doing to the family so he moved out.  And now she’s implying that my daughter was up to no good??  That pissed me off!!    

I was forced to change the number on my cellphone but she still managed to call the house leaving questionable messages on our answering machine in an attempt to make my husband and me doubt Jon’s honesty and intentions and hopefully kick him out.  She knew if we kicked him out, he would have no choice but to come back to her (after all, it worked with her other son).  We ignored every message and call.  It was some time during all of this that Jon learned from a close family friend that his mother didn’t – and never did – have cancer.  She had him believing a lie for two years!  Then the truth about the income tax money came to light.  Jon admitted lying to us about it because he was so ashamed and embarrassed.  His mother didn’t take him to a bank, she took him to a cash exchange place and cashed the whole $6,500.!  He was afraid that if we knew his mother took all of it, we’d kick him out.

The boy is wearing shoes and jeans with holes in them and his mother took ALL OF IT!!!  (well, except the 1,000.00 she "let" him have)

My goodness, the amount of control this woman had over her own son!!  She took him for every single penny he ever made!  He was like a slave in his own family!  He told us how she’d know when his paychecks were deposited into his account and how she’d wake him up at midnight to go to the ATM to withdraw it because they needed it to pay bills.  How they put ALL of the household responsibilities on him except for the cooking – he cleaned, vacuumed, dusted, fed the four dogs they had, did laundry; and all of that was AFTER working two jobs back to back.  Some days he’d come home after work and there would be no dinner left for him.  This poor boy was 20 years old and about as ignorant as a 10 year old.  He thought he was doing the right thing for his family.

Last week I found a website called, "GoFundMe.com."  It’s a fundraiser site that anyone can use to try to raise funds for anything from college tuition to paying bills to raising money for charity.  I told Jon about it and he immediately went to work building his own page to seek donations in the hope that he’d raise enough money to get a car and go back to college.  Even though his mother was banned from his facebook, somehow she came across his page and immediately blew up.  She reported him to the site administrators as a fraud and his page was deleted!!  That was the last straw.  He JUST started a new job and was terrified that she’d cause him to lose that as well, so I took him down to the courthouse to file a protection order against her – and his brother for good measure.  We go to court on the 20th to plead his cause.  Please say a prayer for him, he’s scared to death.  

I’ll continue my update tomorrow.  I’ve missed you all and I’m glad to be back.  Now, I’m off to get caught up on all your entries.  

Until next time…