The Fourteen Years War - 2002 - Volume I and Only One Again and Yet Again

Having filed for custody of Nate, I spent a lot of time worrying over the situation. AZ knew what was going on and encouraged me to stay the course and not give an inch. Jeff wasn’t helping matters much. To my knowledge, he was still drinking and drugging and trying to sling shit in my direction. Oh, and he found religion, for about three weeks or so. At some point, whether at this time or another, Lo, who was STILL married to, and I ganged up on him and tried to get him committed to rehab. This was after he spent an entire evening driving around drunk as hell, stopping by MY HOUSE to get a light for a cigarette, and then falling and screwing up his face. The bitch called and said he couldn’t see Nate because he had had a bad night. Well, fuck that noise. Jeff did eventually go to rehab, three times. It was the only way he was allowed to see Nate. Then, he fell off the wagon again. He got drunk/stoned one night and tried to call the bitch. Her daughter and Jeff’s nephew were hanging out together and thought it was some guy trying to call the daughter so they kept hanging up on Jeff. The bitch was sound asleep under the influence of Klonipin. That is, until Jeff showed up and dragged her out of the house by her hair and beat her. He blacked both her eyes and busted her eardrum before the police showed up, the same police force he used to work for, and arrested him. What a fucking mess. Any steps forward to determining our custody matter went straight out the door. My lawyer cut out the newspaper article and faxed it to his lawyer, telling her that Jeff would be agreeing to our terms or we would move to have his parental rights revoked. Jeff and I finally settled the matter after he completed an Anger Management Course. Can you believe, after all that, the bastard wanted to be the “primary custodian?” Yeah. Again, fuck that noise. Not only that, he turned down extra custodial time. So, he wanted control of the situation, but he didn’t really want to spend time with Nate. Manipulative, controlling asshole. In the meantime, Holland was getting worse and worse and he finally moved out. I had thrown him out earlier but he was too drunk to realize it. Luckily for him, he never, ever came home drunk when Nate could have seen him. He didn’t sit around and drink in front of Nate, nor was he ever mean to Nate in anyway. Matter of fact, Holland was one of my biggest supporters in what I was doing with Jeff. He knew what it was like growing up with an alcoholic for a father. Too bad he didn’t learn any lessons from it. I finally broke down and came clean with AZ, whether via phone conversations or via the multitude of letters I wrote to him. (There will be an epilogue about the letters when this whole schmear is done.) Working through my latest slide down the slippery slope of co-dependency and dealing with Jeff’s continued bullshit, took us into 2003.