Or
Tales of How Our Choices Effect Others, Part I
Or
All the Bananas in the World Cannot Fix Crazy
Once upon a time a girl got on a bus. Why and how she got there is really only the beginning of the story though.
She was an unhappy girl, and had been for some time, presumably even before she had her first baby at too young an age and suffered postpartum depression, which she denied and refused help for. Instead, she made threats of awful things she could do to the baby, and had a second one by a different father two years later, a pregnancy she attempted to hide for five months, even though it was obvious.
Her unhappiness and clear resentment of the children and herself lead to her yelling at them and neglecting them for hours in the mornings, because she felt it unfair she could not stay up and out all night and sleep the morning away. Why did they have to wake up? Why did they have to eat? Couldn’t everyone just leave her alone? She only truly lived at night. And the girl’s grandparents, who had taken her in when she had nowhere else to go were treated to fits of anger and screaming for their attempts to help care for the children who were still too young to care for themselves. They did not respect the way she was choosing to raise her children. It was none of their business if the baby girl cried from hunger pangs through the morning hours while she slept. How dare they try to overstep her parenting! After all, they were her children- her things. So instead of being grateful for their help and caring, she disrespected her grandparents and was cruel to them every chance she had.
One day, the girl moved in with her boyfriend, not the father of either child, and took the children with her…at least for a few months, until it got hard. She requested the grandparents take the older, harder to deal with child, the boy. She had always liked him less anyway and made no attempts to hide it. The boyfriend seemed to need someone he felt he could fix, and the girl was in need of fixing, and so it was a perfectly unhealthy combination for a codependent relationship.
It occurred to the young girl while she was launching and breaking items around her boyfriend’s father’s house as the couple fought one day, that she’d had enough. Yes, she was done. It was time to “minimalize” her life. Everybody expected her to have a job, to take care of her children, and to be a responsible, like an adult. Who needed that? It just wasn’t fair! And so, with nothing except the clothes she was wearing, her wallet, and a pair of sunglasses, she took her boyfriend’s deceased mother’s bicycle and peddled herself under the hot Florida summer sun at least 30 miles to a bus station. There she purchased a one-way ticket that would take her 3,000 miles away. She couldn’t take the crazy demands of everyone. Too much was expected of her. They were sapping away her free spirit, so she let it loose, like a bird, like the homeless people whom she had always admired, with their carefree lives.
The problem? Both children were in the home that day, as even the boy had been allowed to visit with his mother for the summer, even if he couldn’t have ice cream when his little sister did. Now they were simply left behind at the young girl’s now ex-boyfriend’s (who was neither child’s father) father’s house. She had simply disappeared, making no arrangement for them whatsoever. The distraught ex-boyfriend quickly contacted the much resented grandparents, not knowing what else to do, and not having been given any instructions from the mother, whom he was afraid was going to kill herself.
But she didn’t. Instead…she simply got on a bus and left everyone else to pick up the pieces of the abandoned children, which is where the story really lies. Maybe if everyone had just left her alone and let her sleep when she had wanted…
Stay tuned for more possible stories. Any similarities of these tales to real life will be denied, chalked up to paranoia, and called a piece of fiction, as nobody would believe such an awful person existed anyway.
caverns of my mind 