Rubies in Crystal

The ex's girlfriend needs a 'name.' I'll call her the Commandant. It suits her. And which she is, most certainly. One of my strongest images of her is her standing with her arms crossed, twaddling one finger on an elbow, in an Authoritarian pose, a la Milgram. Though she is a very buxom Barbie bleach-blonde who isn't skinny by any means and is quite tall and wears short mini skirts even though she's about 50 or something.

Anyway, "the Commandant" told my daughter to call her Dad for cab fare to and from the doctor.

Meaning=1) the Commandant knows exactly my financial situation and the detrimental effect getting my ex to cut child support will have on my family (she appeals to his cruelty, she knows him well). She thinks leaving 3 people without enough to pay rent, bills or eat is a fun thing to do, as any authoritarian personality would. She knows that I have a legally binding Separation Agreement where it is clear the ex must continue paying child support for my son and she knows I can't afford a lawyer who would stand up for me. She's laughing all the way to the bank.

And 2), to suggest that my daughter call her Dad for cab fare before she even dropped her off today tells me loud and clear that she knows exactly what she did to my daughter's foot when she drove over it and that she truly is behind manipulating my daughter into deciding 'not to' wait at a clinic or emerg for medical care (then the Commandant's 'traffic accident' would have to be reported and then her insurance premiums might go up, but let's care more about money than people) and how bad it really is since she knows my daughter cannot walk even the 2 blocks to the doctor (a 10 min walk at most under normal circumstances).

Could she have driven my daughter to her own doctor in the city where her Dad lives this morning? The one she took the poor girl to to get a load of anti-depressants that I assume she wanted to make the poor girl more docile and manipulable. Of course not. That would be to admit she ran over her foot and did not report the accident to the police as she should have, who would then report it to her car insurance company.

A highly manipulative woman who is extremely vindictive, oh it would make your hair stand on end to tell of some of the 'punishments' this woman has meted out to our family over the years!

You know, I wonder if the sense of ethic, compassion and fairness is a genetic trait that some people have, and others, like the Commandant, and the ex, don't have. While they treat my daughter as a weak little neurotic failure of a child, my daughter is in fact stronger than anyone in that house. My daughter has a strong sense of ethic, and for that she is amazing.

The Commandant's son, who was a heroin addict, on methadone now for 4 or 5 years, de-flowered my daughter mere weeks into her 16th year when he couldn't be charged with statuatory rape, and my daughter fell in love with him and was taken down the garden path of drugs by him and we nearly lost her, and my son, both in that house of doom, the Commandant's house, and yet her son's recovery only came about due to my daughter's strength and insistence on a drug-free relationship. I couldn't imagine living under the Commandant's rules and regulations and infinities of punishments, of which she mets out tons from what I hear, and I can well understand why no-one can live there without becoming dependent on drugs, street drugs, alcohol, prescription drugs, they all have, just to survive, as I understand it, because the core is bad, without moral understanding, without an ethic of care. I accused them of being terrible parents and so she had my ex cut child support to 'punish' me.

This is the commandant, her methods. How she 'controls' people. She particularly hates me because I refuse to be 'controlled' by her. She has never been able to manipulate me. She has hurt me and my children in innumerable ways to 'punish' me when I speak the truth about what goes on in her house but she has not been able to bully me into submission. For a decade she's been trying to take over the reigns of running my life through my children. I refuse to talk to her; I will only talk to my children's father when there is anything to be discussed regarding the children. It incites her to fury, I'm sure, that despite everything she's done, I remain a free woman raising two children alone, and I'm doing a damn good job considering what I have to deal with.

They are terrible parents and my daughter's foot is yet another example of how dangerous the situation is in that house.

I write too much. The story is so shocking.