As I said, before, I took my son, AP, to live in Austin, TX after the divorce. He was a very easy-going kid; the love of my life and reason to make a good life for the two of us. After a while my present husband joined us as a live-in boyfriend and about four years later we got married. I think AP is about eight years older than his half sister, A. Beauty, and ten or eleven years older than his half brother, Savant.
When AP was about thirteen, my husband's business went belly-up, along with the rest of the economy in Texas in 1986. Our marriage was going through a stressful time too. We decided to head back to his home state in the North-East, stay with his parents while he looked for a job, and make a fresh start.
AP had always been a good, normal kid. Our move prompted AP's Tennessee family to propose that he come to live there for a while, until we got settled. They, his Grandparents, said they would send him to a good private school (he had been a bright student), only the best for their only Grandson. I haven't sent anyone to a private school and didn't really care, but, I think they were trying hard to persuade me that he would be fine with them. I refused the offer based on what a frightening life I had experienced with the creepy control-freak his father is; that and he had no idea how to be a parent. He dropped acid the day AP was born and said he wanted to be the first one to turn our child on (give him hallucinogens).
Are you getting why I wanted to keep him away from them? No one else knew what a freak-show the kid would have to deal with every day with his dad and girlfriend. My mother and his other Grandparents were all lobbying to let the Tennessee side of his family have a turn to enjoy having him with them. I finally caved in, only because I truly believed that it was going to be only for a few months until we got settled up-North and he would then rejoin us. I also thought that JP's girlfriend couldn't be as wierd as he was. I thought she probably just got involved with him due to youthful stupidity, the way I had.
AP (Chimera evolving) soon figured out that he could do as he pleased, and that kind of power can go to a thirteen year olds' head. Things then got turned upside down. He knew that we had normal expectations for good behavior, rules, curfew, sobriety, doing your school work,... the basic parent-child stuff. According to Chimera, at his Dad's, he could sell marijuana for daddy dear or stay away for days without checking in with anyone... He began changing quickly and not in a good way. Did his father ever give him any of the "magic medicine" he took so frequently, himself?
He came up to see us in the summers now. He was a seriously conflicted kid now and I couldn't get him back. We made plans for him to start school and move back with us, but when he found out that he would get his driver's license a year earlier in Tennessee, the plan was off. One year he showed up with a Mohawk and an offensive fashion look that was sort of neo-Nazi. My husband and I are open to free self expression, but there are limits. He looked like one of those frightened young men who dresses up in "fuck you" fashions to cover up his insecurities.
To be continued....
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