THE DIVORCE

#12 - THE DIVORCE

I had seen many things happening between my mom and Roger and now that I look back on it and weigh out all of the events that I had witnessed, I can not help but ask myself or anyone else that could answer "Why in hell was she with him for so long"? My mom had finally left Roger and moved my little sister and I to her hometown of Vandalia, Ohio right before my 4th grade school year had began. I was used to the way that both my mom and Roger treated me as my mom had sometimes been meaner than Roger had been towards me and was sad when I had found out that Roger was not going to be living with us. Looking back to recall the events for this post I would say that 1990 was a rough year for all of us and it also had to have been the breaking point of the marriage. I do not remember how Roger came into the picture or when they had gotten married but I was about four or five. I remember that he had both a daughter and son from a previous marriage and they would both live with us from time to time. I did not have to deal with Roger much during this time. I would of course see him at night but I avoided him every chance that I had got. Roger had the same routine at night, he would always eat his dinner on the couch in front of the TV and he had always eaten meat and seemed to love greasy foods. Normally he had eaten a whole bag of frozen french fries, he drank a beer with dinner and then he would drink a few after dinner until he would fall asleep and snore loudly. My mom would wake him and like clock work, he would go to the bathroom and then go to their bedroom. A couple of times we had heard a loud boom from the bathroom and soon learned that the boom had been Roger passing out. The first few times that he had passed out, my mom had called 911 and they had came and put smelling salts under his nose. But eventually my mom ignored the boom of him falling, I remember one night after the boom he began calling out to my mom in a loud voice and she had pretended not to hear him. I know she had heard him because she stood in the hallway by the bathroom door listening and she had whispered to me to get out of the hallway, a few minutes later I heard Roger cussing at her and it sounded like they were having a shoving match before their bedroom door slammed behind them. Right before the divorce I would be in my bed sleeping and would have been awaken by my mom whispering in my ear and she would put her hand over my mouth, she had awoke me like this a few times and I would make noises until I was fully awake. My bedroom was at the end of the hallway and on the corner of their bedroom door, my mom would hand me my shoes and then I would follow her past the bedroom with Roger's snoring echoing throughout the house and I would follow my mom out the door to the carport. My little sister would be sleeping in the front seat and I sat in the back seat always being wide awake because soon I had known where the three of us had went when we left in the middle of the night. (I just did not know why until later.) We were on our way to the hospital and it had been a memory for me because it was one of the few times where I got to stay in the waiting room and play with the LEGO'S, you know? The divorce had to do with what my mom had found out by taking my little sister to the hospital and in the end I was saddened by the divorce. I had not found out what had happened to little sister until a few years later, I would not have felt as bad about the whole situation if I would have known. I was going to miss Roger a bit, he had not been a monster to me all the time. He used to take me for rides in his TRANS-AM and he would tell me that I could push the speed button, (The car's cigarette lighter) when I had pushed it he would accelerate like crazy. I had to think hard when I had written this post because it would be fair to write that I had very few good memories of the guy and yet, I had missed him some on the day that he had moved out of the house in Springfield until my mom had found us a new place to live. My mom had taken me and my little sister to live in the town that she had grown up in, (Vandalia, Ohio) Trisha had decided that she would stay in Springfield with her dad. Roger was found to be having an affair with both the neighbor lady and her sixteen year old daughter, I had heard in later years that he had gotten the daughter pregnant. It had been nearing the end of the summer and I was about to start the 4th grade.