Almost a Daddy

A friend of mine from High School, who has kept in tenuous contact with me over the past 18 years, appeared on my door step on Sunday with a tale of saddness and woe.

She, Stephanie, had seperated from her 48 year old husband (she's 36 like me) and her youngest son, Conner, had been having severe behavioral problems with the man over the past few months.

After the kid was put into handcuffs for fighting with other kids in school and threatening teachers, she had to remove him from that school and decided to drive all the way up from Florida to drop the kid off with her own parents here in portsmouth.

Normally, the child would have been sent to go live with his father, a man named Chris, but Chris had died in 2006 from... something. So there was no family on the father's side to take care of the boy. That left Stephanie's own parents to figure it out. Her own parents are getting on in years and her dad's health, from what I understand, isn't the best.

So she and two guys that she know made the road trip up to Portsmouth and she ended up on my doorstep. She said that she attempted to call me, but I probably ignored it since I don't answer numbers I don't recognize.

This is when it gets weird.

Since Stephanie, who has had no job for 6 months and is attending school in Florida for an Associates, is still living with her soon-to-be-ex husband, she wanted me to act as a "mentor" for her son.

It was clear that she didn't want me as a Mentor, she wanted me to be a dad to her son since her son "was just like me". I'm not sure what she meant by that since, at 13, I was damn-near homicidal, half-blind, and seriously in need of time alone.

Her own father is ill enough that he couldn't go tromping the the woods with the boy - which is what Stephanie wanted. I told her that I had no interest in being someone's surrogate father. Immediately she back-peddled and tried to explain that it wouldn't be that much and just a few hours a week or so.

Her plan, it was revealed, was to drop the kid with her parents here in Portsmouth and bring me in as a surrogate role-model for the boy if they couldn't keep control of him. This would work, in her mind, long enough for her to finish her Associates degree (by July of this year) and then she could collect the boy and reunite him with his older brother (at 15 years old) . The three of them would find some new place to live and everything would be great - once she has her degree.

So... a woman I haven't seen but for maybe a half-dozen times in eighteen years arrives with a thirteen year-old son and wants me to watch over him because he can't stand her near-fifty year-old husband. Rather than pulling both of the boys out of Florida and relocating to Shawnee State (since the only thing holding her there is the degree that she's working on down there), she's dropping a child with parents who are ill-prepared for a teenage boy and wanting me to pull up the slack.

Even though I had such a perfect role model as a father, I would somehow be able to utilize my uber-cool teacher mojo to take care of a child that I've met twice.

Yeah.

So, I was almost a daddy.

And then it happened.

Yes, it happened.

Listen for it....

"Oh HEEEeeeEEELL No."

Politely, yes politely, I explained that her entire process of thinking lacked any sense of logic and that she was being selfish. She was focusing on her own life more than her children's. She wanted her degree. All things will be better once she has her degree. She's not realizing that an Associates' degree isn't going to solve all of her problems and that even when she gets it, she'll have to go back and pick up the pieces of a child that has been fostered upon her own parents sixteen hours away from its mother.

I gave her a hug, some coffee, and sent her back into the game. She needs to fix her own problems and not include someone from high school.

Oh, and get this:

She continually tried to site our friendship in high school as 'eternal' and something that has lasted for the past eighteen years. Granted, I have kept in touch with a few people that I knew in High School - one of them I've lived with, attended his wedding on my birthday, etc., and he's even a soulless red-head, but come on. She is someone that I've seen only sparsely, for a few hours, once every two or three years. For her, nothing has changed because she's still living as though it were the day after high school graduation.

Those people are quite disturbing.

So... for those people who are reading this and wondering "WHAT THE HELL?"... there ya go.

Hopefully it was more entertaining for you than it was for me.

My life has more drama than a production of Les Miserables.