February 24, 2023 - Ibby Part 2 & 3

February 24, 2023 - Things are about to get long! I’m looking back now at our early conversations on messenger and on 2/22/23 I’d told my half-sister that I’d done a DNA test and was waiting for the results. I asked if she remembered meeting me at Chili’s back in 1999 (oh, I can’t wait to get to this story later!) and she said she did, and this is where she told me she’d actually looked for me the week before. I don’t know if she’d found me, but she wanted to know why I was reaching out then. Was she not planning on reaching out to me? Was she worried that I would be as judgmental as she was about to be to me? 

She wanted to know why I had reached out to her and not her dad. She said she didn’t know what had happened between us back then and that she didn’t want to be in the middle of any drama. I told her I didn’t want anything other than to get to know them as adults. The last thing I wanted was to cause any drama and I was being as careful as possible because I worried that I was dropping this bombshell of my existence on her. I told her I had messaged him but thought maybe he hadn’t seen it since we weren’t friends on facebook. She offered to answer any questions she could and said she’d sent him my profile. So far, so good. 

She said it was sad that it had taken me so long to try to find out the truth. What she couldn’t know was everything I had done over the years, in between raising my kids, homeschooling my kids, and everything else, to try to put together the pieces of the puzzle. That was pretty judgy coming from someone I’d only spoken to that afternoon. Looking back now, she was judging me without very little knowledge, making declarative statements as if she were an expert on my lived experience, and she wasn’t all that interested in getting to know me. 

She asked if I was following his posts on facebook and I said I was and that it sounded like some of my relatives had really hurt him. She asked if I had sent him a friend request and I told her that I was leaving that up to him because I wasn’t able to determine if he was up for reconnecting with me.  

Here is her response -  “….yes it does sound like that. I don’t want to tell you what to do, but if you’re waiting for him to reach out, he more than likely won’t. If I were you, I would send him a message and just start a conversation and see where it goes. I’m not sure how old you or your kids are, or what relationship you have with their father or your partner…or at what point you are at in your relationships with your own children, but from my own personal experience, it can never hurt to reach out for a connection, even if it isn’t met with what we think it should be met with in return. Regrets are far worse than the potential of being hurt in my opinion….” 

I had written down what I wanted to say to him but hadn’t sent it yet. I asked her to give him a heads-up to be on the lookout for a message from me. She accepted my friend request on facebook, but I wrote in my notes from that time that she seemed distant and uninterested. 

For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that I wrote to her to share a bit about who I was, my childhood experiences. I was clear that I had no contact with my relatives, and that I wanted to get to know her and my half-brother, if they were interested. I did not want her thinking that anyone was pulling any strings - that it was me, as a grown-up, wanting to get to know her, my father, and anyone from their side that was interested in connecting. She said that she and my half-brother didn’t get along and that he’d cut off contact some number of years prior. She said my other half-siblings weren’t as “pleasant and well put-together” as her. (Someone certainly isn’t lacking in self-esteem, huh?)  She warned me that our oldest half-sibling was a “bigot” and that she didn’t have a relationship with him. I told her I hated to hear she didn’t have a relationship with her brother, but she said she was fine with it and that it was easy for her to detach from people. Red flag, I guess. 

She told me about her son, where she lived, where she worked, and what her life was like. She lives one state away and her son, about the same age as my kids, was living with his father. It didn’t sound like she saw him much. I don’t know the circumstances that led to that, but the reverberations of another generation of parent not under the same roof as their child struck me. Our father was abandoned by his mother (allegedly), he and my mother abandoned me, and here she was living apart from her child. But again, I don’t know the circumstances and I was trying not to judge before I knew the facts. Too bad she didn’t approach things with that mindset.

Anyway, I told her I’d sent my message to him and she said that he didn’t use facebook messenger at all. 

She asked if I had seen part 2 of the Ibby story and I had not, so she sent me screenshots, which I’ll get to here in a bit. We talked a little about the “weird and sad” stories he was telling and that was the last conversation we had on messenger. I gave her my phone number and we began texting. 

His part 2 of the story of Ibby… I didn’t copy and paste so I’m going to have to type it out from the screenshots. My thoughts are in parentheses in bold.

“So where was I? My first month out of the hospital. Well I’m one month or so out of the hospital. Taking Elivail (sp?) AKA the nastiest antidepressant known to human kind. Short term memory was non-existent. Forever dry mouth. Was it the medicine? PTSD? Other? Damned if I know. 

You don’t kill yourself because you honestly have put together a good plan to do it and execute it. It’s hard to explain but thinking is segmented. 

Routine mental health counseling. Equally useless. Read “I’m OK, You’re OK” for my self study. Then a book on transactional analysis for the common man. Equally useless. TA is an instructional manual for successful sociopathy. I saw how I was manipulated. I highly recommend them for victims if you want to really see how they do what they do to manipulate you. For example, my first wife while living with her boyfriend would visit me every day to tell me that she loved me. She cared for me but we would probably never reconcile. I was in a locked unit. She wanted to keep me on the hook just in case. After about a week of that she psychologist banned her from any contact with me so I could move on. 

I’m OK, You’re OK is a lie. Sometimes it’s true. Most of the time it’s not. Usually only one of you are OK. Sometimes you both are. Sometimes neither of you are OK. I used to gravitate to the latter where nobody was OK. 

So I took to the latter category. Hung out with motorcycle gang members, drug dealers, and a lot of people who didn’t go to prison cause they didn’t get caught. West Charlotte was a bad side of town. 

Even had a friend who was completely blind and open carried a handgun everywhere he went. God knows what he eventually did. 

Some of the life codes I got from my friends at the time went like this. If you’re going to do something really bad then don’t talk about it. If you do something really bad then still don’t talk about it. Be willing to die for a just cause or a brother (but ironically not for your children) and some people just don’t deserve to live. Shoot, shovel, and shut up. 

You know. Useful life lessons. I consider it pre law enforcement training. You never really understand how an evil at heart felon thinks unless you have thought like one. Once you have, then you recognize each other without ever acknowledging it. 

Even after you spent forever purging that person from your psyche a little of that old person still resides deep in your psyche no matter how hard you fight it. 

Those who have never been there will never understand those who are there. You like to think everyone uses your thought processes. They don’t. I didn’t and still don’t to some extent but I’ve changed. For the better I hope. Couldn’t have been worse. 

Now let’s take a baby step forward in the story. Pun intended. You’ll see. 

I don’t get to take credit for Lenny’s love child. Lenny works at Harris Teeter as a stocker/bag boy. Both sisters do too. One’s a cashier, the other a head cashier. All at different stores. 

I don’t remember what happened to the 17 year old girlfriend. Also, I don’t remember Lenny being a daddy. The older sister’s husband discharges from the Army as an E-5. I remember the most arcane things sometimes. He gets a job loading trucks at Thurston. I don’t know how that ended but he was in a trap and didn’t know it. That girl was like her mama too. 

Ibby marries Lenny. Lenny joins the Air Force and goes to Minot AFB in ND for AIT to be eventually assigned to Hamburg(?) Germany. (I think he got his nicknames mixed up here and he meant Squiggy.)

Does anybody besides me see where this is going? Well let’s continue…

Ibby and I hook up. As far as I know, Squiggy doesn’t know. Didn’t matter to me but I’d probably have liked him to know. Remember him and Lenny wanted to hook up with my wife and I had to live with it. 

For me, it’s the best of both worlds. I get to screw Squiggy’s wife and Lenny’s sister. Plus wife number 1 left me functionally impotent. She fixed that. (So all this was just some warped revenge)

Well after several months Ibby gets pregnant. Hold your horses there family readers. This ain’t going where you think!

Now she’s living with momma and daddy. Got her career as a cashier. Pays no room and board. 

She gets a monthly government check for being married to Squiggy. (Oh, really? My mother was getting a check because she was married to someone in the Air Force?) She’s living the high life. Driving her red Sunbird and doing what she wants when she wants with who she wants. (Probably true. My mother always did what she wanted.)

To me she is no more than a revenge bootycall (that’s one way of putting it) and a cure for impotency. 

I’m not emotionally connected yet. I don’t think I ever was. But a baby’s not in her plans. She opts for an abortion. Didn’t seem to phase her in the least. I had no say. I would have taken the baby to raise even as emotionally broken as I was. (Also probably true. I know she had several abortions. I just didn’t know one of them was his.)

I'm devastated when I thought I was way past that. I’d lost my son. So I’ve already failed as a parent once. Now I’ve done it again. If I had killed someone then IMO they deserved it. The kid did nothing. It is still hard for me to live with. (Now I doubt that, considering everything he’s done. But he sees babies as opportunities for redemption, so maybe.)

Still it was her body. It was her choice. I sucked it up personally. Adapted and tried to overcome. I feel that it was a decision that she regretted and rectified later on. But that’s for tomorrow and not in the way that you think. There are so many twists and turns to this story but I swear it’s true. 

Tomorrow I introduce the last character in this tragedy and the reason it’s being told. Stay tuned if you’re interested in where this goes. 

Please note that I firmly believe opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one. The motives I attribute to myself are indeed accurate. Unvarnished truth. 

Motives I attribute to others are based on the facts that existed at the time and the logical conclusions I’ve reached. 

I have not played loose with the facts. They are absolutely accurate. Truthful and unvarnished. Exactly as described.”

Before I read this post I sent him a direct message on facebook. Here’s what I said - “I hope it’s okay that I’m reaching out to you here. I’ve read some of your more recent posts and I feel awful that my mother and her family treated you like they did. I’m sorry that things went the way they did between us in 1999 and that I didn’t get to know you without being influenced by my mother and grandmother. At 19, I didn’t know how to navigate that and didn’t for a long time. 

You are probably correct in your statement about running from the truth. I gave that some thought yesterday after reading your post. I had no idea about the things that happened, still don’t, in fact. I think everything they told me ended up being lies. I’ve spent years trying to untangle the lies and try to process and make sense of it all.  

I can share, if you like, the things they told me about what happened. Back when we met, my grandmother especially, didn’t want us to get to know one another. She had me afraid of you. But reading your recent posts, I’m certain what they told me were more lies. 

I no longer have contact with any of them. I spent several years after finding out trying to be okay with everything, trying to make them happy. Honestly, I don’t think they ever told me the whole truth and I feel like there’s a lot still that I don’t know. 

When my husband and I decided to start a family, things really fell apart between me and them, though there were cracks in our relationship for a long time. I haven’t seen my mother or grandmother since 2007. My mother has tried to get in contact over the years, but her intentions are not sincere. 

I’ve thought about you over the years, wondering what your life was like, but never wanting to intrude. I feel bad for how things went when we met and that I didn’t get to know you or hear your side of things. 

I live in Charlotte and have been married for over 20 years. We have two teenagers. I got my MA in Sociology and stayed home to raise my kids, as well as homeschool them. We still homeschool, though now that they are older they take more classes online. I knit, sew, try to grow plants, read and cook. 

I spoke with Jennifer (she’s very wise, but you already know that, I’m sure) (this take was premature) and she encouraged me to write to you again. I would love to hear from you, but if it’s been too long or it’s too painful, I understand."

In my notes I wrote about how my half-sister and I exchanged phone numbers and had started texting. I said “ I don’t know how to be a sister, not even half of one.” And I didn't. Because what’s the protocol? Should we talk everyday? How much do I share? What do you even say?

I had to go pick up our car from the shop. You can read your long-lost father’s facebook posts with his take on how you came to be, meet your half-sister and still, life goes on, you know. She texted me to say that he was going to write another post, possibly that night. Then after dinner she texted me to say that he couldn’t see my messages. She said he didn’t use messenger and that’s why we were having trouble connecting, but she’s trying to help. After dinner I was able to see that he had read my message and was in the process of typing a response. I felt slightly nauseated wondering what he was about to say. 

He said “Tina read the rest of my future installments about that time in our lives. Then, decide if you want to try building a relationship that didn't stand a chance back then.

I'm going to publish the good, the bad, and the ugly about what happened back then. I made mistakes and they can't be fixed. 

One thing is that if somebody doesn't want to be a part of your life, then you can't force it. 

You have my friend request. I hope you'll accept it. To be honest with you, I'm not sure how to take your openess to establish some kind of relationship but I'm willing to try. (Yeah, I guess openness, honesty, and being interested in building a relationship would have been foreign to him.)

I will warn you up front. You made an overture Ling ago only to slam the door shut on me. That hurt but I did so much more to hurt you. (I wasn’t the one to close the door, actually. In the spring of 2000 he told me not to contact him for 6 months. And I left him alone for several months, not the full 6, which I admit to. He was busy with his new family.)

I don't often deal in second chances. I'm willing to try. I've never dealt in third chances. (Some father! You get one chance to be the kid he wants so don’t mess up!)Get to know me. Like me. Love me. Hate me. I'm willing to work through it and still be family. (Well, someone get him a Father of the Year award!)

Do what happened the last time. Well to be honest with you, I would be done. I'm willing to carry some hurts to my grave. I'm not willing to keep picking off the scabs so it hurts again. 

As I told Jxxxxxxx a couple of says ago, you can love someone but not like them. (I have come to hate this phrase. One can’t care for someone while actively disliking them.) You can also love them but want nothing to do with them. 

Just to be clear I'm talking about my mother when I say that. She holds a unique place in my life. 

Read the narrative I'm sharing. Think about it. Meditate on it. Get back with me knowing that it's a rocky road if you decide to take it. (Rocky. He’s trying to warn me that he has no plans to make things easy or anything other than a one-way street.)

I don't consider me a nice person. I hope that you find me acceptable. (Red flags everywhere. When someone tells you who they are, you better believe them.)

Peace.  I wish you nothing but loclve and happiness no matter what.”

I think at the time I was accepting this firehose of information and revelations that were coming to me. Now I look back with more experience and knowledge. I should have let it be. 

“You can love someone but not like them”? Ugh, no. He doesn’t consider himself a nice person? Red flag for someone who isn’t trying to be better. He was blaming me for not making it work in 1999? I was 19 and the whole thing was traumatizing, but he put it all on me. He doesn’t often deal in second chances? I shouldn’t have given him the time of day because he was trying his best to warn me off. And here he was telling me he wouldn’t give me a third chance if I couldn’t make it work this time. I shouldn’t have walked, I should have run. 

Yeah. 

But I accepted the friend request. Ugh. I should have known better - he all but told me he hadn't changed, was a bad person, and it would end badly.

He posted again that night, as he promised. This one I was able to copy and paste from his public facebook post. 

“The Story of Ibby (Part 3) Well, I think I left off with the abortion so let's pic back up around that time frame shall we?

Now to be pretty honest I do believe in a woman's right to choose. Her body. Her choice. Still decisions have consequences. Those consequences extend beyond yourself. I admit it I cried for the child.

Now to be really clear. I did not love Ibby. Nor did I see us getting married and living happily ever after. (I now know from searching public records that he filed for a marriage license a couple of weeks before I was born, but she didn’t go through with it.) She was married. I was still married. It was a matter of revenge and convenience.  Plus my ex was a friend of the family and constantly in touch so she could still have a little control. It was nothing more. She was supposed to be taking care of birth control. She wasn't.

So we move in together. Rent a house on the south side. Got a dog. And surprise, we're going to have another baby!  Emotions in her family ran the gauntlet. My family and I were estranged. I don't remember Ibby meeting any of them.

The ex wife is advising Ibby's momma. Ibby starts spending much more time with her momma and less time with me. A young motorcycle guy starts spending a lot of time at her mommasl's house too.

Elwe started arguing a lot. She shot at me once. Missed bt about a foot hitting an oil can on the countertop beside me. (So this was news to me! But it could explain my mother’s fear of guns. And possibly why my grandmother ended up with me. He will tell me more about this later.)

Yet still despite it all, I'm truly happy at just the idea of being a daddy. Another chance to try to be a daddy. (Here we are with the redemption crap again. He is using me, a baby, to try to feel better about the things he’s done.)

I was in a tunnel with a freight trying coming my way on the tracks and too stupid to see it coming. Nut come it did.

Ibby goes into labor. Nobody comes to the hospital for the birth. My daughter is born and I'm as happy as if I had good sense. Oddly enough Squiggy's name goes on the birth certificate as the daddy. The explanation given is that it because they were married. (A note on this - my mother and her first husband, Squiggy, have been legally divorced for more than 6 months before I came along.)More on what I think the reason was momentarily.

Ibbi and I don't get along when we get home. I'm watching my daughter more and more since she spends more and more time at mommy's house. Did mention motorcycle dude? (Knowing her, this is probably true.)

I'm good. I'm working. I've got my daughter. Until...Ibby takes my daughter and moves in with mom. It's only then that it becomes apparent what's going on and it hurt me bad. (This is a completely different story than the one I was told about how I came to live with my grandmother. I was told that he barricaded himself in their house with me, locked my mother out, and attempted to kill himself.)

Let's looks at the situation objectively.  Ibby's moved in with motorcycle dude at Paw Creek. She's getting her government check as Squiggy's spouse. Somebody's getting a government dependent check for his daughter who is actually my daughter. (Again, really?! The real question is why Squiggy went along with putting his name on the birth certificate and what my mother did with that money, if she was getting a dependent check, especially if I wasn’t living with her.)

I'm given an ultimatum. Stay away from my daughter or be arrested. Remember, DNA hasn't been discovered yet. Blood work may prove that you're not the father but it's about a decade from proving that you are. I'm stuck there. (He didn’t put up much of a fight, I don’t think. Time to find another woman to have more babies to have a do-over.)

Ibbys husband goes along with it. I can't explain the social dynamics behind it. I do know that he's gone and this whole thing doesn't cost him a cent. Did he actually pretend to be her daddy. I don't know. (How would he? They had already split and the divorce was well and done. I never even met him.)

I'm told that they will consider any attempt to see my daughter as stalking.  Any attempt to see her as stalking. I lost contact with her. (Okay, about this… he could have made some effort to find me, especially once I was an adult. He could have fought them in court rather than abandoning another kid. He sees himself as the true victim, yet again, and he’s just this hapless man being manipulated by his first wife, then my mother and grandmother. Things happen to him and he has zero responsibility. And I’m supposed to count myself lucky that he’s going to give me a second chance here to be his daughter.)

I do know that every year for 8 years that I drove down to the end of Ixxxxxxxxx Avenue sitting just up from from grandma's house just hoping to see a glimpse of her on her birthday. I never did and I gave up. (I’m guessing some of that had to do with the face that he didn’t know when my birthday was. And that my grandmother didn’t celebrate my birthdays.)

Fast forward to when my daughter is 19 years old. She calls me out of the blue. It seems that the man she thought was her daddy had died. Rather than let her just grieve and live with the lie they have told her for her entire life, her mother decided to tell her the truth.

Kinda like pulling the wings off butterflies isn't it?  Anyway, she finds me, calls me, and we go out to lunch near Mxxxxxx. I thought everything went good and we could build some kind of fractured relationship. (He seems to forget we met 3 times. Once at Chili’s near UNCC, once we met halfway, and the final time I drove up closer to where he lived. He was calculating the mileage to make sure it was fair. Some father. And this was after I found him - I had to wait several weeks to meet him. If that were me and my daughter reached out, I would have been driving to her that day, not waiting and definitely not calculating who drove how many miles.)

Next thing I know she calls just absolutely irate. (Again, we met 3 times during the November to December 1999 timeframe. I don’t recall this phone call, but I won’t claim I wasn’t frustrated with him and the situation I was put in.) Wants nothing to do with me. Mom and grandmother have told her all she needs to know about me and none of its good. She's done with me. After my first wife, I chase no one. Not even her. Not ever. (No, seriously. Father of the Year material here.)

Now I've been having the deepest nightmares I've ever had for no apparent reason. My daughter contacts me to tell me that my first daughter has contacted her wanting to...well I'm not sure exactly for what just yet.

But I've written this trilogy entirely for her benefit. Now I've told her the unvarnished truth for better or for worse. I wish ir was a love story and in a way it is.

I didn't love your mom but I've loved you since before you were born and ill love uou until the day that I die. You were not a mistake although your mom was.

It's OK to love someone and not like them. It's OK to love someone and want nothing to do with them. I understand if you feel that way and I'll still love you

What I won't do is be someone's doormat.  Someone who's life you drift into and out off.

If you're here you're here. If you're not you're not.

Regardless, I love you and always have and always will.

“

I just… there’s so much to pick apart here in this last post in the Ibby story. I knew my mother had a couple of abortions, but didn’t know at least one of those was his baby. I did not know that my mother (supposedly) had shot at him. I didn’t know he was with my mother as revenge to her husband and brother. I still have no idea who motorcycle guy is. He’s saying my mother put her first husband’s name on the birth certificate so she could collect military benefits. I wonder how much she collected over the years, if this was true. His story that my mother took off with me to move in with her mother doesn’t match what I was told about my early months. I didn’t know my mother moved in with motorcycle dude, whoever he was. And he claimed that he tried to see me for 8 years on my birthday? That was probably difficult considering I’d find out in our first conversation that he didn’t remember when my birthday was. I don’t remember ever calling him irate and telling him off.