I'm Going To Be Completely Honest, Here...

What kind of an awful person am I?

Let me tell you.

Yesterday, I got a phone call from my ex, telling me about a really bad thing that had happened to his daughter, my former step-daughter.

Upon hearing this news, I felt virtually nothing.

Seriously.  

No, "Oh my God is she OK?"  No, "Oh that's terrible!"  Just...zip.

Tell you what....I won't make you read the archives to figure out where all that cruel heartlessness is coming from.  I'll just tell you.  I do not like this woman.  Don't like her one little bit.  The entertainingly bitchy stuff she did, which made it to the blog, was just the tip of the iceberg in reporting the day to day hell--and I do me "HELL"--of living with her.  The nicest thing I can say about her is that she didn't have body odor.  She lied, she stole, she manipulated, and worst of all, she blamed all of her awful shit on other people, and since my children and I were the closest scapegoats, we usually got the brunt of it.  I actually dislike this person, for real.

A couple of weeks ago, when her father described what an asshole her boyfriend was, I thought, and said, "There are two sides to every story," and I asked him if he had formed that opinion based on time spent with the boyfriend, or on his daughter's anecdotes.  Since she, herself, would never admit to doing anything wrong, certainly everything that could have been wrong with their relationship had to be the boyfriend's fault.  Her father bought into that.  He buys into all of the stuff she tells him--always has.  The fact that her father believes everything she and her brother tell him is actually the number one reason why I am no longer with their father--I couldn't stand to be around it anymore.  No matter what happened, it was always our fault.  

Mathematically speaking, that's some pretty sketchy odds--I mean....how is it possible that a person can go through life without ever, ever making a mistake?  But that was the logic his children would have you believe--that they were above reproach, and everyone else was irreparably flawed.  Having conversations with them in which they would blithely make up some incredible, negative untruth about you, then look at you as if to say, "Yeah, I lied--what are you gonna do about it?" produced the most incredible rage in me.  But as much as I hated them for doing that, I hated the fact that I was letting them have that power--that they could push all of my buttons and get a reaction, to make me look like a crazy person for being in constant disagreement with them.  I had been a happy, relaxed person, and then I met those two and became a hyper-vigilant, stressed out, angry person.  It was not a good thing.  I left.

On Sunday, I was advised that my former step-daughter's boyfriend had thrown the woman to the ground, smashed her head on the sidewalk and beat her up.

I was not taken aback.  I was not surprised, or appalled.  The only thought that ran through my head was, "Wow, just think how many times she made me so angry that all I wanted to do was grab her by the hair and smash her face into a door frame, and now someone has gone and done it."  And that's the truth.

Do I sympathize with him?  Absolutely not.  If you feel like beating the crap out of someone, get the hell away from them, like I did, before you do something you'll regret--something that will give them power over you for the rest of your life.  

But I most certainly understand the rage.

I was unable to provide her father with the appropriate sympathetic responses to a woman being beat up, and instead asked questions like, "Did anybody SEE this happen?" because that's how deep my mistrust goes--it would not surprise me one bit to discover that she made most or all of it up.

I don't feel bad about not feeling bad.  She earned my disdain, one lie at a time, over the course of many years.  I'm not glad this happened, whatever it was that actually occurred.  I really wish it hadn't--not because I wish her well, but because some angry person not so very different from me has ruined his life in one stupid, drunken evening.

Her father used to say, when speaking about his children's mother, that if he'd only just killed her when he first felt like doing it, he'd have been out of jail by now, and the world would have one less evil bitch in it.  We all laughed about that because A) He didn't kill her and B) She really was/is a truly awful, evil bitch.  

I wonder if the boyfriend will be saying that same thing 20 years from now?