2020

Oh 2020…you stupid bitch of a year.

This year didn’t start out with any hope of great things to come.

We had court dates, filings, calls with lawyers and angry/hateful texts from the whore, for the foreseeable future.

One good thing about living with family, and for which I am so grateful, is not having to pay rent or a mortgage. This is the main reason I was able to pay the legal fees. Sure, I wasn’t able to save as much as I had wanted, but we wouldn’t be bankrupt either and I think this aggravated the whore.

When the pandemic hit and the lockdowns started, I was really close to a breaking point. I thought that working from home (it still gives me the ‘ick’ to call that place home) would allow me to relax because I wouldn’t have to be up at 4am everyday or take the TTC at 6am everyday to get to work.

We were allowed to take whatever we needed from the office in order to work remotely. Monitors, laptop docking stations, stationery, etc.

I set up my work space in a corner of the basement with all of the things that I needed to do my work. And it was fine.

I was able to wake up at a decent hour, not have to rush to catch the bus. I could walk George throughout the day and sit with him when I took my breaks. I think he liked it; I know I did.

I had the office mail redirected so that it came to the house instead of the office and I made sure I had enough FedEx supplies so that I could courier any letters or packages as required.

I don’t think the Italian’s mother quite got the idea that I was actually working. Whenever I was on a conference call or trying to focus on a project, she would stand nearby, listening and waiting until the call was done to tell me some random thing about what she just saw on the Italian game shows she watches, or to inform me of something that a neighbour was doing.

Look, I get it. She didn’t really know what I did for work and still doesn’t. But, the Italian did tell her that I was not to be bothered between 7am and 4pm because I was working. However, telling her something and her actually understanding it are two very separate things.

The Italian had been laid off from work again and he was sinking into a deep depression. I told him not to worry about money because I could handle things for a while. He was ok with that but the depression came more from the way the ‘children’ were treating him than anything else.

He tried to contact them but they would not return his calls or texts.

He reached out to the whore to ask about his ‘children’ but she wouldn’t assist in any way saying that she could’t make them do anything they didn’t want to do and that they could make up their own minds and that he should have thought about that before he started the court proceedings.

Ah – there it was – payback for not allowing her to step all over him.

One summer day the Italian’s sister decided to contact the ‘children’ to see how they were doing, to make sure they were staying safe, and to ask if they could reach out to their father because he was feeling really low. And to also reach out to their grandmother because she was asking about them and they didn’t return her calls either.

Oh boy! This started an epic text battle between the Italian’s sister and the ‘children’, who, by the way, were 19 and 16 years old at this time.

The Italian’s sister texted me to call her asap and to make sure that the Italian wasn’t around. So I went to another room and stayed on the line with her as she read out the exchange from the group text to me.

The below is a paraphrased version of what she conveyed to me as I remember it:

The Italian’s Sister: Hey kids, hope you guys are doing ok and staying safe. We miss seeing you but hopefully this will be over soon and we can get together. I just want to give you a big hug.

‘Children’: hey

The Italian’s Sister: Are you guys ok. Is everyone safe?

‘Children’: sure

The Italian’s Sister: Ok – hey could you guys do me a favour and call your dad? He’s feeling a little depressed and you contacting him would go a long way to help him feel better.

‘Children’: why do we have to call him, why can’t he call us?

The Italian’s Sister: Well, he’s been texting and calling, leaving messages but you haven’t called him back.

It was at this point I knew that the whore was deleting the Italian’s messages and texts to his ‘children’. They have a family plan and she gets all the texts the ‘children’ get and she has access to their voice mail too.

The Italian’s Sister: Um, the texts that he sent are still on his phone and all the times he called you are still on his phone. That’s weird you didn’t get them.

And this is about where it escalated.

‘Children’: whatever, why should we call him when he hasn’t been a father to us.

The Italian’s Sister: When was he ever given a chance to be a father to you? All you ever did was treat him and the rest of this family like shit.

It went on back and forth and at one point the Italian’s Sister told them that if anything ever happened to her brother or to her mother, they had better not even come near her.

Then the girl child said something that triggered a memory for me from the recent court documents and I knew that the Italian’s Sister was texting with the whore, posing has her ‘children’. So I told her as much and I said that I doubt if she was ever texting with the ‘children’. I think it was the whore all this time.

Then, whoever was on the other end of this battle said that the only way they would visit with their father and grandmother is if I was not at the house because everything was my fault.

Why exactly? Because, I showed the Italian that he had every right to stand up for himself and that I would back him up and support him? Because, the whore wasn’t going to be able to keep taking and taking from him and wouldn’t be able to enrich her life and the lives of those in her household that had nothing to do with the Italian?

Or…maybe it’s because the whore knew that I would not keep quiet about what she did.

Probably a little bit of everything.

The Italian’s Sister replied that I had done nothing wrong and I’ve only ever been supportive and kind to everyone. She noted to the boy child that when he was visiting with his dad, I was the one would would interact with him because he said that he was ignored in his house. She noted to the girl child that whenever we all went out together, I made sure that she wasn’t using her own money for any purchases, clothes, shoes, makeup, whatever she wanted.

She also told them that if they wanted to know what happened between their parents and who was at fault, they should ask their mother. And if they wanted to know the actual truth, they could ask anyone on their father’s side of the family.

When the Italian’s Sister mentioned “the truth”, the replies from the whore and her ‘children’ stopped and some time later – I think it was a day or two, the Italian’s Sister received a text seemingly from the boy child’s phone stating that she was “never to contact my children again!”

So yeah, it was the whore the whole time.

So after all this, the ‘children’ did come by to visit (with masks on) but I made sure that I was not around. I didn’t want to stand in the way of the Italian and his mother being able to visit with them.

One day the Italian told me that they would be visiting and I said, no problem, I’ll make sure that I’m not around. He asked if I would please stay for him and the look in his face broke my heart.

I told him that actually, I was leaving the house for him. That I knew his children didn’t want me around and that they wouldn’t come by if I was there. I didn’t provide any other information and to this day, I don’t think he knows of what went down between the whore, her children and his sister.

For the rest of the year we managed to stay healthy and we kept COVID out of the house.

The Italian’s mother was going stir-crazy, not understanding why she couldn’t go to ‘the club’ (the community centre) or out to visit with her friends.

It was a tough time for the entire world and we were all just trying to keep each other safe. I still had to go grocery shopping for us and for my mother. And when my younger brother got COVID, I took care of his groceries as well – at least as much as he would let me. All the while wearing a mask, latex gloves, and staying 6 feet apart from others.

We couldn’t wait for the year to finally end and looked forward to whatever 2021 had in store.