She stopped journaling for three days, and on the fourth day she wrote hysterically, most of it not even making sense, just desperate started sentences that went unfinished. She finally told herself to get it together, and she wrote that she had just gotten off the phone with Mike, that he was packing his things. His mother had kicked him out, and he claimed he didn't have anywhere else to go. She asked him with dread where he was moving. He responded lowly, "Sarah."
Her heart broke again.
Even though he initially claimed they were not back together, that it was just a living arrangement, she knew that with him under Sarah's roof, she would never see him. Sarah would get him back before long, and she would be right back where she was before, but worse, because she couldn't even go to his house to see him after Sarah went to work.
My mother did make one last, desperate stab to stop it; she asked him to move in with her. She said she would get a place, which she had been planning to do anyway, and they could live there together. He made up an excuse about not knowing if he had enough money for rent. She told him he didn't have to, that she could pay the rent on her check alone. My mother was willing to do anything that she had to do to be with Mike, go to any lengths. By that time, she had lost more than her heart to him; she had lost her entire soul to him.
It was then that Mike finally told her that it wasn't about the rent or having a place to live. He admitted that Sarah wouldn't let him see his child if he wasn't with her, and he told my mother that she couldn't ask him to choose between her and his own kid. Crushed once more, she could only stare at him, before finally saying, near tears, "I would never ask you to do that. You have to know me well enough by now to know that."
"I do," he replied, but went on to tell her that's exactly what it came down to. Sarah was making him choose between my mother or his child.
My mother was outraged, and she told him that Sarah couldn't do that, that they could reason with her, they could figure something out— if all else failed, they could fight her in court.
But Mike was certain that if he did that, the courts would rule in her favor and he would still never get to see his child. She wrote in her journal,"I wanted to push, I wanted to open his eyes and argue with him until he saw reason, and I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that wouldn't happen. But what if I'm wrong? What if I pushed and made him believe me, and he did lose his child? He would never forgive me, and I would never forgive myself."
She cried in front of him that day as she realized that it was truly over, that it was really goodbye, and he looked at her sadly, tenderly, and told her as he wiped away her tears with his thumb, "This is exactly what I didn't want to happen."
My mother was terribly depressed for a couple weeks after that; she claimed that she cried all the time, at the tiniest things, that she felt completely worn out, too tired even to get out of bed.
It was a month after their goodbye when Alex came back. During my mother's six to eight week period with Mike, apparently Alex moved in with his girlfriend two hours away where she was going to college, a fact she only added as an afterthought before she signed off and went to bed.
Alex was still with the girlfriend, but he called my mom the morning he got into town and told her he'd love to see her while he was there.
Just two days before Alex called she made a remark that she needed something to distract her, to make her forget about Mike, even if only for a little while. Alex was nothing if not a good distraction.
Alex decided to come up to her work that night and visit her, and when he got there she ran out and gave him a hug, like any old friend, although she noted,"He gave me that affectionate squeeze as he hugged me. Made me sad."
Mike was working that night, and he knew Alex because they had grown up going to school together and living just down the road from one another. He also knew from talk at work that she had been involved with him before she met Mike.
My mother wrote that she could see and feel the difference in Mike after Alex came to see her. She wrote that Mike made fun of her for ever dating Alex, and that he was mean to her for the rest of the night. Reading the following entries, he seemed to only get meaner as the entries progressed after that night.
Personally, I think he was jealous, but he had absolutely no right to be, especially not after all she put up with from him.
Anyway, I don't know what happened between my mom and Alex that night, because she seemed upset about it, ashamed, and even in her own private journal, she wouldn't state plainly what had happened. Apparently she was angry at the way Alex achieved whatever he had achieved. She wrote that he had manipulated her, played her in a way that he had never played her before. He pounced on her vulnerabilities, probing about Mike, asking questions that made her sad, feeding on that vulnerability, touching her, rubbing her shoulders, stroking her face. She tried to just ignore him, not rejecting him and making things awkward like they had been before, but not accepting, because she certainly wasn't going to sleep with him.
I kept telling myself, she wrote,I am not that jaded.
Whatever did happen between them that night, it helped her forget about Mike for approximately four days, and by the end of a week (Alex was gone again, since had had only been visiting) she was completely miserable again, with nothing to distract her and with Mike suddenly treating her by her own description, "like a whore."
Another month passed and my mom and Alex stayed in touch, not enthusiastically, but there was a phone call here and there. Then, one night, she received a phone call and he declared, "I think I'm kind of in love with you. Is that bad?"
"Well... you have a girlfriend," she responded.
To her annoyance, he told her he didn't see what that had to do with how he felt about her, but she didn’t argue about it.
One of the days Mike was being mean to her, she told him that he was a liar. He demanded to know how he was a liar, and she told him he had lied to her when he told her he had ever cared about her. I don't know what he said, but whatever it was she acknowledged that it bothered him when she suggested things like that, and she said after that remark she caught him flirting with her, maybe unintentionally, and she thought it was probably to reassure that he had cared about her, but she still wondered if he knew how cruel that was.
My mother wrote about much of their flirting, so I can understand easily how he would send her mixed signals. Even after he let her go, he would continue to flirt suggestively with her. She guessed at the time that he just didn't realize that it still bothered her, but I suspect that he was completely aware of what he was doing, and it was a boost to his ego—at my mother's expense.
Whatever else there wasn't, there was passion and desire between them, and I know that only made my mother's devotion deeper.
But passion and desire aren't always good, I've learned. Together they can bring bitterness and destruction, jealousy and betrayal, longing and obsession.
In the journal, I could see her love changing, not dying, but holding onto her with its death grip as it poisoned her heart. She began to acknowledge that she never should have trusted Mike, and she tried with all her heart to make herself stop loving him. It didn't work, but it was a valiant effort.
The night that decided everyone's future was a party at the house of someone from work. My mom got drunk that night for the first time in her life, and Mike was there. Once she was goo
d and drunk, apparently, by her recollection, she went off in search of Mike, and while I don't know entirely what happened, I do know that apparently she chased after him and he ran away from her which confused and annoyed her. When she finally caught up to him she asked him, "Mike, why do you hate me?" She said he didn't respond at first, merely asked her in a mean, nasty tone, why she had to follow him around.