"Because I wanted to ask you why you hate me," she responded sensibly.
"Because you follow me around," he responded harshly.
My mom wrote that she could only stand there, not sure if the alcohol dulled the pain she had expected to feel or if it was just really anticlimactic, but she stood there thinking, "That's it?"
After that night, my mom was full of hurt and anger. If necessary, she reminded herself hourly that she hated him, that he only had to tell her he hated her once, and that he would never have to worry about her following him around again. Her love seeped over into regret, and she wrote about how she wished she would have never gone over to his house, never given him her number, never given him a second glance. She said that if she would have known how it would all end, she would've gone so far as to quit her job before he started working there if she had to, anything to just stop herself from ever meeting him.
As their baby boy's due date grew closer, my mother became more and more bitter.
Alex came back to visit again and my angry, cynical mother consented to go out with him again. Her mother told her she was stupid for going, that she was just asking for trouble, but my momwrote,"But I don't care. I'm going. They could be having their baby within the next week or two, and I need something to make me forget about that, even if only for a night. Alex is good at making me forget."
She journaled when she got back that night, and I gathered this time that she had slept with him, and apparently that wasn't even what pissed her off— it was that he had the nerve to tell her he loved her.
Apparently, unable to stop herself, she snapped that he didn't love her and he didn't need to lie to her, because that was just going to piss her off. Apparently he fed her a whole load of shit to try to charm her, so before she let him get what he wanted she said, "Let's get one thing straight, Alex. You don't love me and I don't love you, and that is the only reason this is about to happen."
I didn't understand that comment when she wrote it, and I doubt he did either, but my mother explained in the next entry what she meant.
She had loved Mike and he had shattered her heart. She decided she would rather sleep with Alex for the first time knowing that it meant nothing than to sleep with someone else thinking that it meant something, only to find out later that it didn't. She swore she would never let love blind her again, that from there on out she was going to live with her eyes wide open.
One day later, she put in her two week notice at Burger King, deciding that she needed to get away from Mike.
It was two days after she went out with Alex that Mike, having heard that she was leaving, decided to make peace with her out of nowhere. He said something about how she had been so mean to him lately and she had thrown back some remark that yeah, she was going to be mean to someone who told her he hated her. Baffled, he claimed he never said that. She told him he most certainly did. Mike said she had gotten on his nerves that night, but he didn't hate her, and he wouldn't say he did.
This seemed to depress her since she had already slept with Alex. She wrote in that tiny handwriting again that she felt like crying, that she felt cheated, that Mike could so easily make her doubt herself and her righteous indignation.
For two weeks she was miserable. As the end of her two week notice drew closer, I expected to see her leaving Burger King. Instead, I flipped a page and read, "I think I'm late."
As I read on, I realized that what I was reading was when she first found out she was pregnant with me.
For the first time since Mike had started screwing her over, I could see that she was getting excited. In the first entry she was freaked out. She was 19 years old, she had just quit her job, and now she might be pregnant with her ex's kid? And Alex, of all people. She seemed particularly annoyed that she would always have to think of him as the father of her child initially, but she reasoned it out and she decided it would be convenient that way.
Since she didn't love my father, she wouldn't have to worry about her feelings turning bitter. They could always be friends, and she would just raise me on her own with him making periodic visits.
Mike and Sarah had their kid in August, and she did write it down, but I noticed that she didn't seem to care quite as much because she had me to focus on. She decided to clean out her life and in doing so, she did have to remove Mike from it, so even though it scared her, she followed through with quitting her job. Before long, she had a new job as a waitress, and things were looking up.
From there she started planning our life together. She didn't factor men in at all, because she decided they were bad and she wanted nothing more to do with them. When she told Alex she was pregnant, he was pretty mad, but she yelled at him, telling him she hadn't asked him for anything, she was just letting him know. That seemed to ease his mind.
I believe I gave my mother something to live for. From the moment I was born, I became the center of her universe. Honestly, even though other people say they knew she was unhappy, I know I certainly didn't. She never appeared sad or bitter to me, in fact, I never really knew her pain until I found her journals. I got a glimpse that day at the grocery store, but usually she was loving and happy, everything a mother could be. I thought she was perfect.
I was only six years old when it happened.
I remember one minute I was sitting in my room playing with my dolls, then I heard a cry from the other room. My grandmother started screaming so incoherently that she scared me and I started to cry. She just screamed, calling for my grandpa and hyperventilating. I had no idea what was going on, but she finally started gasping, "My daughter! It's Jamie!" I knew my mother's name was Jamie, but I didn't know why a phone call from my mother would upset her so much.
But my mother wasn't on the phone.
According to the stories, my mother was driving down the road on her way home from work, and she noticed Sarah's car pulling out of the road that she and Mike lived on. Of course nobody can know exactly what happened, but what we do know is that my mom was driving down a road that had a posted speed limit of 45, a road she took every single day, so she was surely aware of the speed limit, and when she hit Sarah's car head on in the left lane, police say she had to have been doing at least 80 to 85 miles per hour.
My mother and Sarah were both killed in the accident—although it isn't referred to as an accident, of course, it's referred to as a murder. A murder-suicide, to be more precise.
When my mother died, I was given to my grandmother rather than my father since he really didn't want me anyway. He still came to town to visit his friends sometimes, and usually for his Christmas visit he would stop to see me and give me a coloring book or a cheap doll.
Unfortunately for him and for me, my grandmother died of a massive heart attack and my grandfather couldn’t take care of me on his own, so when I was 14 years old, Alex had no choice but to take me in.
I went from living in a modest two bedroom house with my mom, to a four bedroom family house with my grandparents, to a two bedroom trailer that always smelled of beer and cigarettes.
Alex never married, going from girlfriend to girlfriend, never without one, always cheating on the one he had.
I knew from pictures that he had been very handsome in his younger days, because my mom pasted photos in the backs of her journals and I used to love the one photo she had actually displayed of me, her and Alex when I was three-years-old at an ice cream stand when he came home to visit. In the picture he had me in his lap and an arm around my mom, a smile on everybody's face.