My Mother's Version of Events

My mother's version of events, as written for the Butterfly Glen house psychologist. All grammatical and punctuation choices are her own. I'll embed links to relevant blog posts so you can compare different perspectives. The only emails I've made into blog posts so far were the big ones, and most of my retellings aren't dated at all, so I'll have to go through my old emails and post the excerpts from the events my mother references in her letter (from 2005 to 2008), partly just to confirm the timeline.

She doesn't mention the times she called me or talked to me during the events detailed below, but we were still in contact. A lot of what I know comes not just from my dad but also from her.

She was often high back then and, based on how long she says we've been estranged, she presumably wrote her version within the last year. I don't trust my own memory that much, let alone hers.

Dear Curtis,

    Could you please help me find my long lost daughter Christina Rosetti Martin DOB 7-31-1980. The last time I saw her was on her wedding day 15 yrs. ago!

    When I married my paraplegic husband, I married in sickness & in health and I took care of him for 36 yrs. but as soon as I got sick he filed for divorce. Paul was in the VA Hospital in Cleveland when he filed for divorce. I was totally blindsided. We had talked on the phone and he hadn't said anything. He followed up the file for divorce by cleaning out our bank account right after I paid the entire mos. bills (wrote checks for) All of the cks. bounced & I was faced with pay up or we'll shut off water, lights, gas, phone & cancel insurance on house & Cars. Naturally I panicked, I called the bank & they told me that my husband had closed out our joint account & opened a single account leaving me penniless & deep in debt. He received $8,000.00/mos Disability & $325.00/mos SS. All tax free.

    I called Paul at the hospital in Cleveland & said, "What the hell do you think you're doing? I just wrote checks for all of the months bills & now thanks to you there's no money to cover them!" He hung up on me, so I called him back & he hung up on me again.

    Paul had an extensive music collection in our family room so I called Guitar Center where he bought it all and told them that my husband passed and I wanted to sell his music studio. Notice that I didn't say my husband died, I just said he passed, as far as I was concerned he passed for asshole of the century!

     I kept out his keyboard & bartered it for massages & as mad & desperate as I was I couldn't bring myself to sell his 3 prized guitars. I just sold the amplifiers & the recording equipment. I donated his harmonica collection to the church, and I donated microphones to the church. 

    Guitar Center came to the house & gave me a check for $1,000.00 which was a rip off but I didn't have time to quibble. I took Jeff's wedding ring (had diamonds) & his grandmother's second husband's wedding ring to a pawn shop, and I sold his computer. 

    I still didn't have enough money to cover the checks I had written and I took all of his record collection (jazz & blues) to vintage stock and they gave me $60.00 which I'm sure was a steal for them and a rip off for me but beggars can't be choosers.

    I went to the bank in tears and told them my sob story all they said was I could've done the same thing to him, he just beat me to the punch. You'd better believe if I had known he was going to clean out our account I would have done it.

    I went to my best friends house and used her phone to call Paul so he would answer the phone after I got served with divorce papers at 8pm on Tuesday. I asked him what brought on the need for a divorce and he said it was because all I did was lay in bed all the time, didn't cook & didn't do laundry. I told him I had been severly [sic] depressed for 6 mos and I had only gotten out of bed to go to the bathroom. I was hospitalized 3 times in 6 mos. for dehydration & falls. He hung up on me again but he said he would put some money back in our joint account.

    Many times after that I called to try to talk some sense into him about the divorce and explain bipolar disorder but he refused to listen, he said I was just lazy, no good.

    Eventually the hospital disconnect [sic] his telephone so I couldn't call him anymore. My mother always said, "There's more than one way to skin a cat." So I bought a bus ticket and rode 4 hrs. to Cleveland, to confront the jerk face to face. He was in the ICU so I couldn't see him very long, he looked like Jabba the Hut all propped up 350 lbs. buck naked with a colostomy & foley catheter & IV's & Blood. I slept in the waiting room til it was time to catch the bus for home. As soon as I got on the bus I fell asleep and when I woke up my head was on the shoulder of the man in the seat next to me. I was so embarassed [sic]. We got to talking and he told me he had just been released from prison. I told him my story and when we got back to the bus station in Cincinnati I discovered that I didn't have enough money to take a taxi to my house so he offered to share the cab & he would pay for it. When we got to my house I drove him to the building where he was staying downtown but first we had to go to the Emergency Room to get him some medicine. He asked me to get in touch with some friends of his and tell them that he was back in town.

    I got in touch with his friends and they decided they were my friends too. They moved in with me and proceeded to sponge off of me. I was lonely so I went along with it. My son, Dante came over and he expressed his concern for me taking in a bunch of strangers. Without me knowing he hid my husbands prized guitars in the garage.

    We had a bad storm and the roof was damaged, when I called the insurance company they said they would have to do a walk through inspection of the entire house. The house was a mess so I offered $100.00 to every man, woman or child who would come over & help me clean up & get ready for the inspection, Of course the ex convicts friends were the first in line and the five teenage neighbors of my parents came over too. Dante was suspicious of all the people who helped me.

    After about a month I got tired of supporting 3 freeloaders and I told them it was time for them to go home.

    Dante came over and he asked me what I did with my husbands guitars. I told him they were on there [sic] stands in the family room & then they just disappeared. That's when he told me that he had hid them in the garage. I don't know who took them but it wasn't me.

    Anyway, I'm sure that's why my daughter quit talking to me, because I sold part of my husbands things and she thinks I sold his 3 prized guitars. She hasn't ever let me tell her my side of the story. Being left penniless. I had no choice. She also doesn't understand bipolar disorder.

    If you can help me find her, you can share this letter with her.

    Thank you in advance!

    Annie Rosetti 

 

From checking my old emails, I know that she took the Greyhound bus across the state to visit my dad at the hospital in November 2006, right before Thanksgiving. She says in her letter that it was to confront him about surprising her with divorce papers, but he didn't file for divorce until April 2007, long after she'd invited the ex-convicts to live in their house, and long after two of the convicts had been arrested for stealing Dante's car. Based on old emails, she sold my dad's music equipment at least a week before being served with divorce papers, and she had been threatening to sell all his belongings since at least December 2006. I also knew Dante took the guitars. My dad had been relieved that he'd managed to save something. I don't remember being aware they ever went missing. The only pieces of information that seem new to me are that she pawned his rings and told people he was dead.

I Found Out Who Bought the Hoard House

I found out who bought my childhood home.  The county finally uploaded the sale paperwork to their database, and I looked up the guy who bought it.  He is a registered sex offender (child pornography) who was previously in prison but is currently out on parole.  When you Google his name, the first hits are all about his crimes and subsequent sentencing.  It seems fitting.  He sounds like an appropriate owner for the home that is still the setting for most of my nightmares. 

It would feel weirder if a family with young children lived there.  That wouldn't feel good. 

My Cousin's Half-Brother Was Murdered

My cousin Ellie's parents divorced before I was born.  Her father was my uncle who got his high school sweetheart pregnant and then dropped out of high school at age sixteen to get married and take a steady union job (the only job he ever had, as far as I know) at the local steel mill like his father before him.  He had a cocaine problem as an adult and ultimately died of a heart attack in his fifties, a few years after the steel mill laid him off.  Her mother was my uncle's high school sweetheart who got pregnant with Ellie at age seventeen.  We all went to the same shitty high school in the same small town where we all grew up, albeit decades apart.

Ellie's mother went on to remarry, and that marriage lasted for the rest of her husband's life.  I didn't know this until recently.  She had another child too -- a son -- several years older than me but a decade younger than Ellie.  I hadn't known this either.  I only know this now because Ellie started posting on Facebook last week that he was missing.  She said he was 40 but, due to a car accident and traumatic brain injury, mentally closer to 12.

His body was found in the woods yesterday; he had been murdered.  I don't know the details, but apparently someone does because the police have already arrested two young men for the crime.  Their photos are in the news.  Their faces look like they were made for punching, and I hope they get everything they deserve.  I hope they are scared.  That's the worst thing I can imagine personally -- being scared and cut off from anyone who might be able to save or comfort me.  It's what I imagine most people would experience while being murdered.  I hope they feel it through a lengthy trial and a multiyear prison sentence.  I hope they can't live with themselves but have to for a really long time.  I've looked them up on Facebook, and they're both very much poor, uneducated white trash, so at least they shouldn't be able to buy their way out.  I don't think the currency of being a white male extends far when your victim is an equally white male.

It was when I was thinking all these thoughts that I realized I did know my cousin had a younger brother.  We went to elementary school together.  I met him once, but I had forgotten.  It was the time my mother and I were watching Ellie's daughter, Wendy, for a few days.  I remembered bringing her to school one morning while my mother was dropping me off.  I remembered being approached by an older boy and girl who inexplicably knew baby Wendy.  My mother told me they were Wendy's uncle and cousin.  When I asked if they were my family too, my mother told me no.  I was confused and disappointed.  I always remembered the cousin's name because it was the same as my own, but it occurred to me today that I remembered the uncle's name too.  I think he had been in fifth grade when I was in kindergarten.  If I could go back in time and watch events unfold, these are the sorts of mundane things I'd want to see again.  I'd want to know what else I missed, who else I met without realizing.  It was an awfully small world I used to live in.

His mother doesn't know yet that he's dead.  She's in the ICU recovering from surgery.  I met her once too when I was younger.  She was really nice.  She worked as a stagehand in the costume department for the US tour of Phantom of the Opera, and she showed me around backstage as a favor to my mother, even though we weren't technically family anymore.  I hope she's okay.  Ellie is having a hell of a time.

I don't understand murdering people.  I understand the allure of committing violence -- I've been made powerless too many times not to want to do it to someone in return -- but if your life is going badly and you feel worthless, I expect you either to learn to cope or simply to internalize it as a quiet shame like the rest of us.  You don't get to kill someone just because you feel bad.  And reading these murderers' Facebook pages, one of them appears pathetic and self-pitying to the point that -- had he not been a violent criminal -- I would have simply felt sorry for him.  He battles his weight, he doesn't have many friends, and his own father doesn't seem to care much for him.  The more I learn about someone, the more I tend to relate to them and the less I can be angry, but this piece of garbage person also killed someone who could not defend himself and whose family now has to live with the fallout.  He should kill himself.  If he were to kill himself, my only regret would be that he didn't do it before murdering someone who actually had friends and family who loved him.  (I kind of want to write that to him in a letter.)  The other murderer just sounds like a really stupid sociopath who is bad at not getting caught.  I understand feeling violent and wanting to hurt someone else.  It's what I feel about these murderers, for instance.  It's what I've felt when people have physically hurt or restrained me and made me feel powerless.  It's a horrible feeling.  I get it, and it doesn't ever go away completely.  And I have zero empathy for the people who act out their violence on others.  There are too many other options for that one ever to be acceptable.  Violence is the act of a despicable coward who cannot sit with his own feelings.

My Mother, Savior of Convicts

On the Greyhound bus home from seeing my dad in the hospital, my mother said she met some convicts who were in the process of being transferred between prisons.  One of them stole her cell phone, or she left it behind and he kept it.  When she got home, she said she called her phone and the man who had sat beside her answered.  His name was Jeremy.*  She told him to give back her phone, and Jeremy explained that he couldn't.  She threatened to cancel her phone plan, and he begged her not to.  His life depended on that phone, he said.  Another prisoner would kill him if he didn't have that phone and let him use it.  So my mother continued paying for her cell phone while a small subsection of the local prison population used it.

Some months later, Jeremy got out of prison.  He contacted my mother, who invited him to live in her home.  My dad was still in the hospital, and Dante had found his own apartment, so no one else was around.  She promised Jeremy and another ex-convict, Sam*, several hundred dollars per day to clean the house.  These were the kinds of extravagant offers she often made and never paid. 

She also invited another woman, Beth, to live at the house too, though I don't know how they met.  I only know that Beth slept in a hospital-style bed my mother claims to have spent several thousand dollars on, and bled on it, and had hepatitis.  My mother complained about her hepatitis blood ruining the mattress long after Beth moved out.  I remember talk of a second woman living there briefly, but I remember nothing about her.

As one of their odd jobs around the house, my mother asked Jeremy and Sam to fix Dante's car, which was sitting broken in the driveway.  She gave them the keys, and when she came back outside and discovered both the car and the men were gone, she called the police.  She told the police her son's car had been stolen.  The police found both the men and the car at a local gas station, and both Jeremy and Sam went back to prison.

*This was not his name.