Pure Joy

Being a Mom for me is pure joy. It was something that I never sought. In fact I didn't think I would ever have children. I had some physical issues and I just accepted it. But when Matt was born, our lives changed for the better.

I don't think I know of two people that were happier. We had gone through so much in the past six years and to have it all turn out with this smiling beautiful baby was surreal. We had a real life miracle baby and God answered Bob's prayers.

We were lucky. Neither of us had to go to work and we spent all our time being a family and being together. We now had two children. We didn't get to see his daughter much because five months before our son was born, her Mom gave birth to her new son.

It must have been hard for his daughter. No child likes to pack a suitcase for the weekend trips and we understood that she was being asked to leave her "Life" during the week and come to her "other" house to see us and her brother every weekend. We just wanted her to be a part of our lives and to get to know her new brother.

When Matt was four months old we all went to Hawaii for a family vacation. It had been years since Bob had been able to do anything special with his daughter. It was important to him that he make the years drinking up to her. He wanted more than anything to make her happy, to try and give her whatever her heart desired. He wanted her to know that she was still the love of his life, nothing was going to change that, certainly not a new baby.

We had a wonderful trip. We spent the day's at the beach and at night we tried to just spend our nights with Marisa alone. We left Matt at the Hotel with a sitter. We were bonding the family together. Bob always felt that he had a lot of making up to do to her. He tried his best and to the best of his ability, he never strayed from that goal. Make his daughter happy, make all the things he was not proud of go away. It was important to both of us to make sure that she did not feel that she was not taking a back seat to her two new brothers. Actually her dad and I now went out of our way to make sure she knew how special she was to us. We began spoiling her and giving her anything she wanted.

At the time it really seemed like we were doing the right thing. Many years later, I'm not so sure. It seems we failed in our parenting abilities. We failed to give her the proper boundaries. It would come back to haunt us both later on. We had the best intention with her for her entire life. We failed to do a good job.

Sometimes being a parent means having to risk your kids be mad at you when they don't get what they want. Bob was not willing to take that risk. He simply couldn't do it. Even when he wanted to make her come to see us on the weekends because he missed her, he didn't force it.
The years went by and she came over less and less. Bob suffered in silence at first and later became pretty verbal about his disappointment. But never to her or her Mom. He didn't risk the disapproval. The years of drinking made him feel like he didn't have the right to demand anything of her.
I wish he had found the courage to say something. In the end his daughter was probably the thing we fought about the most.

If he expressed his anger and I agreed, he turned it on me. I learned to keep my mouth shut for many years, but even I couldn't do that forever.

We simply put all our time and effort into our son. He was the love of both of our lives. The three Musketeers is how we referred to our self as.

When Matt was two we moved out to Malibu. The drive to Beverly Hills to pick up his daughter became a nightmare. Bob had a terrible back problem and His back was always bothering him after a two hour drive there and back and the fact that his daughter would barely speak to him all the way home only made it worse.
There was a subtle storm brewing on the inside of both of them and all the money in the world wasn't going to stop what would happen. The more they tried to be close the further apart they were becoming and the more tension they would bring into the house.
She was living two completely different lives. Her life with her Mom was the one she embraced. After all her house, her room, her school, friends, family etc. were all in Beverly Hills. Disrupting her routine to come to our less than glamorous life in Malibu wasn't her thing. We had an angry child in our mists, silent, but angry.