Moving on

I can't say this was a total surprise- it wasn't. Cat had been migrating out of the house for weeks. Any time she wasn't needed to help out with the kids she'd have herself stuck over at her new boyfriends house, even when he wasn't home. When she began calling his house "home" a few weeks back I shuddered. Not again. But yes, here we go AGAIN.

Finally, she left the alcoholic and went to school and gotten her dental assisting degree. During this time she met the new man...a guy 14 years her senior and a widower. Did she meet him at school? Nope. A New Age book store. While he may be a perfectly nice, upstanding man. He has a job and owns a home and doesn't have a criminal record or alcohol dependence- as far as I know. I'm not happy the behavior she began exhibiting once she started seeing this guy. She doesn't look for a job in her dental assisting area- claiming that with the recession there aren't any jobs out there. And the couple interview's she's been on she's managed to blow. Including one at our dad's dentist- which really wasn't a good idea- they told him she went in there and pointed out in detail every one of her tattoos. Which, you are required to cover while working in dental offices, by the way. That should be the hint that you shouldn't talk about them there. It left their relationship strained for a while. But I digress. The new guy's hours of employment are between 1-10pm. So she has been staying up all night w/ him then sleeping half the day when she should be job hunting. She started dropping WC off at school and going straight to his house and going back to bed for most of the day and becoming less and less reliable to help me with the kids. Because she was supposed to be at my house and not a half an hour away. There were times I needed her but she mysteriously wouldn't answer her text messages or phone for hours on end. So of course she began to go through more gas and asking me for gas money. Now I have taken her in (more than once), fed her, clothed her and not charged her a dime of rent in exchange for her help. But I started giving her a few dollars here and there to help with the gas even though it was her choice to do all the driving back & forth. And Jay's twelve hour days and very little flexibility in his work leaves him unable to do more than drop CJ off at daycare 3 days a week. So I depended on her to help with drop off and pick up from school and karate.

Last week she came in one night and said she had to talk to me. Then told me that her "work" (retail shop) needed her for more hours, so she'd no longer be able to come and help out with the boys. Because her "home" is closer to work so she would just stay there all the time now. I just nodded and said Okay. What I really wanted to do was raise my hand and scream out "I call BULLS***!"

She took WC to school the next morning and I haven't seen her since.

Now we're looking at probably putting CJ in the daycare all 5 days (instead of 2 w/ mom) because of the time WC needs to be dropped off at school, I can't leave earlier and taking WC to school then CJ to moms leaves me 10 min late for work- at best. Luckily it isn't a huge deal with the company right now. But I don't want it to become one either. And I still haven't worked out on how to get WC to karate two days a week.

I knew she wasn't there forever. She'd leave at some point. But the senario in my head was that she'd had her job that she went to school for. That she'd saved up some money and was moving into her very own place. However, she is an adult. She has to make the decisions about her life for herself. And regardless of whether or not I agree...It isn't up to me.

A few days after she left she posted to her social networking page that she was so very blissfully happy. And I wanted to punch her. Is that wrong? Probably. Hey, I'm not perfect.