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Saturday, May 10, 2008

Zoe

She loves it here. She asks each weekend to come and stay. She begs and pleads...

"Please let me go stay at Aunt JJ's house."

How can I refuse.

My daughter acts a fool and each time at bedtime they never go down. Her asthma is bad and without question it will flare each night and each night she comes down.

"Aunt JJ, I'm wheezing."

I pull down Logan's breathing treatments and give her one. Within minutes she is fine and returns to bed with Arwen. Each time I check on her through out the night.

Tonight when this happened it was late, 11:00pm. The girls were agging one another on. Arwen bounding from couch cushions. Zoe running behind.

"How sick can you be?" I ask. "When you are running around so fast?"

I do the treatment and send Arwen back to bed. As Zoe has the treatment I ask...

"Don't you have a bedtime?"

"What do you mean?" she asks.

"A time you go to bed. Don't you have a time to go to bed by?"

"No." She answers. She quickly jumps to explain, to defend. "My Mommy shoots pool so sometimes I have to wait in the car until she is done."

I know from experience that APA pool means long nights, waiting to shoot, never knowing how long it can last. It's one of the reasons we gave it up ourselves.

"You have to wait?" I question. "What do you mean?"

"Well, I wait in the car with Craig. Until they are done."

"Don't you ever get out?"

"Sometimes." She answers. "If they allow kids. Or if we need to we walk around when Justice is crying."

"So otherwise you wait in the car?" I ask. My heart wrenches.

"Yeah." She tells me.

I finish up and walk her back to bed. She climbs in and I kiss her goodnight. I feel sick to my stomach but she doesn't know this.

I have to have a serious talk with my Sister. Consequences be damned.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow. That's just about all I can say. When people leave their children alone anywhere it makes my stomach turn. There is a reason these things are illigal. There are reasons that social services will take your children away if you get caught doing this. It's dangerous and careless. I'm sorry, but this makes my blood boil. You and your sister are obviously very different!

Tania said...

omg...I just about cried when I read that. It breaks my heart!

Jaime said...

Hey Lee and Tania ~

I'm still very torn on how to proceed here. First, I'm very emotional about this and it's not smart to enter into a conversation as such. Second, I need to prepare for the potential fall out from it.

I'm obviously very angry about this. No child deserves to be treated so shabby. Please understand one thing, she is NEVER alone in the car. Her step-father (pretty much her father) is always with her. But that isn't the issue really.

My Sister constantly travels, it's nothing for her to arrive home at 11pm with kids in tow on a school night.

Bah you know what, I'm blogging an entry about this! LOL