Married Since Middle School

Chapter Nine

Dear Extra Mouth to Feed,

Mom here, I just got home from work and thought I'd finish up on the whole "Brandon vs. Aaron" saga.

So long story short, Brandon and I dated for nearly two months (it seemed like a lifetime to my ninth grade eyes) and everything went well until around Christmas. You see, the big Christmas parade was around the corner and at that time, it was an even bigger deal than it is now, mostly because the town was so small and we didn't get much excitement....ever....

Brandon wanted me to attend the parade with him but as it was also my grandmother's birthday, I would be confined the upstairs tea room of a downtown restaurant to celebrate the birthday and watch the parade from the windows.

As fate would have it, Brandon attended the parade, but wasn't alone. He ran into another girl from school named Katie.

I'm sure you can imagine where this is going next, Katie and Brandon ended their night by making out before the parade ended while I was being hugged by my elderly grandmother. Not exactly my idea of a good time.

When Aaron (not your father, a different one) came to tell me the bad news I went through a range of emotions that I guess ultimately shaped my future but not in the cheesy-Hallmark-movie kind of way. 

Most of my friends tried to encourage me to fight Katie in a all out, scratch-her-eyes-out-pull-some-hair street brawl but I'd always promised myself that if this sort of thing happened that I wouldn't take out my anger on 'the other woman.'  You see, the way I pictured it, the only one who actually owed me any loyalty was Brandon as he was my boyfriend. In no way should I have expected loyalty from Katie, although she would be permanently marked as not following the "girl code" appropriately, and that seemed like punishment enough. Actually, I went through a brief period of time when I debated having that brawl with the grandmother that kept me from being with Brandon myself. Eventually I decided that making the news for abusing an elderly woman didn't sound like my kinda 'thing' and I eventually directed my anger to the appropriate person: Brandon himself.

There was no yelling match or fight. I guess by the time we actually broke up I was a little relieved because I'd stopped being madly in love with him and begun to see through the jeep goggles.

Unfortunately, your father had been MIA for a long time at this point and it seemed strange for me to call him back up after rejecting him so recently...(even if that rejection was warranted)

Throughout my freshman and sophomore years, I continued on-and-off dating other guys, but never really went back to speaking to your father until we had a PE class together our junior years. I wasn't angry with him anymore, I'd gotten over that long ago but he'd sort of "fallen off the radar" so to speak.

There's some irony in the fact that a PE class was now bringing us together for a second time. ...maybe this is even more like a love story than I thought...

Anyway, I need to go wash some laundry, I'll let your father fill in his side of this story before we get back to the PE class.