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Hi! My name is Jim. I am seventeen years old and I will tell you the story about my mother and how she nearly died on a sunny spring day because of my father. Oh yes, strange things do happen.
On that day, my mother received a message on Facebook about how her husband had checked into a motel room near the highway. And it seemed that he wasn't alone there. So she left her house and walked through town to get to the motel.
It was hard for my mother to walk past our neighbors’ houses as they watched her from the windows. Somebody even left their house to take a closer look. And it's no wonder... my mother had literally led an almost hermetically-sealed existence, locked away from the world for almost three years.
For her, each step was almost excruciating, and it didn't help that they were all looking at her with judgement and disgust. Maybe it wasn't true, but this was probably the reason why her heart was beating faster at that moment which eventually resulted in her heart attack near the motel.
Oh, one last thing I haven't shared: my mother weighed more than five hundred pounds.
A long time ago our family life was perfectly normal. I wouldn't necessarily say that we were particularly happy, but everything was normal. My mother, father, and my three younger brothers and sisters lived together in a small house on the outskirts of a little Texas town.
The only person who earned money in our family was our father. My mother was a housewife and never worked, and honestly we could hardly make ends meet with our father’s salary. He didn't have a profession that was in high-demand and the unemployment rate in our town was high… so our family was pretty poor. But still I don't remember that I was really in need of anything in my childhood."
It wasn't until the age of twelve that I understood what real poverty meant. My youngest brother was less than six months old when our father dumped our family.
I don’t remember exactly how it happened. You know, sometimes our brains just black out some of the awful episodes in our minds. I think that's what happened in this case.
All I remember now is that it was late at night when my father packed his things and left in his old car, leaving the garage open. And in the morning mother found a note there. It said that he couldn't live with us anymore. That this life was eating him up and he could not stand this endless family routine that didn't bring him any happiness. That was why he was leaving us in order to move to South America, while it was not too late, at least for him.
Father didn't leave us any contact information, so we never found out if it was true or not. He didn't even tell us the name of the country he was going to.
My mother was broken, and the news had nearly killed her. For two reasons: first, after her husband just up and left, she was all alone, with four kids, with no work, with no money, and even without a car.
Second, everyone in our town immediately found out about my father’s disappearance in detail, including the contents of the note he left. Well, you have to understand, when people know each other for so many years, it's hard to keep this news a secret – news would spread immediately, even when our parents were little. And now that every house has the internet, it's even worse!
My mother was ashamed to have been dumped and she felt really humiliated.
Well, from that day on I suddenly had to grow up – I was the oldest man in the family. Now I had to take responsibility. Of course I couldn't take on a lot at twelve years old, so for some time our family barely existed on government assistance, but as soon as I could start working officially, I got a job at the nearest car wash, where I've worked until now.
Work was not too hard and the owner of the car wash was nice to me, but I didn't have any free time. I was ALWAYS busy - at school, at work, or at home where I had to share all the house work with my sister. Сleaning, cooking, and looking after the younger ones…
You might ask: why I had to share all this with my sister? The thing is that my mom just completely stopped being herself and wasn't able to take care of us. For several years after my father left us, my mom tried to hang in there but she couldn't fight her depression any longer.
She became very sad. She even had problems going out to eat because she thought that everyone in town would look at her – some with pity, some with mockery. Both were unbearable for her.
So she spent most of her life on the sofa: watching TV or surfing the internet with our old, barely working laptop.
And also my mother ate very VERY much...
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#actuallyhappened
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