Now That's What I Call Progress!

Once upon a time, there was a close friend of mine who fathered a child.  Let's call him (the father) Bill.  We will call the mother Cathy.  She ran in our circle until she had the child, and then no one really heard from her after that.  She had broken up with Bill while pregnant, promising to tell him when she went into labor.

Now, Bill was not perhaps the most stable person one would want for a father, and he did have a bit of a temper, but he would never physically harm anyone, especially someone he loved.  Like the daughter Cathy gave birth to.  My special friendship with Bill was well-known, and Cathy had never really liked me (people scared to present their honest self seldom do), so it came as no surprise when I heard about the birth through the grapevine a few days after the fact.

And maybe it surprised me that I found out before Bill had, and maybe it didn't surprise me.  Towards the end of the pregnancy, Cathy had made no secret about wanting to keep Bill out of their daughter's life.  This pissed off every child's advocate in the 402 area code.  Not to mention all the baby-mamas out there who were trying to get something from their deadbeat baby daddys.  Yeah, Bill may not have been the greatest dad, but he was far better than no father, which is what Cathy seemed to want.  He just wanted a chance to have  a relationship with his daughter, and she milked Nebraska's tradition of siding with the mother in custody cases.  Maybe she got more money from the state than she would have from Bill's meager wages, and that's why.  But that's a piss-poor reason to deny someone their parental rights.

I remember getting my, er, nose chewed when Bill found out I had known that his daughter was born, knew that he hadn't been told, and didn't tell him myself.  It was one of the many things that inspired my theme for 2011.  To see him lash out like that, especially at me, showed me just how much pain he really was in, and I wanted to see Cathy set on fire, doused in water, and then thrown into a lake covered in a thin sheet of ice. 

"With one thing and another, three years passed," and my animosity diminished.

The other day, RevHoney announced some new locations to buy their products.  I took the opportunty to question them about the availability of their energy drinks, since  the store locator on their website  has them in places where they are not.  They told me of a few, and one of them happens to be in the last known (to me) neighborhood of Cathy.  I drove there tonight, looking for them.

Maybe it was the joy of finding them, maybe it was the fact that she was deliberately trying to avoid my stare as I saw her with some lady at the ATM while I was at the register, maybe it's all the case studies on forgiveness that have been creeping their way into my thoughts lately, but I didn't want to punch her in the face.

Had it not been so late in the evening when I saw her, I would have been sad to see the child not with her.  None of our friends have seen her since she got out of the hospital.