27 years

First, my brother and I are not writers. My grammar and punctuation are horrible. If you're looking for mistakes, I promise you will find them. We just want to tell our story, so that the truth is exposed.

Second, while very unflattering to the people involved, everything we have to say is truth. In this blog we will try and make sure that anything mentioned can be backed up by documentation or first hand knowledge. OK, maybe an opinion or two. So to say it's defamation or slander would be incorrect according to all the research I have done prior to publishing. I know what we have to say is going to anger people, but we've been angry too. Angry that the truth has been hidden and swept aside.

So now that we've addressed that, back to the beginning. We were young when our parents divorced. Dad struggled a lot with being alone. He dropped a lot of weight, and started going to bars more frequently than I had known him to. Every other weekend when Justin and I would stay with him, it was rough. There was always bologna in the fridge, sometimes there was bread, and sometimes there wasn't. Sometimes there was chips and sometimes there wasn't. But bologna, always. We spent a lot of time at my grandmas house where she would cook for us and man, she could bake. We would shove our faces full of all the amazing cookies, brownies and individual desserts she would have prepared for our arrival.

I'm not sure exactly when or how, but about 2 years later, my dad met a woman. My mom and stepdad had moved us to Plano, Texas, and during one of our visits, Justin and I flew back to see dad and there she was. Her name was Rhoda. We didn't know anything about her, didn't even know he was seeing someone. Again, we were kids so he probably didn't think much about letting us know. But, not only was he seeing her, they were pretty much living together.

On February 15, 1991 my dad and Rhoda were married at the JP. Justin and I were excited to have a new step mom and the best part was that my dad seemed to be doing better. We had moved back to our town of Levelland, Texas and visited him on our scheduled weekends. We still spent a lot of time at my grandma's house. She was living with a man who played guitar in a band and we went with them a lot of times to his performance venue where they could always drink and dance. At our age, and understanding, it seemed like fun for the most part.

Life for my dad seemed to balance out. He was happier. He took a job at a local university and she worked at a dermatology clinic. While it definitely wasn't perfect or even close to it, it felt almost normal most of the time.

We never really grew up with any money. Both sides of our family come from old fashioned farmers. We always had enough money for the essentials but not much for the luxuries that we all dreamed about, and in our community, that's normal. We are average working folk. So when dad and Rhoda would tell us they didn't have the money for this or that, we understood and never questioned it.

Years went on, and we grew up, and family trusted us more with their conversations. Justin and I learned quickly and that it wasn't a secret in our extended family that Rhoda "had issues with money." That's all we were really told until we were near adults. Little did we know "issues with money" was an understatement.

What we later learned was that Rhoda was on probation for theft. In 1985 she was convicted by Grand Jury on 7 counts. I'm not sure the exact total (we have the records somewhere and they are public record), but the restitution was close to $193,000.00. According to dad and what she told him, was that her ex-husband made her steal the money and she did because he was physically abusive to her and had even broke her jaw before (she told me about her broken jaw several times). So we felt bad for her and never really considered this to be about her.

We were wrong.