We visited Jack's great grandma while we were in Red Deer.  She's ninety-one now and relatively healthy, except for her arthritis and dementia.  Her long term memory is intact but her short term memory is almost non existent.  Fortunately for me, we knew each other over forty years ago and she remembers me.

I dated her son, I'll call him Stuart, for four years and he's the biological father of my son.  I was young when we met, we both were, only eighteen.  There were immediate red flags but nobody talked about red flags back then and I was just flattered to have a good looking guy take an interest in me, actually, any guy.  I had no self esteem when I was a young woman and he made good use of that.  

Looking back, I can see that Stuart, was/is a sociopath, much like our son.  He was also an alcoholic, a chronic liar, and abusive.  I finally broke up with him when my son was a year old.  Stuart had come over to my place, the top floor of an old house, completely out of his mind.  He had peed on the stove and when I went to heat up my son's bottle of milk, the stench was sickening.  That was the final straw for me. 

As Stuart lay passed out in my bed, I thought of blowing out the pilot light on the furnace in my place and cranking up the gas.  At that point I realized I needed to get out of that relationship and I did, but it took another year to rid myself of Stuart and I even had to leave town for him to leave me alone.  

Stuart is three months younger than me.  He's had a stroke and lives in a continuing care centre in Calgary.  He's been sober for the past eight years, mostly because he had a stroke and couldn't buy his own liquor anymore.  He remains a sociopath.  He tried to sell his mother's home out from under her (his mother already had dementia at this point) which was when his family removed him from his mother's home.

That's part of the story.  The other part of the story is that Stuart had a wonderful, warm, loving, supportive family that I didn't want to break up with.  Obivously I didn't break up with them; we've kept in touch all these years.  

Stuart's mom is indigenous and was born in Hobbema, now called Maskwacis, the Cree name of the place, before the Europeans showed up.  She's still a lovely, funny, kind woman who is stubborn as hell.  Jack was so good.  She must have asked him twenty times, at least, how old was he.  He was kind to her, an old woman whom he didn't remember ever meeting before.  

And Stuart's sister is just lovely as well.  We've kept in touch all these years too.  We talked about my son and Stuart, about how similar they are, about how much they lie and use people.  It felt good to be understood and accepted, more accepted than I've ever felt with my own birth family.  I got and gave a lot of hugs yesterday when we visited.