fuck.

I'm going to update on the last six months.

This past summer, I got a letter saying there was a warrant out for my arrest. Yup. Thinking it must be some mistake or misunderstanding, I headed to the courthouse, where I discovered it was indeed not a mistake. But let me give you some background info.

When I was 18 my mom decided it was time for me to buy a car. I should've known she had an ulterior motive, as helping me is not something Joanna is inclined to do. First, she insisted we buy the car out past Towson, MD. About two hours away from where I lived, because she thought the banks would give us a better interest rate. At the time I was working as a lifeguard, making around $300 every two weeks. Knowing this would not suffice when buying a car, she forged a bunch of documents, and said I worked for one of her fake companies. She told me she would pay for the car payment each month ($331) if I paid for the insurance ($125). I have no idea why I believed her. This turned into her taking each of my checks that summer, which I guess was fine. I did, after all, have a new car. Except, she started taking my car whenever she wanted, and for days, and weeks at a time. So naturally, I stopped giving her each paycheck. She showed up one day and demanded my check. I gave it to her on one condition: that she pay $125 toward the insurance so it wouldn't get cancelled. Of course, she didn't. My insurance was cancelled. Then, she just took the car altogether. I tried to report it stolen, but the cops, as usual, were useless. They told me I couldn't report it as stolen because it was a family member. That I could only report it as unauthorized use. To do this I'd have to go to the station (with what car?) and pay a fee (with what money?). And that they couldn't do anything about it anyway. Cops in Montgomery County have very rarely helped me throughout my life. So, the bitch stole my car.

She drove around in it for at least a year. Never paying insurance and never paying a car payment. Do you know what the MVA does if you don't insure your car and don't turn in the tags? They charge you $7 a day. Thus, I now owe them thousands of dollars, ensuring I will never be able to have a car in my name. Anyway, the car was supposed to get repossessed. She was living somewhere in Redneck Town at this point and I wasn't sure of her address. I was constantly harassed by the repossession agencies. I'd explain the situation to them and they didn't believe me. What kind of mother would steal their daughter's car? Once I was able to provide her address, she hid the car at her friend Jimmy's house. All I knew about Jimmy was that he was a nice redneck my mom probably slept with for favors, and his last name. My boyfriend at the time me figure out his address so we could stop being harassed by the repo agencies. He found a website that would provide us his address if we payed some amount of money that I can't remember. So we did. And the car was recovered.

Now, I'm at the courthouse, and they tell me that the car company has sued me for the money for the car and the money it took to recover the car. That they'd sent me court dates and given me fair warning. I told the cops that I never got anything in the mail. Turns out they not only sent it to my mom's address, but they physically served her the papers. She just never told me about it. So here I am, about to be arrested and put in a cell because the bitch never even told me. Thankfully, the cop was nice and told me to call the car company's lawyer and work it out. And I did, for a little anyway. I started paying them off monthly. Until it became too much and I got a couple months behind. Then, this past November I got a letter saying they will start garnishing my wages. They didn't say how much and they didn't say when. Today, December 23rd, I found out. They're taking around $240 from each paycheck. Which is a lot when you don't make that much in the first place, are 23 and living on your own.

BUT, I am trying my hardest not to let it ruin my Christmas spirit. Plus, I'm still really fucking lucky. I know if I really need help there is always my dad, there is my amazing boyfriend and there is my ex boyfriend turned best friend. It could be a lot worse.

But still, what a twat.

The other significant event that happened is that she signed her portion of the house over to me. Not before sufficiently destroying the property. All the "fixing up" she did, and hired other drug addicts to do just demolished the house. She tore down the downstairs kitchen and hired her pill-head friend to put up a wall in the center of it, "a seventh" bedroom. There is still no ceiling. All of the doors are broken. There is paint on the wood floors. The railings on the deck are falling off. She got high and applied so much paint to the walls that they are now lumpy. Trash everywhere. Syringes littered throughout the house. Oh, and she hasn't paid the mortgage in four years. We owe them $75,000. But, I applied for a home loan modification yesterday, so hopefully that works out. All I want to do is get the house in livable condition and rent it out.

She currently believes that the mortgages company actually owes her $400,000. How, you ask, when the house isn't even worth that much? Yeah, I don't know either. But this is how the minds of drug addicts work. I only even began talking to her again so she'd sign the house over to me. She kept talking about how thankful I should be that she's giving me a house I can rent out for $6,000 a month (what??) and not have to pay a mortgage on. Yes, she really believes the mortgage does not need to be paid. It's shit like this that makes me hate drug addicts, the way they think. They're so ridiculous.

So, that's that. It's two days before Christmas and I still could afford presents this year. So it's not so bad. I'm going to Panama next month with Scott, so it's really not bad at all. Sure, I'll be making less than $1400 a month and I'm not really sure how that will work out. At least I'm not homeless. Anymore.

Spiteful

The latest info I have received about Joanna is that she is homeless. I honestly could not care less. She still has the house, but since she is too lazy and drug ridden to actually get a job, there is no heat/water/etc. I might be inclined to actually feel sorry for her, if she hadn't constantly started kicking me out when I was about 14-years-old.

At 14 I had entered high school, had my first boyfriend and was gaining some independence. I'm not going to lie, I loved getting kicked out because it meant I didn't have to be near her. The downside to this is that she would kick me out, and within hours call the cops and report me as a suicidal runaway. It was never mentioned that she would hit me and tell me to get the fuck out, but that I left and was threatening my life, which was a complete lie. This made it very awkward for me, and for my friends when cops would show up looking for a suicide case. She loved to tell people I was suicidal, I have no idea why. For attention, I guess. I was actually never suicidal, homicidal maybe.

When I was 19 and living in the house with two crackheads (I liked them, don't get me wrong, but they literally smoked crack) she demanded I pay her rent. I refused, because they didn't have to pay rent. I really thought it was unfair they received free room and board while I had to pay. Anyway, she came to the house one day, high off her face. Of course, she started a fight. She would regularly take all of her pills, not remember and accuse my brother or myself of stealing from her. She would also take all of her pills, be aware that she took all of them, get desperate and call the cops to report a theft, so she could re-up her prescription. That day was the latter. I encouraged her to call the cops so they could see what a crazy drug addict she was. I think the cops have been called to 13304 Dauphine St. at least one hundred times. I am not joking. The cop showed up and she screamed, "My son stole all of my medicine!" Don't you love how drug addicts refer to Oxycontin as their "medicine"? I explained to the cop that she regularly did this so she could refill her prescription early. "That's a fucking lie, you stole my medicine you dumb bitch! She stole my medicine!" The cop noticed the inaccuracy in her story, "I thought your son took your  pills?" I chimed in the she was the one who took all her pills. "Ma'am, you clearly need help." This is when she decided she wanted me out of the house for good. "Fine, but this is my house, I want her the fuck out!" The cop asked me to leave, just to "make the situation easier." I didn't want to stay there anyway, even though I didn't really have a place to go and it was February. I had just turned 20 actually. I gathered up as many clothes as I could in a trash bag and took a cab to my grandmother's apartment. It was an efficiency. When I went back to gather the rest of my clothes, Joanna had either thrown or given them away to one of her drug addict friends. My room was completely empty. I barely had anything. I spent the better part of six months between friends' and my grandmother's couch.

When the landlord caught on that my brother and I were pretty much living there, she said we had to get out. She was doing an inspection in a week and all of our things had to be gone. I had nowhere to take them, so I asked my mom if I could keep them in the hotel room she was staying in, for two days. It was a really nice hotel, she didn't really leave the room and she was so high she could barely talk. I figured my things would be safe for a couple days while I figured out what to do with them. When I went to pick my clothes up, they were gone. She couldn't even remember that I had brought them. I literally only had what I was wearing and a few random (and shitty) items I'd left at my grandmothers. Not only had Joanna rendered me homeless, but now I didn't even have clothes. The clothes I worked for. Clothes I had spent my money on, because she refused to stop buying me clothes (even winter clothes) when I turned 11.

My little brother, who I dislike immensely has been up in arms about her situation. I guess I'd be concerned too if she hadn't treated me so poorly my entire life. Joseph never really received her anger. Maybe because he was the baby and got everything he ever wanted. Or maybe because they're the most alike. I couldn't care less about her situation. She threw me out on the street when I was extremely young, and never cared about my well being. I didn't have anything. She is a grown woman, she's had cars and houses, and she lost it all because of her poor choices.

The most spiteful part about this is, she is now going to lose the house. She has no money, she can't maintain it. I told my little brother that the only way to save the house is by signing it over to me. Which is true. Despite the fact that she'll lose the house either way, she won't do it. She said that I had the chance to buy it (when I was 19, with no job, and for double what it's worth) and I lost it.

I feel good that I'm entering a place in my life where I no longer feel this bitter, intense anger toward my mother. Now I sort of just don't give a shit. It happened. Sometimes I still get really angry, like when I get bills for $2,000 for expired accounts that I've never opened. Which brings me to the following story: my mother committed identity theft in my name.

She did the same thing to my older brother. When I turned 18, she began taking out credit cards in my name and opening bank accounts. She rarely got bank accounts in her own name. First because she's sketchy, and second I think she probably owes every bank in the entire world some money. She would sweetly say that I had just turned 18 and she was trying to build credit for her daughter (she has told me this, and still to this day maintains she was just trying to build my credit). She'd pay the minimum balance on the credit cards until the minimum balance became too much, and then she'd just stop paying. She didn't have insurance, and oxycontin is severely expensive without it, she'd use credit cards in my name to pay for her drugs. She completely lived off of them, and would often go on spa weekends when she had absolutely no money. She always wanted to be rich, and would've been if she would've just been smarter about all the money she stole from my dad.

One day she showed up at the house my brother and I were living in (it was technically her house. 50% belonged to my dad and 50% to my grandmother. My grandmother was terrified of her and my mom forced her to sign over her 50%. My dad put his 50% in a trust for my brothers in I, but stupidly had my mom draw up the papers. So while the trust is in our names, she is the trustee and has all control) with a stack of papers to discuss my buying the house for around $350,000 (it was worth nowhere near this much, in her attempts to "fix it up" on her own, she made it look like a tacky piece of shit). I told her there was absolutely no way I was buying the house, I was 19 and had no money and no job. She told me I had to buy it, that we'd been discussing that I would buy the house for a year (couldn't tell if she was just being nuts or if this was one of her drug delusions). This is when she told me that she had built my credit up to the minimum credit score allowed for me to buy a house. She'd been trying to sell it for years; I told her it was pretty pathetic that she'd try to force her daughter into buying a house (that is half mine!) for an escalated value just so that she could get some money.

Now I'm 22. I would love to buy a house one day soon, but despite my attempts, creditors make it unbelievably easy to commit identity theft, and even after you've proved it, all that matters to them is money. I had an investigator talk to me once after I filed the police report. She told me that we'd repair my credit and my mom would get what she had coming to her. I never spoke to that woman again. Not because I didn't try. I've disputed all the items on my credit report that aren't mine, which is everything because I've never applied for a credit card or had anything like a cell phone in my own name. At this rate, and with the incompetent cops of Montgomery County who only care about busting low profile weed dealers trying to get by and high school parties, and in a capitalistic society that only values money, I'll probably never be able to buy my own home. Or car. Or anything. I'm still trying though.

When I was fifteen I experienced my first bout of heartbreak. His name was Pat (probably the grossest name for a male ever). He was three years older and in a band. Naturally, I thought we were going to be together forever. In hind sight he was a douche bag, which I can appreciate now because I learned from it. We started dating when I was fourteen, and it last for about a year, which in teenage girl terms is roughly four years. For the latter half of our relationship he treated me pretty poorly, and ended up leaving me for a girl his own age when he was at beach week. The day a friend told me he was hanging out with her at beach week, the same day he broke up with me, I was crushed. It felt awful and I was convinced I wasn't going to find anyone else. I was retarded. But instead of letting me deal with it, my mother barged into my room and demanded to know every detail of what happened even though I didn't want to talk about it. She didn't want to know the details because she was concerned, she wanted to know because she was a nosy bitch that loved to gossip.

In the months following the breakup I was pretty sad, normal stuff. I didn't eat as much. I have been blessed with a speedy metabolism, so I used to eat Mcdonald's and Taco Bell constantly, and just didn't anymore. My mother took this opportunity to decide I was anorexic. One morning when I was making cereal my mom came in and started freaking out about how I wasn't eating (ironic huh?). She was screaming and cursing at me at the top of her lungs, as usual. She knocked my full bowl of cereal out of my hands and onto the floor, where the glass bowl shattered. She continued to scream at me and push me in the mess. I didn't have shoes on.

She was always obsessed with being skinny and anorexic. She would boast about having an eating disorder and I wanted to tell her that eating a ton of pills and forgetting to eat actual food does not an eating disorder make. When I was twelve she started making me go to the gym everyday, because even though I wans't fat, I "have the potential to be." She got me a personal trainer, but after a while she would just drop me off there, sometimes not picking me up until they closed, at 10. But mostly making me take cabs home, who were unrealiable, especially since I didn't have a cell phone and constantly had to borrow the gym's phone. It was horribly embarrassing. Eventually I got a job at the gym. The woman I worked with at the front desk, Rita, was in her forties, one of the worst gossips I've ever met and devoutly religious. She'd read the bible and go to church all the time, despite treating me like shit and telling me I wasn't allowed to sign up new members (I later found out this was because we made commission off of them). Gyms are already gossipy places. So when I walked in one day and everyone was staring at me out of the corner of their eyes and then whispering to their chubby companions on the stair master, I knew something was up.

I was sitting at the desk reading when Rita came up and in a sickeningly sweet voice slid a power bar over to me "Here, I bought this for you." I was furious. I knew my mother, who gossiped with her regularly, and talked shit about her regularly had called to spread the rumor. When I got home I demanded to know who she told, "God, you're such a drama queen, I only told Rita." Though she knew perfectly well that calling Rita and randomly telling her this lie would ensure that everyone I worked with would think I was anorexic. It still just seems to me that her goal was to make every facet of my life as miserable as she could.

sporty spice

One of the sports I was forced to participate in was swimming. I hated it. I loved to swim, don't get me wrong, and I adore being in water, but I hated doing it competitively. At some point when I was pretty young, it was discovered that the one stroke I was good at was breast stroke. I pretty much sucked at everything else in comparison. Joanna latched on to this. After this discovery, I was swimming year round, sometimes twice a day, before and after school. I did both summer and winter swim. After school I'd go to practice for baseball, or soccer and then on to swimming. I never had any time for homework, or to eat. Not that my mom ever helped with homework or bought groceries. The worst part of it was that my mom was a lazy piece of shit. By this I mean I would finish with swim practice in the evening and literally wait anywhere from one to three hours for her to show up to pick me up. She didn't have anything more important to do, she was just lazy about picking me up. And it was winter. In Maryland! I'd wait for her for so long inside the pool, that eventually it would close and they'd have to ask me to step outside. I knew they felt bad asking, and it was embarrassing being the only kid on the team with a neglectful parent. So I would wait outside in the freezing cold, a little kid, with long wet hair and clothes from swim practice. And then came high school.

I went to a private Catholic high school in DC with a diligent ROTC program. My mother made me join the ROTC program because it apparently would look good on a resume (not if you constantly failed the class and they said to leave the program or be kicked out) and because if there was ever a war and a draft was enacted I'd be a high ranking official. Seriously. Another one of her requirements that was that I joined the swim team, which I expected. St. John's didn't have a pool on campus, so we'd swim at the Montgomery College campus in Takoma Park. Takoma Park is an old, beautiful hippie type neighborhood with lots of big Victorian houses. Like so many neighborhoods in the greater DC area, you'd walk a block and be in the shitty part of Takoma Park, which included lots of crime and drug deals. So while the pool wasn't in a bad area, the walk to the metro was. Again, while all my friends got picked up from practice in the middle of winter, my mom, who had nothing else to do, told me to walk. I had no idea how to get to the metro, it was always dark and I'd often get lost. So I'd wander around Takoma Park (the bad part) in my flimsy Catholic school girl uniform (by this point I'd dropped ROTC and wore the regular super short plaid skirt and white polo), wet from practice searching for the metro. I was old enough to start taking my driving classes, but Joanna refused. One particularly cold night I remember, it took me about 3 hours to get home. I walked in the door, freezing cold, drained, tired and overall just emotionally exhausted. I had so much hate for my mother, I knew she was a piece of shit, and I had no way out. I always felt trapped. She was sitting on the couch reading or watching tv or something.
"I need to take that driving class. Seriously. It took me three hours to get home and I'm fucking freezing." I said this calmly. I only ever started to yell after she did, which was basically all of the time.
"I don't think you're mentally stable enough to have a car." When I was a child, hell, even until I was a teenager, I was never allowed to have a bike, literally because my mom would tell me it was a mode of transportation. And I had this dug addled crazy person telling me I was too unstable to drive a car? This makes me mad even writing it.
"What the fuck are you talking about? I have to wander around the bad part of Takoma and in the middle of winter soaking wet. I'll pay for the classes."

I don't remember the dialogue from there so I won't try to reenact it. I do remember that it turned into a screaming match, she could give me no valid explanation for not letting me go to driving school, she hit me, and I ended up outside on our deck hysterically crying. I called my friend Raph to pick me up. She took me to her house, fed me vegan desserts and ran me a bath. She dropped me off back at my house later that night, where I passed out in bed, thinking of how much I hated this aspect of my life, and fantasizing about its nonexistence.

baksetball

When Joanna had kids and we were old enough to walk and understand basic English, she basically made us her slaves. First it was with my older brother until he got too pissed off and hateful and then just refused, then it was me until I got too pissed off and hateful, and lastly my youngest brother (though it was constantly my grandmother, her own mother, who did every little thing for her because she was terrified of her own daughter, until she moved out). If she was sitting on the couch and her purse was literally five feet away from her, she would call on me, often while I was outside, or a completely different part of the house to hand her her purse, or get her a Xanax, or whatever she wanted. It was absolutely ridiculous, and it was constant. This happened non stop all day, and she'd be enraged if I didn't respond quickly enough.

When I was in middle school, I want to say sixth grade, she was driving me so basketball practice. She enrolled me in any and every sport, no matter how much I hated it or sucked at it (and I sucked at most) because she was afraid I would get fat. Also, she had decided this was the only way I could make something of myself and my profession would be that of a famous athlete. When I would miss a practice or do poorly in a game, as soon as we'd get in the car she would lose her mind about how I was throwing my life away...this started in about fourth grade.

On the way to basketball practice she was fumbling around in the center compartment of the car and then stated,
"There's no chapstick in here." I nodded my head in acknowledgement. I knew she was telling me to find her the chapstick but it infuriated me that she didn't even have the decency to ask. Again she said it,
"Did you hear me? There's no chapstick in here." Each syllable was pronounced harshly, she was pissed I didn't immediately start searching for some chapstick.
"Ok." I said quietly and calmly.
Then the backside of her closed fist connected with my face. She was a fan of the "backhand." She was always threatening them, but she refused to acknowledge that a closed backhand was a punch. She almost ran the car off the road, one hand on the wheel and the other hitting me as I tried to protect my face and my head, my head tucked to my knees while I began hysterically crying. I always wanted to be one of those strong silent types that could get through it all without crying, but I never was.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?!" She screamed, "How could you do this to me?"
Naturally, I had no idea what the fuck that crazy bitch was talking about. I would've tried to respond, to tell her that the only thing I did was not grab the chapstick, but it would've just made her more angry. And now looking back, I don't think it was about the chapstick, I think she knew that the act of not finding her fucking chapstick was my act of rebellion. Most kids pierce something or sneak out in the middle of the night.

She stopped hitting me and continued driving to my school, my little brother was there anyway and we had to pick him up. She screamed at me the whole way, calling me a fucking bitch and the like, though she did say I wasn't going to basketball practice, so I was thankful for that. When we got to my school she told me to wait in the car while she picked up my little brother.
"Don't even think about running away. Who do you think will want you? You have nothing and no one, no one wants you and no one in this world will help you."
She told me this regularly. I know now it was to alienate me, and to scare me. It worked. When social workers would come to school and ask me questions, I was always afraid to say yes, my mother does hit me and no, she does not feed me.

two in one day, i'm bored at work.

One of the worst things my mom has ever done she had done to my father. They started a lead and asbestos removal company in the 80's. They had a lot of large jobs, including government contracts. I don't know why I'm saying "they" because that would imply that my mother was an active part of the company and actually contributed anything. What I mean to say is that my father built this company from the ground up, and my mother ran it into the ground.

The company was very successful, they had a lot of money. Joanna, however, began stealing the money in large quantities, and wasting it. She'd give it to whichever of her white trash friends asked her for a loan, she'd give it to whatever piece of shit she was sleeping with. He would go to pay his workers and she would have taken the money from the account. Eventually my father pulled out, he left the company, and left her to run it. So naturally, it ended in bankruptcy. One time she took fifty thousand dollars my grandmother was left with when her husband died. My dad has worked hard all of his life, he should be retired in a nice house. Instead he's almost sixty, a survivor of two massive strokes, and working his ass off every single day doing HVAC.

When my dad had the two strokes, he was out of commission for quite a while. During this time my mother took out credit cards in his name and never paid them off. She had already ruined her own credit, as well as my grandmother's. She would go on to ruin my big brother's credit by taking out credit cards in his name, and eventually she ruined mine. When I turned 18 she began taking out credit cards and opening accounts in my name. I didn't know it was going on before it was too late. Now I'm 22, finally in a position where I can go to school, but my credit is awful. I'll never be able to buy a house, or a car, or any significant purchases really. I've told the cops, lawyers, credit bureaus, filed a police report, everything. Nothing has been done and my credit is still shit. No one cares, companies only want their money and say they don't believe me. They do, they just don't care.

Her explanation for ruining my credit is that she was building it up so that when I was 19 I could buy her house for $375,000 (after her fucking it up it was worth nowhere near this). And part of the house is mine. My dad and grandmother bought the house, Joanna forced my grandmother to sign over her half. My dad put his half in a trust for my brothers. My mom's lawyer set up the trust...she is the trustee. My dad's only stipulation when putting the house in our names was that my mother not be able to gain control of the trust, guess he should've read the paperwork before he signed. And why the fuck would a 19 year-old with no job buy a house that is partially hers for an inflated price? She claims we had been talking about doing so for over a year, but in reality she very regularly makes these things up in her head and believes them. Maybe it helps her sleep at night.