Worst Nightmare Realized

Okay, this is just a quickie because today has been a little slow by my standards. I had a doctor appointment this afternoon and my husband drove me, which was lucky because there was massive traffic and I would have freaked. Dad on the other hand choose to vomit up every vile verbiage that he could for his hate of the SUV and their drivers. He feels they are responsible for everything from the fuel prices to insurance rates. The way home was a little quite since I did not want to direct the rage my direction, and as we excited the expressway we saw a guy with a ‘will work for food’ sign. As we got closer and closer we realized it was our oldest son!!!!!!

Now the boy is going to be 30 this year, and has not had a firm job ever, longest employment was one year, and is $10,000 + behind in child support! As a kid he would break the lawnmower rather than mow, he would lie to teachers, to the point children’s services came to my home to find out why we had kicked him out and made him live in the car (after I showed them his wreck of a bed room and asked them who they thought was packing his lunch every day, they realized they were being scammed). But there he was standing there about as pathetic as you could be.
Dad completely lost it, he was driving erratically, he was screaming and was so upset. I started crying, what was he doing out there? What has happened now? Is he pan-handling for a career? This is so sad. Does his family have food? We were driving around a neighborhood all confused and disorientated, bumping off of curbs and each other. Then Dad got it together and we headed back to pick him up. At a light we stopped and Dad leaned out .

He yelled for him to cross the street and his tone was less than gentle. He was waving and honking the horn. Our son turned around, and wandered across the street. We pulled up to him, I rolled the window down. It was not him.

Looked just like him, until we got up close. Too embarrassed and stunned to admit the absurdity of the situation. Dad offered to take him to our house to mow the yard for $20. We had after all yelled at him, made him cross traffic and gave him hope someone was going to offer work. He seemed barely able to respond, but at 300 pounds, it was not drugs or alcohol that was causing his delay. We thought him a little slow (this is not an insult to those of low intelligence, because as well displayed, we cannot even recognize our own child! We thought he was not a quick thinker, where we are very quick to, well, over think). His wife was in a car at the fast food café across the street, they followed us home and Dad convinced himself he was doing a good deed for some guy down on his luck.

I know that doing a good deed just does not ever work out for me. When the guy saw our 1/ 2 acre yard and the push mower, he suddenly remembered that he could only work for about 45 minutes because they had to pick up their daughter at school. So he mowed for about 30 minutes, said he had to leave, we gave him $10 for the trouble of having to actually do something. Dad went to finish and found the mower was now broke, and will no longer self propel. So the good deed will cost us about $100.00.