Meet Me in the Parking Lot After School!

Not long after the bomb, I was summoned for my very own Sermon on the Mount with Mi Hombre’s ex. It was disguised as, “I want to get to know YOU better.” A harmless meeting of two seemingly level-headed women. Naturally, being committed as I was I quickly reached out to the ex to schedule my “quid-pro-quo” session. After all I was dedicated to my relationship and ready to face the complexities that come with being in love with a man, with a child and an ex. I told myself, “She is just a ‘mom’ wanting to meet the woman that has been playing with her kid. No biggie…right?”

Boy was I wrong! Apparently, the idea of a woman entering her daughter’s life was enough to have her acting like Jekyll and Hyde. Our initial chance public meeting with Super-girl present was cause for celebration. She was cordial and voiced an overt happiness for Mi Hombre. Then strangely, the ex wouldn’t communicate directly with me afterward. It was as if she were in denial and suddenly I simply did not exist. Instead she communicated through Mi Hombre with an unsettling doom and gloom attitude. Her anguish accompanied every correspondence with him.

Irreverently, she came up with every excuse she could conjure up to delay our meeting from happening. Confiding in Mi Hombre that she felt things with me were moving too fast for her daughter – we understood it as it was moving too fast for her. We caught on to her ploy when conveniently every date I offered up to meet her there was some sort of conflict with her schedule. According to her, it was just never a good time. I felt that she was being catty and selfish, but I respected Mi Hombre’s vow to take the high road. We went along with it for the summer and when fall arrived all patience was lost.

I was angry at Mi Hombre for the ex’s complete avoidance with me. Obtusely I believed that having been married to her he should be able to influence her behavior. “Who am I kidding! He has no clout with her.” I reprimanded myself when I began thinking clearly. Exasperated by the ex’s intentional delays,  Mi Hombre told her that we were going to move forward with sleepovers because it wasn’t fair to Super-girl to have to commute the distance between our cities in a single day. Finally, she agreed to meet me…ALONE.

I could not understand why it was necessary for us to meet alone. What couldn’t she say with Mi Hombre present? When her email arrived I felt as if I had just received a note from the school bully that said, “Meet me in the parking lot after school…Just YOU!” I experienced the same hair-raising effect I did as a child only her correspondence actually read, “Meet me at my house after work.” Inquisitively, I questioned her agenda. She played it off as not being able to “be herself” in Mi Hombre’s presence, that she would inevitably censor what she wanted to say if he were there. So I obliged.

It was an eye opening experience, and in all honesty a little unsettling to say the least. I listened to the 2 hour monologue on how Super-girl passed through her Va-jay-jay (au naturale), how great she was as a “mother,” how no one can possibly know anything unless the are a “mother,” how she would never ask Mi Hombre for child support because she had ended the marriage and most importantly, how she wanted everything and everyone to be in her daughter’s life. Incidentally, there was not a single question about me.  Not even, “Where are you from?” or “What do you do?” Nothing.  It was one of the few times in my life that I was rendered speechless. In my silence, I remembered that bullies bully because they are afraid and if I weren’t truly in love with Mi Hombre I would have just stood up and walked away.