My wife at twenty-six left me with a three-year-old son and remarried. At first she wanted to take the baby too, but my mother wouldn’t let her. She was afraid Barbara would ruin the baby, so she took it upon herself to take care of it. My mother had always been a great help to me, and when I was young she told me to be careful and strict when Barbara came back to me.
“You should chase people like that away. They take advantage of you as long as it benefits them, they bullshit you, and when something happens, they cheat you again,” my mother used to say.
I raised my son with my parents. They sent the boy to university and introduced me to his girlfriends, until he met the one he really liked. The girl was really very nice and kind, always offered to help me in some way, and once she became my official daughter-in-law, she often visited me and brought me her food, making my fridge full. She was honest and hard-working, so I thought that with a wife like that my son would always have a sober head and learn to tell when people were sincere and when they were lying.
I had lived a lot of years in the world, but I wasn’t going to get married a second time myself. I thought only those closest to me knew about it, but it turned out that Barbara had renewed her communication with her son some time ago. She played around with her deceitful love and was quietly asking about me. When she found out that I lived alone, with an apartment and a job in my fifties, she came to visit. She offered to get together, saying that she missed me a lot. So I, remembering my late mother’s words, kicked her out the door. She had already deprived me of a happy family life once.
So the restless one went to her son, started complaining about me.
– You didn’t even give her a chance! Mom has changed a lot, she is a good person, she helped me with my grandchildren more than once, – my son told me off over the phone. – Because of you two, I grew up in a broken home, so at least let the grandchildren have a grandfather and grandmother!
– It’s not like she’s going anywhere. Let her meet her grandchildren, as long as you let her. But I’m not getting back together with her. Not everyone deserves a second chance.
My son resents me now. Barbara has already told him something, and he thinks I’m doing it out of spite, because I still resent my ex-wife and because I want to ruin my grandchildren’s childhood. And they tell me that Barbara has changed-not a bit, she’s still self-serving and clearly wants something from me.
