Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Apr 23, 2008
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days, that all these memories come flooding back to me.
Second Time Round
Relationships, well that was the title of the thread on that Saga Zone site that I visit on occasion. It's a website set up by Saga, you know, the one that sells car and life insurances to the over fifties, as well as holidays. In fact, the site is also set up for that same kind of age group. I heard about it on Radio 2 one day, when the site was being discussed on the morning phone-in-show, so I thought I would give it a visit. Well, I am over fifty, so I thought I qualified. I couldn't get in the first night I tried as the site had so many hits after the radio show that it crashed! So it was a couple of nights later when I managed to get in and signed up to join it. It's quite a good site, really, and well laid out with all the different threads on the front page which makes it really easy to find your way around. Anyway, I started a new thread called 'second time rounders' as I noticed that the subject of people getting together or married again after a divorce was not being covered. I thought it would be a good subject and that a lot of people, who like me and Mk2, might have had the same problems as we had when we first got together. However, after a dozen or so posts, the thread died away, maybe not as many as I thought then, or it could be that folk did not want to talk about that online. Yet somehow I don't think that was the case, as in some of the other threads some folk have revealed their darker most feelings, which I found surprising; or maybe it's just I am a bit more defensive about such things, well at least that's what Mk2 keeps telling me. You see, when we first got together back in 1991, I had just come back from working overseas in Russia, and was working out the last few months of my contract on a construction site where they made modules for offshore oil platforms, as a welding inspector. That was when I met Mk2, and my life totally changed, and I must say right now, the change was for the best, and I have never regretted my actions. Even though I was left totally broke after the divorce and had lost everything I had worked so hard for over all those twenty three years, I was starting all over again at the age of forty. As mentioned in an earlier Snippet we did have a few problems with our families and offspring who were very hostile at first, but over time, things improved and we all get along great together now.
When we eventually did buy a house after living in a caravan for two years, Mk2 wanted her youngest son to come and live with us, as this would not have been possible while we were living in the caravan; so we drove back down to collect him. What happened after that is well covered in an earlier Snippet, so we wont go down that road again. Suffice to say that we all get along really great now, and that is the main thing. I remember thinking at the time how difficult it was and really wished for someone to help me through it all, as they don't come with instructions do they? You see, when my own two daughters were going through their teenage years, I was working away from home, so was not there for most of the time, that I do regret now, but the clock does not go back, does it? We did have friends at that time, who were second-time-rounders like ourselves, so we could talk over our problems with things in general with them, as they had kids from previous marriages as well, so that was a great help to us. We were pretty much shunned by all my old friends, as living in a small town like that, folk tended to keep away from folk like us; so we more or less stuck to our own little group. There was one couple we knew who had been trying to have a family for years without any success, and were in the process of trying to adopt. They showed us some of all the forms they had to fill in, and told us their experiences and thoughts about all those interviews they had to attend as well, it made the whole idea of adopting scary to say the least! This got me thinking at the time, about the system in general, I mean prospective adoptive parents have to go through all that, yet a man can move in with a single parent mother and live with her and her child, and no one knows anything about him at all!
My thoughts about that came true to life recently in our small village, where we now live, and a young single mother who had just moved into a council flat with her young son. Then she met a man who moved in with her not long after they had met, which no one thought anything about at the time, especially in these days. Then one night, we heard the police car screeching to a halt way down at the bottom of the village main street and stopped at her door. Over the next couple of days the news of what happened started to spread through the village. It appeared that the man who had moved in with her was a paedophile and was wanted by the police for skipping his probation commitments in another part of the country, after he had been released from prison. It transpired that she had her suspicions and he had violently assaulted her when she challenged him about comments made by her son. My immediate thought was of the young lad, and hoped that he was all right and that no harm had come to him. Then I thought of that young couple we knew all those years ago, who had been trying to adopt a child, and just wondered if they had ever been successful, and just how easy it was for something bad like that to happen, but then again, no one ever checks out prospective step fathers or asks them to fill in a mass of forms or produce references of any kind. I only hope and pray that such instances are few and far between.
