The bleakest season . . .

It's that extra day in the year, February 29th, one that comes only every four years. The last time it came I was in my sixties, and still within a distant last sighting of any of my 3 children more than a decade earlier . Now I'm in my seventies and my last sighting of any of my children has slipped to two decades earlier. The divorce you know.

This the the day the bleak third of the year ends each year, usually on March 1st, occasionally on February 29th. For persons estranged from their loved ones darkness often descends on Thanksgiving, the start of the holiday season, and ends . . . ? For me it's always at the end of February when my youngest child, now in his mid-thirties, has his birthday at the regular end of the month. The other two sons cram their birthdays in between the New Year and the youngest's birthday. Time moves on, you know?

Do I still care? Yeah, I guess so. Probably a lot. But less so now, as the years-now decades-march on. Their mother made a fine job of poisoning their tender minds back then against me and all Lambertons, none of whom have heard from them since they were mere children. She painted with a broad brush, and has made a lifetime work of it. She's truly extraordinary in her accomplishment, and the boys-now men-have an unnatural enmity hardening their hearts. I'm sorry for them. C'est la vie, or perhaps, c'est la guerre.

Very Unusual Human Beings

 This Thanksgiving I was home since I am not traveling in deference to the over-stressed US health care system, thanks to the criminally negligent pandemic nonresponse on the part of President Baby Huey. At Noon I went to take out a pizza from the Lost Dog Pizzeria in Westover but it was closed for the holiday, although several Uber-Eats drivers were hanging around with putative takeout orders, wondering what was going on. 

I waited awhile in my car to see if anyone I knew showed up. Nobody I recognized came by so I went home to cook a solitary meal for myself.

The meal was fine, a pork roast slathered in BBQ sauce plus fixings. I ate it wondering how many grandchildren I might have, but I also knew two immutable things: my ex-wife who turned our children against me through PAS when they were minors (a form of child abuse) would never tell me if one of them suffered a tragedy; or if I as a parent would ever be informed by her or them of the pleasure and pride of indulging in any grandchildren of any of these three now-adults might have had by now.

I wouldn't want to be my ex-wife, Sharon R. Lightbourne (nee Sharon Rogers), good luck to her at St. Peters gate! And as for JJ&D, I wonder how any of them could have accepted such largess as their Lamberton grandmother provided for them through her own frugal sacrifices as a widow and still diss all Lambertons for these last two decades as being unworthy of having any gratitude towards or communication with, I would have thought that accepting such a sum of money (about 100K each in trust money) from so apparently foul a source would have compelled them to either refuse it or cause them to turn it over to charity; those three now fully mature male adults are unfortunately very unusual human beings, persons I wouldn't recognize now as having had any upbringing influence from me as to what they have become from all appearances.

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

 Here is an interesting article in the Washington Post by a student who attended the Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in Fairfax County, the best technical public high school in the land. The author made the most of the education opportunity presented but laments that the school hasn't kept up with the changing demographics of our nation as represented by the population current makeup of the county and suggests that it would have been better to attend a local public high school for a better life experience which would or could have led to a more productive and rewarding life.

This is interesting to me since my oldest child attended TJ for four years and certainly would have had a more productive or at least a more rewarding life if he had attended a local high school in the city of Falls Church or the county of Arlington instead. He squandered his magnificent opportunity by attending this school (which was his choice because he could have otherwise attended an elite top-ten boarding prep school, Lawrenceville, perhaps the Stanford of high school education instead), staggered out of TJ with the bottom high school diploma of three grades in Virginia (about equal to a GED diploma after four years at the premiere public technical school in the nation), a general diploma rather than a regular  high school diploma or a magnet school diploma. This was during the multi-year, quarter-million-dollar divorce engineered by his mother during which, in my opinion, her covert narcissistic predilections overcame the immature wills of our three minor children through the perpetuation of PAS (which many persons knowledgeable of its pernicious scourge label a form of child abuse) for her own petty personal aggrandizement of her sense of her self.

Our oldest child, a talented, bold, smart, athletic pre-teen, a mega-achiever when pushed or nurtured, never went to college after being let out of TJ with his shop-class diploma, and lapsed into internet gambling, being a boy-Friday for the scumbag divorce lawyer who took his "case" to sue his father for fiduciary breach during the divorce (the case was thrown out of court, with sanctions assessed) and perpetrating ever-incomplete schemes on go-fund-me pages.  In his foisted-upon bitterness as a child (by her coterie of mercenary adult "professionals"), the lad, now a fully mature adult, changed his name, lived I think at his mother's next husband's residence and hasn't communicated with any Lamberton (the name he eschewed on his 18th birthday) for over fifteen years.

So I think the article's author might be right.  The experience my oldest child received at TJ wasn't representative of any child's that I know of, when I was effectively shut out of any involvement by TJ of any involvement (or even discussion, really) of my child's continuing high school education by TJ administrators who absolutely adhered aggressively to the fallacious, sexist common principle prevalent in domestic law that "mother knows best."  I'm sorry for you, Jimmy; perhaps TJ wasted your life; instead you could have gone to Yorktown like your brothers who both graduated from VCU, or Lawrenceville where your grandfather (Carleton, Yale Law School), your uncle (Yale, Wharton MBA), and I went (CU, UVA Law School).

Happy Birthday, Jim

July always makes me think of my 4 or 5 year divorce, that cost me a quarter million dollars.  What I got out of it beyond becoming thankfully clear of Sharon who is, in my opinion, a destructive covert narcissist, was the extra-judicial extinguishment of my fatherhood of my three minor sons though extreme Parental Alienation Syndrome ("PAS") perpetrated by Sharon, a form of child abuse in the opinion of many including me, and, get this, lifetime alimony.

Lifetime alimony exists pretty much only in Virginia, a state that still clings to contributory negligence, versus the modern doctrine of comparative negligence in the courtroom which effectively ensures some form of righteous compensation from wrongdoers for injured persons.  The reason July makes me think about this stuff is because Jim, her older second husband (I am younger than Sharon--she didn't age well--but Jim is many years older than her), was born in July and after many years of me paying her alimony, he married her and thus ended my lifetime alimony.

She sent me a certified letter to notify me of her remarriage (although even so, per usual, she didn't fully comply with the information required by the divorce decree) but what my corrosive, expensive divorce taught me was never present yourself to receive an unknown certified letter.  You see, I was litigating for years against low-down dirty-lawsuit experts and that's what they did; yes, those scumbags she surrounded herself and our children with taught me a lot.  But eventually my agency accepted her letter notifying me that she had re-married (she always needs someone around to do her manipulative drama on) and I found out on my own what county in North Carolina the happy event took place in and sent away for a certified copy of her latest marriage certificate so that, many weeks later, I could send it to my payroll office to get rid of my lifetime alimony.

That certificate, a public document, was a thing of beauty, giving the full names (including mother's maiden name, if I remember correctly), dates of birth, social security numbers and current addresses of everyone involved, including witnesses.  All that PI stuff in the public domain is good to know, I guess.  I know exactly how old old Jim is.

I wish I could meet Jim so I could thank him for saving me hundreds of thousands of dollars over my lifetime by taking this economic sponge off my books.  She was costing me $18,000 a year and I still wasn't seeing my kids.  How does that work?  Only in current America.

I've seen Jim, I believe, at least three times but I have never met him.  I believe he was the date of Sharon when both came out of her house one Friday evening while I was on the sidewalk calling her number on my cellphone (my calls to her house asking for the children to be sent out for court-ordered visitation were never answered) to say that I was there at the appropriate time for my visitation of my minor sons.  While the wimpy-looking male hung back, she asked what I was doing there and I told her that it was Friday at 5 pm and I was here to pick up my children for my visitation as required by court order.  She dismissively told me that they weren't there (that's "cooperation" in encouraging the children in visitation, as required by the court order, for you) and she ordered the male standing back in the shadows to get in the jeep at the curb so they could depart.  As she came down the steps to the sidewalk to get in the passenger side, I retreated off the sidewalk into the street 15 feet behind the jeep in observation of the learned, unwritten rule that if you hold your ground during an encounter relating to a divorce, and anyone in her camp comes too close to you, they're likely to later claim that you were "menacing" somehow.  Yeah, that's how bad divorces go, and how females can play the Fright card which is a close cousin to, and enhances, the Victim card.

The male got behind the wheel and started up the jeep.  There was plenty room to pull forward out into the travel lane (there was no traffic on this residential street) but suddenly the back-up lights came on and the jeep lurched backwards rapidly maybe a dozen feet and I was frozen in fear that I was about to be struck by it when the gears clunked and the jeep changed course and pulled forward and away.  I've described this encounter in a past blog entry.

Whether the male was ordered to back up by Sharon or he did it on his own, to scare me, or it was a mistake, it left me shaking but I think that was Jim behind the wheel.  It might not have been him though, maybe it was some other older loser.  After all, I've never been introduced to Jim, "dad" to my youngest child at least (Danny so loves being in Jim's summer house on the Outer Banks, that's where he proposed to his wife, at his "dad's" house on the beach, as I learned a couple of years later from reading the wedding book on the Internet to my child's wedding that I was never invited to nor told about until a neighbor mentioned it to me).

I did see Jim once trying to use an ATM outside a bank as I drove home from work one Saturday after they were married.  They lived two miles from me and I was driving past going home when I saw Sharon on the sidewalk by the bank near her townhouse.  Of course I scrutinized the scene as I drove by and there was this poor man trying to get money out of an ATM as she supervised his efforts.  Sharon had her mouth working in a fury, and her visage was as I remembered it, typically furious and impatient when not in the the sight of others.  After all, if she thought people were around when she was haranguing someone close to her she wouldn't want to besmirch her phony image of sweetness and reveal her true character of being a user of all those around her, in my opinion.  Poor guy, but better him than me.

The next time I saw Jim has also been mentioned in a past blog post or posts. I was once again driving home on a public street from work on a weekend, and I saw a large knot of people walking a large German Shepherd dog on the sidewalk not far from where she lived.  I recognized Sharon and I, missing my children as the years dragged by with no communication from these ruined now-adults (PAS is essentially a form of brainwashing immature minds and can have a lifetime effect, especially upon young, susceptible children), parked at my first opportunity on this street so I could ask Sharon, on this public street, how my children, our children, were.

I walked up to the group of people which included Sharon, with Jim next to her, and a few other adults including other men, the large dog, a teen or two and maybe a pre-teen.  I maintained proper social distance, as we would call it these days, didn't impede, block or confront them in any way and asked, taking less than a minute total since I received nary word in reply from anyone, these five simple questions for each child of mine (and hers): Is he alive. Is he well? Is he married? Does he have children? Where does he live?  I encountered only stony silence during that minute as they walked along, and I walked away.

Anyway, your birthday was earlier this month, Jim (I know the day), and even if you didn't want to give a distraught father even a trace of information about his sons in response to his desperate questions about them then (not even an encouraging: They're all alive, okay?), Happy Birthday, old feller!  At least you saved me a lot of money!

Happy happy, Sharon

Have a happy birthday, mother of my three children. I have nothing good to say about you so I won't say anything further except to say that the last time I went to church I prayed for you.

https://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/court-of-appeals-unpublished/2004/1714034.htmlhttps://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/court-of-appeals-unpublished/2004/1714034.html

Sorry I missed your birthday earlier this month . . . .

Hey birthday boy!  Sorry I missed your birthday earlier this month, but I was busy driving around towns in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia on a big car trip for my vacation.

I forgive you for almost backing over me years ago, if that was you dating my ex-wife last decade, in your big jeep with its ever present Life Is Good spare tire cover.  After all, you are now married to her and I wish you all the luck in the world; if the scales ever fall from your eyes you will need it.

There is one psychological condition you should research, that of the covert narcissist.  Just sayin'.

But I am sorry to say that you revealed to me a hard, inhuman side to your character, in my opinion, that puts you in proper company in your latest marriage.  You see, I haven't had a word of communication from any of my three children in over a decade and have repeatedly tried to ascertain if they are well or indeed, even alive.

The last time I saw the mother of my children on a public street in Arlington, very near where I live, I happened to drive by while coming home from work and you, an adult man and woman, some teenagers and a German Shepherd were on a walk with her on the public sidewalk and I parked and walked past the large group and asked her, regarding each of my three children, five questions for each that represent the bare minimum that any parent would tell another parent, no matter how estranged or outlandishly inimical that person was to the other.  After all, I love my children and worry about their wellbeing and you, since you were there, could have at any time during that single minute, allayed my fears by interjecting, as any human being would to another, that my three children are well, or not well because of [this happenstance].

After all, you obviously know them all; my youngest son speciously referred to you as "Dad" in his marriage book, my middle child has used your address as his address, I believe, and my oldest son has parked his vehicle for extended periods outside your abode and does or has, I think, lived there or caretaken your dwelling.  The five basic questions of anxious parents?

Is he alive. Is he well. Is he married.  Does he have children.  Where does he live.

Your current wife has had this pressed-lip, fallacious and self-serving (to feed her implacable, absurdly oversized rage against the father of her children) narrative to answer my former written inquiries about my children, limited though they were, of:  The children will give you any information they see fit to.  This is an outlandish wild-eyed attitude of parenthood that represents the fringe far end of the PAS (Parental Alienation Syndrome) spectrum, a Western phenomenon fueled by the Mother Knows Best bias of domestic law courts that Sharon played masterfully with her coterie of divorce lawyers and "professionals" until the Arlington court and Appellate courts woke up to her harassing litigiousness, using our minor children as her lawsuit cut-outs, and penalized her almost $50,000 for it.

I don't agree with her parenthood-wrecking attitude and actions but I understand them because she is, in my opinion, a covert narcissist and they only think of themselves.  Your attitude I don't understand, unless you are a terribly cowed husband or you didn't want to, in fact, impart terrible, distressing information to me in a brief interlude.

Indeed, are they all alive?  Well?

There was no answer from her to any of my five simple questions about each one's current well-being (see above).  Nor from you.

A belated happy birthday, Jim.  Life is good, eh?

Goodbye to the Empty Chair

For six years I appeared every other Friday, and on the eve of all Federal holidays, at 6 p.m. at the curb of the house occupied by the mother of my three minor children to execute on the plain vanilla visitation order decreed by the Arlington County court as part of its ruling in the divorce decree brought by Sharon Rogers (now Sharon Lightbourne) against me, and called the house on my cell phone.  (As a practical matter, you cannot go on the porch to knock on the door lest you expose yourself to spurious charges of beating in a rage on the door and a specious arrest.)  For the last four years the phone was never answered and not a person came out as my ex-wife, in addition to not fully cooperating with the visitation order as required by law and by family values, taught my adolescent children to be scofflaws in their own right.

Once my youngest child graduated from high school (I was told that he did), I appeared for the next 12 years at the Lost Dog Cafe, a local restaurant in Westover in Arlington, Virginia, to have lunch at noon on almost every birthday of my children and almost every Federal Holiday, constantly issuing public invitations to come to start a rapprochement with any or all of them via this blog, my facebook page and in letters and cards (all unanswered, none returned to sender) sent to Sharon's address, as she wouldn't tell me where any of them lived.  Always I dined with the Empty Chair during that hour, except for the time a "Jane Doe" appeared to ask my advice on how to deal with the local LCSW who was irrevocably ruining her and her husband's relationship with her step-daughter (his daughter) by aiding in the odious application of PAS by the girl's mother, just as this same man-hating "professional" helped immeasurably to irrevocably ruin, in my opinion, my relationships with my three children via her despicably abetting my ex-wife's pernicious application of PAS, which is seen by some (myself included) as a form of child abuse .

Last month my youngest child entered his thirties and on that day I went one last time to the Lost Dog.  I enjoyed a Dominion Ale (a root beer) and a Kujo Pie, made up of fresh marinara sauce, artichoke hearts and garlic chicken pieces.

At the end of the noon hour I bid a final adieu to the faithful Empty Chair and left, not intending to return to the establishment on any regular schedule anymore.  I wish my three sons (all undoubtedly fully mature adults now, at least physically) the best.

Hey Danny

Later this month my youngest child, Danny, will have a birthday.  He'll be entering his fourth decade, certainly a fully mature adult now in terms of physical and brain development, although psychologically he might be far short of that as a result of the stunting mental debility his mother forced upon him and his two older brothers when all three were tender minors during the long divorce, when she and her two family-wrecking divorce lawyers thrust these three children smack into the middle of the litigation maelstorm by filing an "unconscionable" subsidiary lawsuit in their names, later labeled a "harassment petition" by the court when it sanctioned her and threw it out.  (A good linebacker and an excellent fullback, he claimed during the divorce that I "crushed [his] spirit" because I didn't celebrate a TD he scored well enough and so he would never play football again; do you think those were his words, or the phrasing of his mother's and his oldest brother's counselor, the deeply conflicted and court-barred Meg Sullivan, LCSW?)

This is termed Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), the overbearing of a not-fully-developed childish mind via emotional pressure applied to minors to induce them to reject permanently the other parent by a short-sighted needy parent, often as in this case with the help of a large coterie of so-called professionals who engage in quackery and hang out at the courthouse seeking paid work.  It is often termed child abuse, and it is alive and well, though largely hidden, in the American domestic law system perpetrated by the governing rubric of "best interests of the child" in our "mother knows best" biased courts wherein the woman's word is always taken at face value and the man's word is always suspect until finally, as in my case after years of litigation costing me a quarter million dollars (I couldn't get out of the endless litigation), the woman badly overplays her hand and gets sanctioned or assessed costs.  (We generally had fun on our court-ordered visitation but then I would be accused of bringing him home on time but "too tired" to finish his homework, or doing what I wanted to do instead of what they wanted to do, or letting him burn off a sparkler while supervised in the driveway on July 4th when didn't I know that months earlier he'd had a pyromaniac incident in an Arlington park with a friend?--No, because his mother never told me--and we'd be off on another expensive, time-consuming round of hearings over whether I was a properly fit parent; eventually I ran out of money, the children stopped coming in violation of the court visitation order, and that was that.)

I haven't laid eyes on Danny in a decade and a half, nor heard from him since the summer he was eighteen, when he sent me a letter (which endearingly or sneeringly, depending upon your point of view, began with "Dear Peter") asking me to provide for full payment of his college tuition and fees, which I did.  I haven't heard from him or his two older brothers since, I don't even know for certain if he graduated although I know that eight semesters of college were paid for by the funds I provided; I certainly wasn't invited to his graduation, or his wedding which I heard about long afterwards from a  person in town who I ran into.  (Such a lovely couple, I'm sure it was a lovely wedding, welcome to the family, Laura, I wish you two long and happy lives, and congratulations on your many notable job advancements.)

I have always made myself available to these three boys, and now the time is at hand to bow to the sad permanency of the horrible infliction of the scourge of PAS upon my three sons by, in my opinion, their covert-narcistic mother; once Jimmy, Johnny and Danny become Jim, John and Dan after this month, since they will all be over thirty by then.  Danny, (and Jim, John and Laura), for the last time I will be at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover (Arlington, VA) at noon for lunch on your birthday, please come join me.  (Jim Lightboune's not your dad, I am.)

Have fun in Margaritaville

I checked in this month with my man Trevor, and he had some interesting speculation he passed on to me. He mans the corner two blocks from the house of the mother of my three estranged children, which is two miles from my house.

He told me that he had seen her and her husband on Valentine's Day, each in their own car, after an absence of several weeks and he thought she had moved on that day to parts unknown. This would sever my last tenuous link to my children, but it doesn't matter much because when I encountered her on the street a couple of years ago, I asked her if our children were all still alive and well and she stonily refused to answer.

Now there's a person you wouldn't want to spend over two decades with!

Third Week of September

Last month I was coming back from abdominal surgery but as I came back from the down time, I tried not to lose too much of my conditioning from the prior month where I'd worked hard to get into shape in the first place.  The third week of September I ran five times and logged 26 miles.  (A warm day.)

None of those miles were very fast.  The left side of my navel was bothering me, there was a long surgical scar down there.  (I couldn't do my torso workout so soon after my hernia surgeries.)

The scar is atop another surgical scar I have from 1985 when I underwent abdominal surgery there to try to increase my chances of reproduction.  That was for you, Jimmy, oldest son.  (Jimmy is in the middle, in less conflicted times before the divorce during which his mother Sharon R. Lightbourne, made him a victim of PAS, which I believe is a form of child abuse.)

My long run, or shuffle, was seven miles.  I kept trying to increase my turnover (pace) to improve my workout load but I was happy to log the miles as I fight to come back to full health.  (At the Beltway overpass on the fifth mile of my LSD.)

Labor Day 2016

When I retired from work late last spring, my fellow workers took me out to lunch downtown as their way of saying goodbye.  Among a couple of other gifts, my friends gave me a $150 gift certificate to my favorite local pizzeria, the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover in Arlington.

Today being a holiday, Labor Day, I had lunch there at noon and used my coupon for the first time.  None of my long-estranged children showed up but the draft beer and the Italian Pizza Pie were delicious.

There was even some pizza left over when I left.  I drank the entire draft in the hour I was there but I could have ordered one or four more if JJD or L (that's short for Jimmy, Johnny, Danny or Laura, now that Dan's married) had showed up.

I had plenty of time during the hour to reflect upon the likely-permanent pernicious effect the "professional" cast of characters like Divorce Lawyer Joe Condo, Social Worker Meg Sullivan LCSW, "Psychologist" Victor Elion and others had upon my defenseless, vulnerable minor children during the divorce proceedings fifteen years ago, as, in my opinion, those uncaring, manipulating adults fulfilled their own various agendas to the lasting detriment of my children, none of whom has spoken to their father in about a decade due to the overbearing influence exerted by those adults upon these young adolescents.  Although that was a long time ago, I sometimes worry that those same characters might be engaged in the same sort of family-wrecking behavior, in my opinion, that tore apart my family irrevocably, as shown in the link http://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/court-of-appeals-unpublished/2004/1714034.html, and could very well be similarly affecting some other poor family in Fairfax County even now resulting in the same lifelong, devastating results.

Surgery went well, thank you.

I was stunned by being friended then unfriended by my youngest son's wife on the day before my stomach surgery.  I was not looking forward to this invasive procedure of double abdominal incisions on August 12th, after waiting for six months to have it scheduled, so being friended by Danny's wife on August 11th and unfriended within the hour was, actually, an unwelcome distraction.

But PAS is a sinister reality in western society, destroying normal parental relations based upon the insidious knowledge possessed by all lawyers that the law is merely "the minimum of morality."  That would describe you, Sharon, mother of my children, you represent the lowest common denominator that the law struggles to encompass.

But almost three weeks later after surgery I am fine.  I ran 12 miles this week and I weigh the same as I did on the day of surgery.

I don't thank my offspring for checking on my condition, because they didn't, special children (now men) that they are.  Still, as always when I'm in town, on the next holiday, Labor Day, next Monday, I'll be having lunch as usual during the noon hour at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover; maybe I'll see you then, JJD&L, eh?

I'm guessing not.  But rest assured that I'm fine after a painful recovery period, really I am, as are most or all Lambertons still alive, unfortunately you don't know a thing about those who departed in the last decade, including loving persons who held you as infants, because although I tried to inform you of these mournful passages, you three don't give a damn about such ordinary people.

The many layers of motives

My healing from surgery is coming along nicely, tomorrow I'll come up on the one week mark since the procedure and I have been entertaining thoughts of running a couple of miles, slowly.  I'll wait a few days yet, as the doctor's orders were No Running for 2-6 weeks.

The day before surgery, Laura, the wife of my youngest child Danny, sent me a friend request on Facebook which I accepted, and then she unfriended me within the hour.  I have been totally estranged from all three of my children for a decade or longer, basically ever since the divorce, because they are all victims of the form of child abuse known as PAS (parental alienation syndrome), perpetrated upon them when they were vulnerable children by their mother and her gang of "professionals."

I didn't even know that Danny got married in the spring of 2015 until this summer when I learned about it from a neighbor who is a good friend of their mother.  (She was in on the visitation scam during the divorce of inviting my children to sleep over at her house practically every weekend when I was supposed to have them, so as soon as I showed up my children would express their preference to be at her house with their friends rather than coming with me.  That is how you work PAS with children and foil court-ordered visitation.)  I didn't even know Laura, having never met her nor heard about her before.

In the few moments when I perused Laura's FB site, after I accepted her friend request and before I went out for my daily run during which time I was unfriended, I could see that she and Danny had moved from downstate Virginia to Arlington, in my immediate vicinity, last summer and they were moving to Chicago that very weekend or perhaps they had already moved out of Arlington the weekend before.  What I suspect is that this was my son's way, acting through his wife, of trying to be as hurtful as possible to me by using this method to inform me, on the day before my surgery, that unbeknownst to me he had been living in close proximity to me for over a year without me ever knowing it, and now he had moved far away without ever contacting me.

People Are Strange

People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Streets are uneven when you're down
the Doors.

I had stomach surgery last week, which anyone who reads my Facebook posts would know.  I am at home now healing nicely, thank you, expecting a complete recovery, but this gets bound up with the strangeness of my "contact" with the wife of my youngest son, Danny, who has been completely estranged from me (and all Lambertons) for a decade.

The happy couple got married a year ago, as I recently found out from a neighbor.  This information at least told me that my youngest child is alive and ostensibly doing well, information his mother stonily refused to provide to me in response to my direct questions to her on the subject when I happened to encounter her on a public street a year and a half ago (she lives two miles from me).

Last Thursday I accepted a bolt-from-the-blue friend request on Facebook from Laura J. Lamberton, the wife of Danny, and I added a personal greeting to my acceptance of her request, "Welcome to the family, Laura. Congratulations on your wedding."  I have never met the woman and know nothing about her beyond what I gleaned from perusing her FB site for a few minutes after I accepted her request.

Then I went out for a run in the midday August heat to sort out a mass of conflicting things such as my fears about the double hernia repair surgery I was undergoing the next morning, the fact that I was receiving solid information about my youngest child after so many years of darkness, and what it all meant.  By the time I returned, nine miles later and seven pounds lighter, I had been unfriended by Laura and shut out from any information about Danny again.

Was she just purposefully messing with my head on the day before I went in for surgery?  Streets are uneven when you're down.

The Western Union man arrived.

During WW2, parents with boys overseas fighting dreaded seeing a Western Union messenger coming up the walkway.  It almost always meant that their son had been killed in action or was missing in action and their first notice of this was a telegram from the war department.  "We regret to inform you…"

In my precarious situation where my three sons were turned against me as minors by predatory adults (you know who you are) in a classic case of Parental Alienation Syndrome (a form of child abuse) and haven't spoken to me (or any Lamberton) in years, I have always feared the Western Union man,  What I mean is that if anything tragic ever happened to one of them (beyond being stripped of a parent by insidious adults), I have no doubt that their mother, who lives two miles away from me, wouldn't tell me.  Two years ago when I encountered her on the street, I asked her about the welfare of each of them (including this question for each of them, "Is he alive?") and her cold, marble nature showed when she answered each and every inquiry with stony silence.

Occasionally I"ll run into old acquaintances in town whose boys I coached when they were growing up and I'll ask about their kids.  As I initiate the conversation, I live in dread of one of them breaking out with, "I'm so sorry for your loss, Peter!"  Because I always thought that that would be how I would find out bad news about any of them, maybe months or years later.

Do you have children?  Try living like that for a decade, and that will show you how lifeless my ex-wife is.

It finally happened this month.  Out of the blue, I received a bereavement card in the mail from a casual acquaintance that told me how sorry he was for the loss of my family member.

I reflected on my family members.  All of my siblings were doing well, and if anything tragic had happened in their families, somebody would have called me.  It could only be about one of my children.

I would have been absolutely frantic, with no place to turn for further information, except for one piece of fortuitous luck that had occurred mere days earlier after all these years of silence about my children.  I had encountered an old acquaintance, a best friend of my ex-wife, who although complicit in extrajudicially wrecking my paternity, is made of sterner stuff than the lifeless nature that infuses my ex-wife.  She answered every question I put to her about my three sons, and that is how I found out that last year my youngest child had married a girl named Laura.  She had also said that the middle child and oldest child had recently broken up with their girlfriends and were in various states of devastation about the break ups, so I assumed that with this recent news, they were probably okay unless one of them was suicidal about it.

I made inquiries where I could and learned that the casual acquaintance had been searching on the Internet and come across a news report that a Peter Lamberton had been in a car accident in which his wife was killed.  There are other Peter Lambertons in the world, and perhaps such a tragedy befell one of them, for which I am sorry.  This casual acquaintance reading the news report, being a genuinely nice person, had dispatched a pro-forma bereavement card to my house, perhaps ill-advisedly so.

I have been living on the edge for years.  You should be so lucky as to never have such a situation befall you.

When I'm 64

Happy belated 64th birthday to the mother of my three children. 

Although you are such an absolute, cunning master of PAS, so proficient at it that none of my children has spoken to me, or any blood kin of mine, in almost a decade, their wills overborne when they were minors, since your birthday fell on Easter Sunday this year, I wanted you to know that I have forgiven you.

One year ago...

A year ago, as Thanksgiving approached, I had a chance encounter on a public street with the mother of my three children, none of whom has spoken to me, or any Lamberton, in over seven years. They were ripped away from us extra-judicially by their mother, Sharon Rogers Lightbourne, who engaged in parental alienation syndrome ("PAS") and overbore their wills as minors, given her dominant position with them in terms of time of physical custody, since the Plain-Jane visitation the court imposed gave them to her 81% of the time.

My lawyer wryly characterized the sexist attitude of the domestic law court in Virginia as Mother Knows Best.  Oh, the untold number of secret visits to psychologists my three sons were subjected to in those hours, unbeknownst to me, which induced in their juvenile brains a frenzy of excitement and side-taking as they were caught up in the adult drama of a couple splitting asunder, expensively and publicly (lotsa hearings, lotsa costs)!

When I encountered Sharon a year ago just before our national day of thanks, I asked her five questions about each child.  Is he alive?  Is he well?  Is he married?  Does he have children?  Where does he live?

I received in return only stony silence, a true glimpse into her cold, flinty heart, because those are things that any parent would tell the other parent, no matter what.  JJ&D, I'll have Thanksgiving dinner with your Aunt Melissa this year, give us a call or stop by, she's in the book.

Heathcliff Is the Model

I'm reading Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.  Here is a quote from it that I dedicate to the mother of my three children who, during our divorce proceedings last decade, acted in concert with a coterie of agenda-driven "professionals" to overbear the wills of these tender young minor children, the end result being that their dad was ripped away from them extra-judicially.

On the night she dies, narcissistic Catherine bespeaks her true inner self to her paramour Heathcliff, the dark foundling who bestrides the pages like a super egoistic Iago.  All will be destroyed at the altar of self-worship.

"' I wish I could hold you,' she continued bitterly, 'till we were both dead!  I shouldn't care what we suffered.  I care nothing for your sufferings.  Why shouldn't you suffer?  I do!  Will you forget me?  Will you be happy when I am in the earth?  Will you say twenty years hence, 'That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw.  I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her, but it is past.  I've loved many others since; my children are dearer to me than she was, and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her, I shall be sorry that I must leave them!'  Will you say so, Heathcliff?'"

Friend without the Are

Fifteen questions, spoken with a pause between each one and nary an answer in return, can be rattled off non-hurriedly in under a minute.  That was the case last fall when I had a chance public encounter with the mother of my three estranged sons, from whom I and the rest of my clan haven't heard a single word in over eight years.

I asked her five questions about each son.

Is he alive?
Is he well?
Is he married?
Does he have children?
Where does he live?

She met each question with stony silence, to match her heart.  I added a comment at the end, "That's information any parent would give the other," and then said as I walked away, "I'm sorry for you."

There were several other persons present, including her current husband.  Happy birthday, Jim.

I'll bet anything that he knows the answers to those fifteen questions.  Somehow I don't think he's an independent actor though.

He was walking alongside of the mother of my children as the two of them, and five or six other people, were walking a German Shepherd when I asked her these basic questions about our children, so he obviously heard the questions too.  And his silence to an anguished father was as stony as hers.

Happy happy Sharon as you crawl through your sixties

Hard truisms adhere to the institution of divorce that while sounding like cliches are absolutely true and immutable like No Good Deed Goes Unpunished and A Lie Repeated A Thousand Times Becomes The Truth.  You have to consider the characters involved in divorce, which is inexplicably an adversarial legal process set within an intimate family setting, absolutely inappropriate because the law is driven by the lowest common denominator, hence the saying that The Law Is The Minimum Of Morality.

I wouldn't wish divorce upon anyone, it is a society-sanctioned unbridled assault upon family, character and decency, driven by bottom-dwelling pariahs of the legal profession who provide the most hysterical and unbalanced personality in the mix with a vehicle to vent that person's spleen, while the law firm eviscerates the family's corpus for the lawyers' own gain and they utterly destroy the family members' lifetime associations which provides, I guess, an added rush of heady adrenaline to these bottom-feeding intellectual bullies' pathetic, warped existences.  Divorce is so bad that it exposes western marriage as the failed institution it is, although nobody's listening.

My divorce was final a decade ago yet it still impacts me everyday.  My three children had their wills overborne as impressionable minors by their Mother and her coterie of "professionals" and not a one of my children has spoken to a single family member of mine in over a decade, or me in over seven years.

They are adults now so their actions are upon themselves, but as children they were subjected to the irresistible machinations of the supposedly loving family member who obscenely capitalized upon the position casually given to that self-absorbed parent by mere societal custom, by the court acting upon mere gender perception that the primary caregiver would act "in the best interests of the children," a destructive phrase that has been the cause of untold damage to impressionable young minds.  Acting in conjunction with that narcissistic person were other reprehensible adults, avaricious money-driven or spiteful agenda-driven "professionals" who created the children's current barren tableaux.

Monstrous adults.  We have met the enemy and they are us.