Left for Garbage

hits keep coming nightly via the Charlotte Hope show and many others, I want to tell my side of things, mostly about me and Margaret.
    Yes, Margaret and I separated for a month last year. I stayed with my parents, who live an hour away, until we worked things out. What couple doesn’t have occasional problems? I had lost a lot of money in an Internet scam, and , yes, things could be better between my wife and me, but is this really of interest to all the people out there, and if so, then why so? Don’t they have any problems of their own or does hearing about ours make theirs seem smaller?
    Sure, the dynamics in our hous e changed after Deeley was born - there was a new person in the house, a little girl who stole all our hearts. Sure, there are things that annoy me about Denise, and things that annoy me about Margaret, but the troubles in my marriage have nothing to do with any of this and won’t help us to find Deeley.
    The career I once had - the one Margaret forced me to give up many years ago - would have made a vast difference in my financial value to my household, but every step of the way I gave in to my wife. I’ve always done what she wanted me to do, what she thought was best. I trust her advice, though often it’s not the best advice. She once said, ‘Work with your father, it pays more than your deputy’s job’, so I worked with my father and came close to destroying my relationship with him. She said, ‘Try running your own business’, so I ran my own auto shop and went bankrupt. She said, ‘Let’s move down south, closer to my parents, so we packed up our belongings and moved to Florida with our two young kids and never found another job that paid over minimum wage again. It was easier for Margaret with her R.N. license to get the better job, but I’ve always done my part and am vastly sorry for times I didn’t listen to my own instincts, but that’s personal business.
    Last year I broke my leg, for the third time in two years , and until I could find another job, I went on disability and I even got a decent settlement of nearly forty thousand dollars from the company whose scaffolding I’d fallen off of. I used all of the money towards getting us caught up, and despite being in a cast up to my hip and having to use crutches, I was feeling better about myself as a man. Margaret said she felt better about me as a man, too. Then about six months ago, when Margaret and Denise started fighting constantly, I sensed a foreboding, ominous atmosphere surrounding us in our own home. I had no one to talk to about it, even Seel, as I didn’t want to trouble him with my fears.
    Denise hardly spoke to me at all and Margaret was always at work. It seemed like, while our finances should have been better, they were getting worse again instead. We discovered that Denise was spending more money than Margaret and I put together. It turned out that she was using Margaret’s credit cards and running up huge bills on them without our permission, and taking food from our freezer and running out to friends’ houses to have barbecues and parties.
    Finally I confronted her about it and , predictably, she got mad and defensive, but that night she gave Margaret a check for five thousand dollars to pay back some of the money. Margaret got all teary-eyed and asked me if I didn’t feel like a worm for “Hounding our daughter for money I should have been able to provide for our family.”
    I guess I felt like a worm but mostly because I let Margaret talk to me that way. A few days later, of course, we found out the check was no good and that, worse, all the checks we’d written because of it, for luxuries like our mortgage and the car payment, had bounced, and that the shit had hit the fan. Interestingly, though, it all became my fault. Fault and responsibility, as Margaret has taught me, are, after all, a matter of interpretation.
    Denise never ‘stole’ from us. She took liberties because she’s our daughter, a young daughter, who like any other couple’s young daughter, likes the mall. Meantime, before we had even gotten the news about our own bank account problems, we’d learned about the money Denise stole from her grandmother, Margaret’s mother, Ruthie, who, like Margaret, forgave Denise for it. Nor was there a fight about the social security check Denise stole from her grandpa who is in a nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients, and as Margaret explained, Denise was truly sorry for these