My intent on this blog is to have an outlet to share my painful story, and I hope I can do so with humor, with honesty, with self-deprecation, and with compassion.  My writing has been on hold because of fear and because I don’t want to cause my children any pain.  Ironic, right?  They have completely abandoned me and publicly humiliated me, but I only want them to be happy and healthy.  You know what that’s called?  That’s called being a mom.

I’d like to address my username and the title of this particular entry.  Throughout my twenty-four year marriage, if my husband and I were having any sort of disagreement, he would say, “You’re kuh-razy.  You’re kuh-razy.”  He would say it in front of the children and in a diabolically calm way, the way he said everything in order for people to believe that nothing could ever be his fault.  “No, not Jay?  Jay, who speaks so softly?  Jay, the one who goes to synagogue every Saturday?”

Jay’s maternal grandmother lived in a psychiatric facility before we even started dating; he said she was bi-polar and crazy.  She wasn’t kuh-razy, she was apparently just crazy.  Shortly after Jay and I met in college, he planned on introducing me to his parents on Family Day.  He told me that his dad was a great guy, but that his mom was crazy.  He shared that, when he was young, he and his brothers used to beg the dad to divorce the mom because she was crazy.  Clearly, Jay had his prevailing word of choice for any woman who was even the slightest bit challenging …

When my parents moved to Florida in October of 1993, I was 6 and a half months pregnant with my son.  My dad had just turned 60 and my mom was only 56, and, like most grandparents, they missed us terribly.  My parents paid, like they always did, for the 4 of us to fly down on Thanksgiving, and, knowing that Jay’s parents were in Florida also, my mother was going to make a reservation for everybody to go out to dinner.  Jay’s mom, who was difficult and with whom Jay was not very close, said that she would make dinner in their condo for everybody.  This, believe me, would not be a gesture without consequence, so my mother and I were keeping to the original plan of going out to dinner.

About a week before Thanksgiving, very late in the evening, I heard Jay on the phone with his mother.  “Mom, we’re going to have to keep the plan of going out to dinner for Thanksgiving.  Ever since Bobby and Al moved down to Florida last month, Bobby has been making Al’s life a living hell because she misses the kids so much.  She’s crazy.”