I woke up to a smiling preschooler, already begging me to snuggle & watch cartoons before the sun was ready to rise. The hardest part of single motherhood is the hours. Sunday began at 5:15, about 4 hours before I’d hoped; though I could not beat the company. With a bed full of Barbie’s, blankets and my favorite tiny person, my life is complete.
I’ve been single since her father and I imploded, just before her birth nearly 4 years ago.
I’ve never been happier.
I’ve also never stopped hearing from women who’ve crossed paths with Thomas Murray, and today I heard from the forty-third. As usual, she is articulate, educated & well spoken. She’s a mother. She’s confident, self-assured and funny. A helluva catch, if you will.
More importantly, she has good friends. I learned my most valuable lesson from my first date in hell with Thomas Murray: when your heart is lonely, it stops listening to your brain. All the years of hard-won lessons and painful experiences didn’t help me in the slightest when my heartstrings were professionally manipulated. Rose colored glasses don’t come with bifocals, and it took a village to bring me home safely, and an army to put the pieces back together.
I had friends I didn’t even know. Kind strangers who’d known the vortex of evil I’d walked into, were nice enough to help me see the light at the end of the scary tunnel I’d been lured down.
I’ve come really close to deleting this blog a trillion times, because it can be hard to have all these stupid mistakes, in print. Never mind the fallout that ensued, including the existence of the wife, his daughter finding several blogs referring to the nightmare (and apologizing for him), or the dozens of broken hearts who’ve stumbled upon this mistake of mine, only to realize that my nightmare was theirs as well.
Several women have had a sinking feeling, googled him, and found my blog, That Precarious Gait or my favorite single dad’s giant warning for all of womankind.
It’s sad to see that some of the worst things, never change. Like men who lie for the sake of lying.
Men looking for a healthy relationship, do not lie. This is a big lesson I’ve learned. Sometimes the truth hurts, and sometimes you’d rather not have the full, painful, brutal details… but small lies are GIANT RED FLAGS. If you catch him in little contradictions, imagine the stuff you don’t know about.
#43 actually called him out, and told him she’d read the blogs. To which he replied:
T-“Yeah we saw each other, but it didn’t work out and she wasn’t happy about that. She just has sour grapes. I never saw any of the other women on there.” He also forwarded her emails stating he’d sued me.
I laughed a little when she told me, though the farmer in me wanted to defend any potential grapes I may grow in the future. My grapes are not, nor would they ever stand a chance of being; sour. The other 42 women can speak for themselves, as they are a brave and brilliant bunch.
I must admit… I am categorically disinterested in the male population, and enjoying the hell out of all the freedom being single offers me. I don’t have any latent jealously or tragic feelings of unrequited love gone wrong. If anything, I am embarrassed that I was so reckless, gullible and accepting of whatever the douchebag stork dropped on my porch.
Flying to Puerto Rico for a first date sounds crazy, because it was. Stupid, reckless and dangerously insane. For me, the greatest shame came from how easily the truth came to light with a little internet browsing after I returned.
I should thank him for one thing. He taught me its OK to bail at the first red flag. In fact, it shows how mature you really are. The older you get, the more you learn how valuable those red flags really are.
Any man who gets mad because you Googled him, has something he’s hiding from you. Period. Any man who gives you a fake name to keep you from Googling him, is REALLY hiding something from you. Let’s refer to it as the open phone policy. If a man is completely open and honest with you, his phone is your phone. Any time you need it, or want to look through it, it’s yours. Real honesty is reflected by his transparency.
If that phone is locked with a password he wont give you? You’re crazy if you think he isn’t hiding something.
The same holds true for men your friends warn you about. They’re right. Listen to them. Or don’t… but don’t whine about the devastating consequences of ignoring them.
Here’s a little list of life lessons I lessons I picked up in Puerto Rico.
#1. NEVER date a man your friends don’t trust. Eventually you’ll find out how right they were to warn you. Don’t volunteer your happy life as a teething biscuit for a boy who never learned to behave himself.
#2 NEVER stay at a date when a man stands you up, is egregiously late, or LIES and says he didn’t know where the restaurant/airport he invited you to, was located. Men worth your time, will be ON TIME. Or early. No exceptions.
#3 NEVER date a man who lies about his kids. Um. This is beyond disgusting. If you’re talking to a guy and find out he had a kid he failed to mention, that should be the ultimate deal-breaker for every mom.
#4 Same goes for the unsuspecting wife he hasn’t mentioned. NEVER date a man who’s lied about having or has cheated on, a wife. You are simply the continuation of a bad story. Put that shitty novel down and walk away while you can still take your self respect with you.
#5 NEVER date a man who has several blogs devoted to outing him for the lying, cheating, threatening charlatan he has shown himself to be. Once you know better, you do better… and all that jazz.
I could go on and on, but I just don’t give a shit about a dime store douchebag old man who can’t keep his withered old penis in one relationship. So he’s still reading my blog, 5 years later? He’s still scamming women and making up grandiose tales about a sad little life spent hurting the only folks genetically engineered to love him.
I don’t write sad stories anymore. Fuck off, Thomas.
Or should I call you Jax?
