Why I Hate Shannon

I remember it like it was yesterday, the moment when I lost all respect for Shannon, saw what she was. It was a year or two after my husband's ex-wife had sent their children to us with such a raging lice infestation that I had to wash everything in the house. His daughter's infestation was so bad that we had to cut her hair to get it under control. She had been trying to grow her hair long for over a year. I felt so terrible for her that I had all of my hair cut off, too.

The following autumn, my daughter's father, recently returned from over six years of abandoning her, took up with Shannon. When I first met her, the three dollar bill alarms went off in my head. I held my tongue. Mistake. About a year later, he married her, much to my chagrin. My daughter was in the wedding. Shortly afterward, I gave him the oak kitchen table his mother had given me, in hopes of my daughter dining at it with her dad and stepmom (never happened). It was the table he grew up at, and he had lost pretty much everything while being an irresponsible asshole for seven years.

A few months after their ginormous circus wedding, complete with a forty-year-old woman in a Disney princess gown that wouldn't have been appropriate on a thirty-year-old, his past caught up with him when he got pulled over on his way to pick our daughter up from school to take her to the dentist. He called me and said he knew he was going to jail. Something about not showing up to court for something stupid he did while I was raising our daughter with no assistance whatsoever.

My husband was a member of the State Bar of Georgia in good standing (still is), and he wrote a letter to the court on my daughter's father's behalf. I took it to his bride. We were standing on Fleming Street at the corner of Henry Street, outside her mother's house. When I was about to leave, out of the blue, she burst out with, "Just tell me it was only the one time!"

I suppose I'm guilty of lying to her because I replied, "I don't know what you're talking about," then turned on my heel and left so I wouldn't beat the shit out of her there in the street. She was referring to my daughter's conception, wanting to negate the love that brought a child into the world to fulfill her sick fantasy of being the only woman her husband ever loved, even though she was his second wife. (He and I never married.) I should have said something, should have told her how fucked up and selfish it was to even want such a thing, much less say it out loud. Should have said something about how disrespectful it is to say to a child's mother, "Tell me your child was the result of a one-night stand." But I didn't. However, I knew what she was then, and I lost every semblance of respect for her in that moment.

My daughter was never welcome in their home. She never had a meal at their house. They did nothing for her on her birthday or at Christmas. They were the worst, most neglectful excuses for parents I had ever encountered, too busy playing at being teenagers in love to give a shit about anyone else. They bought a purebred dog and posted pictures of it on social media as if it were their child, all while neglecting the human child they kept out of their lives. I was disgusted by them, utterly appalled.

Fast forward through fifteen years of nothing from these two assholes. My daughter's father stopped being an asshole, or rather, stopped being the biggest asshole on the planet, and began to give a shit (sorry, Shanny) about his daughter. She was drinking herself to death, and her favorite thing to do when she got drunk was to emotionally and psychologically abuse me.

After the first truly excruciating session of her telling me, countdown fashion, what an absolute failure I was as a parent, blending truth, half-truth, and complete fabrications in order to destabilize me and hurt me as badly as possible, I called him for the first time in the ten years since we moved to Charlotte. For the first time ever, he was supportive of his own volition.

Some of you know what happened. We began talking frequently, including hashing through our own past, and we both fell back in love with each other. Stupid of me, but hearts are ungovernable. After jumping through about fifty thousand hoops and moving entire mountain chains, I got my daughter to rehab outside of Asheville. Her father and I confessed our feelings for each other about a month into her sojourn in Fletcher. She was home from rehab both of the times we saw each other, totaling about an hour and a half in each other’s physical presence. The bulk of the affair was talk, text, and email. And my stories, graphically sexual fiction starring the two of us.

I was honest with my husband, hid nothing from him. He understood and supported me through the whole thing, knew about the rendezvous in advance, knew about the stories but chose not to read them. Oh, yeah—it was through this that I began writing again after twenty-five years of not writing. Judge me all you want; go ahead and feel morally superior to me because I didn't hold back when I started feeling alive again for the first time in I don't know how long. Congratulate yourself for your fidelity and know that I reject your judgment of me.

I ended it because warning bells were going off. After I ended it, Saint Shannon went spelunking through her husband's email and found everything in his sent folder and trash folder. Dumbass didn't know that deleting an email from an inbox was insufficient track-covering. I understand that the fight was spectacular. The morning after it all fell down, he called to warn me that she had been snooping and we were busted. He also told me she was going to call me that night from his phone and to expect her to be terrible.

She was lame, spat my name at me like it was the world's most venomous poison about a dozen times in the 51-second call. I said eleven words, including hello. I knew before the call ended that they would divorce—she accidentally revealed that to me by referring to her husband by his name, first and last, instead of taking verbal ownership of him and calling him her husband. Telling.

The decision to divorce took several months. He disclosed her ultimatum to me. According to him, she demanded that he call me, on speakerphone for her listening pleasure, and tell me that he never loved me and that our daughter was a mistake he regrets (present tense). I was horrified and told him that if he did it, he'd be the one making it true and to follow his conscience. He chose divorce over verbally disowning his daughter and denying that he and I meant something to each other.

Fast forward two months to the divorce. He told our daughter that he and Shannon were getting divorced, but he didn't explain the truth; instead, he left the page blank. So when our daughter called or texted Shannon, Shannon had full control of the narrative and distorted it to vilify me. After convincing my daughter that her father and I "used her recovery to have an affair," Shannon sent her every salacious email and document in her possession, all purloined, when my daughter was six months out of rehab, as if it’s safe for anyone to read porn about their parents. Shannon couldn't take my emails, stories, and poems into a courtroom, so she weaponized them as best she could. She didn't send them to my husband—he already knew, and that wouldn't cause any damage, so she didn't bother with it.

It's been ten months. My daughter hates me and won't allow me to see my grandson, whom I kept every other weekend, some months every weekend, sometimes most of the week, since he was born. There’s a bedroom in my house that I have to keep sealed off so I don’t constantly see my grandson’s toys and books. There’s an empty swingset rusting in my backyard. My daughter called me a whore on Facebook, has slandered me to my family, to her son's father and his family, and she spent Christmas with her ex-stepmother last year, but what hurt the most was her statement that I’m a joke as a person and a worse joke as a mother.

I'm not okay, and every day I fight myself to hold my tongue so I don't say something I regret to my daughter, whom I've had to block. She's drinking again (and blaming me for that), and she's an abusive monster when she's drunk. That's why I hate Shannon. She didn't include my daughter in her marriage to her father, then she dragged her into the divorce to turn her against both of her parents. She's not above using a child to get revenge on an adult, regardless of how much it hurts the child or how fragile the child is. My daughter is an adult, but she's still my child, and my grandson is the one who's been hurt the most--he lost his grandmother.

I haven't done anything to retaliate, aside from anonymously sending her roses with a bad rhyme for Valentine’s Day (I hope she kept them by her bed); however, I have a lot of ideas . . .

*author note: It has been ten months since Shannon turned my daughter against me. I’m drowning in grief.