My husband took me to Eastbourne on Tuesday. On the way, we stopped off at a lovely little pub for lunch. We hadn’t been there long, when I received a text message from our daughter to say that she had passed her last practical exam (in spite of not having had anyone to practice on!). Our meal tasted even better after that news! The course is over now, although she still has to send in three more bits of work. She has done really brilliantly throughout it: she has really enjoyed it actually and is very sad now that it has finished.
The other bit of good news is that our son and his girlfriend have got the flat they were after. They have signed the contracts and move in on the 23rd. We had to help them with the deposit – but I had a really nice Facebook message from the girlfriend, thanking us for our support, so hopefully she doesn’t feel angry towards us any more!
Daughter moved back home yesterday, after almost three weeks away. We still haven’t seen any of the dreaded insects, although there is still a very small element of doubt in our minds. We have had just one or two of strange red marks that could feasibly be some kind of bite. The problem is, you find yourself imagining things where there is nothing! I even caught myself searching for bugs in the changing cubicle at the gym the other day! 🙂
 This post was actually written last night, but I decided to wait and post it today…...
“Two posts in one day?” I hear you say. “To what do we owe this honour?”.
Well, hubby was out this morning and is out again this evening playing golf (assuming he makes it there in time; he was quite late leaving!). So, I have some time to myself.
The last post was quite long (for which I apologise) and it took me ages to write. It was probably about two weeks ago when I actually began it. It is however really good to have it published at last, even if nobody at all reads it. Having bed bugs (or just the worry that you might have them) is really not the kind of thing you can tell people you meet, as you are likely to find them edging away from you and maybe avoiding seeing you at all [mind you, people seem to do that with me anyway! :-}] It just feels so good to be able to say it on here to people I am not likely to meet (hopefully nobody who knows me has discovered this blog!).
Anyway, back to the real purpose of this post which is to write about my children……
When we first found out about the possible bug problem, I wailed to my husband: “Why can’t we have normal children, who do normal things and have normal relationships? Why does our son have to go out with a homeless girl?”. Anyone who has read earlier blog posts here, will know that up to now our son has only had disastrous attempted internet relationships with girls from places such as Argentina and Siberia. This is the first serious relationship he has had with a girl who has actually lived in this country for a few years and is allowed to stay here! However, nothing can be that simple in this family……. this girl has to be a homeless stripper! (Sometimes I can almost hear the mischievious spirits laughing at me and saying: “Ha! Ha! Did you really thinking anything ‘normal’ was going to happen to you!”)
I am hoping that our son and his girlfriend will get the flat they are after, so they will have a permanent base to live in, rather than moving around all the time. At the moment, they are waiting for the landlord to do a credit check on the girlfriend. If they do get it though, they will need her to be earning too, as son couldn’t manage a similar rent by himself before. She is unemployed at the moment. She was apparently a head chef at a restaurant in Brighton, but left there (I do not know why, but think she was finding it too stressful). At some point, presumably after leaving the restaurant, she worked in a Brighton strip club. I don’t know how long for, but she must have left there for some reason as she is unemployed now (though she has a part-time job doing some sewing and also tries to sell the jewellery she makes). She got a job in another strip club in London a while ago, but only went there once as the people there were not nice to her and the whole atmosphere of the place was bad. However, she is still looking for stripping work and when I last heard she was applying for a job in Bournemouth. I cannot understand anybody wanting to do that work, to be honest…. though I think she is attracted to it because the girls can apparently make a lot of money in one night. Our daughter said that she told her that she liked the feeling of power over men it gives her. I think she may have been abused as a child, so I suppose that may be involved in this somewhere too.
It is lucky for her that she met our son when she did, as he has been supporting her. I do know that she was living with another guy until only just before she met our son, so presumably only became homeless when that broke up. She was apparently intending to move to Bristol for some reason, but then she met our son…… and stayed……..
My husband asked our son the other night if his girlfriend is still upset with us and he says she is, but that he thinks she will come round. He mentioned that she thinks we don’t like her because of our religious beliefs, that we do not approve of them sleeping together. My husband said that no, we know that virtually all young people live together and that even if we ourselves do not think it is right for people with our beliefs, we understand that it is something that happens all the time for those who do not believe. Our son also said that she thinks we don’t like her because she is a stripper. That isn’t true, we have actually only met her two or three times but we did like her. To be honest, stripping is not exactly the ideal occupation that I would choose for the partner of one of our children (I can hear those mischievious spirits laughing again!) – but that does not make me dislike this girl. We all have our own stories, our own reasons for doing things. I guess I would prefer it if she stopped doing that as a job, but that is mainly for her sake and for her own safety. And I cannot help feeling that a woman who really respects herself and thinks she is a worthwhile person would not want to do it. None of that makes me dislke her though.
So, the relationship between hubby and me and son and girlfriend is not wonderful at the moment. And our son and daughter have had no contact at all with each other since son moved out!
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Than, there is our daughter. She has her problems (drink definitely being one of them), but I honestly cannot believe that she has never had a real boyfriend. She is an attractive girl (especially now she is so slim and fit) and has a good heart, for all her problems. There are no boyfriends though – and she so longs for somebody to love her.
She does however seem to be a magnet for older men. This seems to have been a repeating feature in her life since she was only 16. Then, she met J whilst at a Suzanne Vega concert with us and went on to travel around the country with him, watching snooker. He was a bad influence in some ways, encouraging her to drink a lot, but he was definitely very fond of her. She loved him, but not in a romantic way. He was a lot older than her, maybe 20 years older. Eventually they lost touch and he married, though it seems as if he never really loved his wife, although they are still together. He and my daughter are back in touch now and email each other occasionally.
There have been other older men. There was a guy who befriended her a couple of years ago at a restaurant in Hove which held karaoke evenings. He eventually tried to get her to go to his flat on some apparently innocent pretence, but luckily she had a bad feeling about him and never went back to the restaurant (a shame because she enjoyed the karaoke). He sounded really pretty weird! Then there was S, the really strange older guy when she was at the hotel in Surrey; there was definitely something extremely weird about him too and we were really quite glad when she left there. More recently, when staying at the convent she met S, a guy from Oxford in his 50s (who, by a very strange coincidence, shares our surname) and she spent a lot of time with him, enjoying his company during the three days he was staying there. Once again though, she feared that he wanted more, so she made a point of letting him know that she only wanted to be friends.
I have not yet mentioned B. She met this guy (who is 60, but very fit) at the classes at her gym. Our daughter can lack confidence, but it sounds as if she is very bubbly and quite noisy at these classes, really urging the others on. She and this guy really gelled and enjoyed each other’s company. A group at the gym regularly go out for meals together – and she has been out for meals alone with B a few times too. The problem though is that he is married……. and although for a long time our daughter believed that his wife was cool about their friendship, I had my doubts. I think most women would feel threatened in those circumstances.
About a year ago, a group from the gym went away together, to a fitness weekend at a holiday camp. This guy was there, they had both had a few drinks and as the evening was drawing to a close and they were off back to their rooms this guy said to her: “I think I am going to kiss you.” “No you are not” our daughter said, “You are going back to your room now” and he did as he was told.
A couple of months later, she was invited to a meal that his wife was at. Having had a few drinks (again!) our daughter made the huge mistake of making a joke to her friends, saying something like “Ah, but you don’t know what went on (between her and B) at (the holiday camp)”. B’s wife overheard and she reacted angrily, shocking our daughter who still believed that this woman was okay with their relationship. After that, B apparently told his wife that nothing was going on, but that there was no way that he was ending his friendship with our daughter, so everything continued as before. Our daughter has not seen his wife since, but regularly sees his daughter who is friendly to her.
Recently though, life at the gym – the place that has meant so much to our daughter and has really kept her going through some difficult times – has not been so good for her. One woman who was previously friendly to her (in fact, she once said that our daughter was the only one who was friendly to her when she first joined and that she helped her feel part of the group) has now turned against her. It looks as if there may well be a lot of gossip that our daughter and this guy have been having an affair and, you know, people just love to judge. On two or three occasions they have all been out to lunch on a Sunday and our daughter has been excluded. Though it is funny, if it is the supposed affair they are worried about, because they have still included B. And he (the *******!) has gone along to these lunches without her, even though our daughter is really upset at being excluded.
To cap it all, she has had a really bad – but very bizaare – week! First of all, after leaving the convent she received an email from S (the guy she met there) saying that he had fallen in love with her (after being wiith her for just three days!!). Then, just a few days afterwards, B finally confessed that he is in love with her (I just knew that this was going to happen!). Amazingly, almost immediately after that she got an email – out of the blue – from J (her old snooker companion) saying that he loves her and will she marry him!!!!! (She hasn’t actually met J for several years, apart from us briefly running into him at a concert about two years ago)
Our poor daughter! She told all three of these guys early on that she only wanted to be friends and now this has happened, all in the same week! I always believed that she should not see so much of B, but they do get on so well together and she regards him – sadly – as her only true friend. I think she realises that she can no longer continue her friendship with him now though. Her life at the gym, the one thing she has regarded as being something positive in her life, is collapsing around her – just at a time when her course is coming to an end and her life is uncertain. She is at our Greek teacher’s house until Thursday. We spoke to her on the phone last night and she sounded really, really depressed. I worry about her.
She has another exam tomorrow (Tuesday), a practical in which she has to teach a whole class. She is supposed to have been practising with her ‘friends’, but has not been able to do so because there is nobody she could ask.
Certainly, nothing is ever ‘normal’ in my children’s life. And you just never know which disaster will happen next!!!!
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It is now the next day. B went to see our daughter last night and he said that he still wants the friendship to continue. I think it is a dangerous situation and that she should really not see this guy at all, for the sake of his marriage. I do not think she will do that though: she is so lonely and has no real friends (my heart really breaks when I think of that). The one piece of good news to do with the situation is, I suppose, that B is about to go away with his wife for two weeks. Our daughter told him to have a good time and to spoil his wife. I hope that he takes her advice……..
Life has gone completely crazy in the past few weeks and I have been extremely stressed out……
Even before we went to Croatia, I was feeling pretty down and depressed. Just about everything had been getting me down and I was bursting into tears far too often. The visit to Croatia itself was okay, but not one of our best. The weather wasn’t wonderful: there was only one day when it rained all day but it was much cooler than it would normally be in May. Most years it is possible to swim in May, but not this year. We got the tail end of the Italian earthquake one night too: it woke me up with a start, although I had no idea what had woken me until I heard other people talking about it at breakfast.
Hubby got his implant finished at the dentist’s, although even that was not without incident! The dentist had to take an impression and the stuff he used blocked my husband’s mouth so he couldn’t breathe. The dentist just told him to breathe through his nose, but he said he couldn’t even do that! He leaned forward and to the side, as he found that easier – and once the offending item had set, the dentist had to remove it without being able to see what he was doing properly! Once that problem was over and done with, he added insult to injury by dropping the temporary tooth in my husband’s mouth. Luckily, my poor husband somehow managed to avoid either choking on it or swallowing it!
We were both very tired most of the time that we were there. I think it was not until the last couple of days that I myself did feel just a little bit better. Unfortunately though, on the day we were leaving I woke up with a runny nose and feeling really awful. There had been a cold/flu bug going round the hotel, so I obviously caught it from one of the other guests. I did not feel up to the long day, with the flight home and then the drive from Stansted airport back down to Sussex. The worst thing was though, we had booked to see one of our favourite singers (Martyn Joseph) back in Brighton that evening and our daughter was meeting us there. We only just made it in time for the start of the concert, but by that time I was feeling really rough. The funny think was, the last time we saw Martyn was last November and on that occasion I felt unwell and had to lie down on the floor immediately the concert had ended – and I was really worried that the same thing was going to happen again! I managed to just about survive, but was (unusually for me!) so glad to get back home and fell straight into bed – where I spent spent the best part of the next week (which happened to coincide with the few days that Summer decided to pay England a visit) .
I think I mentioned in the post I wrote in Rovinj that our son was in Hungary while we were there. He returned to England a couple of days before us and installed his girlfriend here in our absence (although he never asked us if he could do so.) They slept on the floor of our lounge (please remember this fact, dear reader: it might appear to be an insignificent fact, but as is actually quite crucial to my story!).
On Tuesday 29th June, exactly one week after we got back home, our son came to us and asked if his girlfriend could stay here that Thursday, as she had nowhere else to stay (we had told them she could only stay when nobody else could have her). He mentioned that a couple of friends who had been letting her stay were now no longer amenable to it. One, who was previously very helpful, has understandably got fed up that the situation has stayed unchanged for so long. She may also have been unhappy to see photos on Facebook of the two of them obviously enjoying themselves (our daughter told us that, while we were still away, the girlfriend was quite angry because another friend who had loaned her some money saw these photos and asked for the money back!).
Then our son told us that the other person who now no longer wanted the girlfriend to stay was a guy who lived in a flat in a house where she had also previously lived (although in another flat, not with him!). The reason was that the flat has a problem with bed bugs….. a return of a previous problem which had affected both flats for a whole year when son’s girlfriend lived there, but which they had thought had been completely cleared up. Son was most indignant that the guy was banning all guests for this reason….. and his girlfriend apparently said to the guy that she didn’t care about the bugs, that she would rather sleep there than in a shop doorway!
Well….. as soon as we heard this, alarm bells rang in our head. This girl had slept in our house while we were away, having previously stayed in a house with bed bugs! I remember reading a bit about bed bugs in a magazine, probably over 20 years ago, and being horrified to learn that these things existed. Many years ago, we also learned from another family member that hubby’s late sister (the reiki one) had stayed with her partner in a holiday cottage and transported the bugs back home with them – although we never learned any further details such as how long it had taken them to get rid of the problem. I also saw a TV programme about the bugs a year or so ago and learned how hard it can be to get rid of them. So, I was not best pleased to hear what our son had told us!
My husband and I immediately became worried and son was told that the girlfriend couldn’t stay. We told him not to tell our daughter, as we knew it would just freak her out. Worse was to come though, as after our daughter had gone to work the very next morning, he told us that he had woken in the night and found one of these bugs on his chest. All he had done (stupidly) was put it in a tissue which he threw in the wast paper bin. When hubby looked the next day, the bug was still there – and still alive! He attempted to squash it – and it popped!
Panic stations! I am afraid I freaked out at the thought of these things being in my house! Hubby immediately called a pest control guy who came round that lunch time. I was so upset at the thought of having these things, that I stayed down the garden and refused to see the pest control guy. He confirmed that the bug in our jar was indeed a bed bug (and that it was apparently still alive, even though hubby had ‘popped’ it) but, although he searched thoroughly everywhere, he could not find any evidence that that there were any more of the bugs here. He said that all we could do was watch and wait.
Our son also had apparently spent one night in the house where the bugs were and, as he had picked up one bug from somewhere, our worry was, of course, that he had brought back more – or would do so in the future. Even though they were now banned from staying there, his girlfriend has stayed in many different places and may have moved the bugs around. She had bits of luggage spread round different houses, so could have imported the bugs to other places where she stayed too.
The pest control guy suggested that we get our son to remove all his clothes in a room with a hard floor and to wash them immediately. That night when he came home, I was alone here and he was very reluctant to do this. He kept making jokes about the bugs and I could tell that he was not taking the problem seriously. When I didn’t laugh when he made a joke about bugs being in the shower (which very kindly went wrong at the same time, along with the central heating having a couple of mad moments when it refused to turn off, plus the washing machine playing up a bit; whoever it was who said it never rains but it pours really did know what he was on about!!!!), he told me that I had no sense of humour. That made me really cross, because he hardly ever laughs when we make jokes!
Anyway, when my husband became aware of our son’s bad attitude, he was very cross. My husband has quite a temper on him when roused and often ends up saying things he regrets afterwards. There was a very big row, during the course of which son unintentionally shouted out something about the bug he had found. Our daughter overheard what he said and – as expected – freaked out big time! Things were so bad here, with our daughter sleeping hardly at all because she was so worried about the bugs, that on the Friday my husband eventually decided that he was going to tell our son he couldn’t stay here any more. I really did not want that to happen, although I must admit I did not know what else we could do. Son stayed away that night, so hubby texted him the good news the next day.
The next day – June 2nd – was a Saturday and was the start of the 4-day Queen’s jubilee holiday. There was a big Fat Boy Slim concert in Brighton and daughter was going. She had stupidly got my husband to order six tickets, thinking she would easily sell the others. In the end, she got a gay male friend (a workmate of our son) to go and, at the last minute, hubby sold two further tickets to the daughter of a guy from church and her boyfriend. The other two tickets remained unsold. All this caused more stress for our daughter (albeit largely through her own fault) – especially as there was a lot of hassle unvolved in actually meeting up with the girl and her boyfriend to give them the tickets. Our daughter actually didn’t enjoy the gig very much – and afterwards she went off drinking in Brighton with her companion and came back somewhat worse for wear. Unfortunately though, the next day she had arranged to meet an old friend she hadn’t seen for a few years for lunch in Brighton (they used to work on the pier together years ago). She had a lovely time with her, so much so that when she got off the bus near our home she didn’t want it to end and went straight into the pub.
Usually, my husband frets and worries when daughter is out, but that night it was me who fortunately kept ringing her mobile until she eventually answered. I knew at once that she was extremely drunk – and when hubby found out that she was in a pub about 5 minutes away, he went to get her. She could hardly walk and virtually collapsed in the hall. Once, she attempted to get up and narrowly avoided really injuring herself. Hubby spent much of the night with her in the hall, until he could see that she was able to walk around okay. Of couse, she was then very sick.
I was so very upset. This was too much, coming on top of all the worry about the bugs. This was possibly the most drunk we have seen her, or certainly one of the worse occasions. I always react badly when she is drunk like this and I usually feel extremely angry with her. I actually feel that I hate her while it is happening – although of course I don’t, I love her, but just cannot bear to see her like that. Surely, no mother could bear to see her daughter in such a state? Anyway, she recovered she is saying at the moment that she is not going to touch any alcohol at all from now on. That is a big improvement, as up to now she has always convinced herself that the next time she will just have one or two. I just hope and pray that it lasts!
To get back to the bugs, son suddenly walked in on the Tuesday evening (at the end of the Jubilee break) to pick up some stuff, It was the first time we had seen him after my husband texted him to say he couldn’t stay here and – although his initial response to the text (and accompanying email) had been okay, now he was extremely angry and cold. One think he said which annoyed us was that the bug might not have come from him or his girlfriend, but that we could have brought some bugs back from Croatia with us. It is true that it is possible that anybody can pick up these bugs, in any place – but the fact that our son was the one who had found the bug on him, on the very day that he had told us his girlfriend had stayed somewhere where there was a definite infestation, meant it would have been an amazing coincidence if the bugs had come from somewhere else! In any case, where it came from doesn’t matter: what does matter is how to stop more coming in here! I was really upset at our son’s attitude and was crying, but he wasn’t interested….. all he cared about was the fact that he was late for band practice! I felt heartbroken. I didn’t really agree that my husband should tell our son to leave, but I am probably the one most upset about it!
Daughter continued to stress about the bugs. The coming week was her week off college and she had a very important piece of work to prepare for the mext Monday. The end of the week was approaching and she hadn’t even begun to start the work, nor was she sleeping much at night. My husband said that perhaps she should go away – and I suddenly had a brainwave! I remembered the old school friend I reconnected with a while ago saying that, after her daughter died and her marriage split up, she came down to Brighton and spent a week in a guest house run by a convent the other side of Brighton. Daughter rang to confirm they had space – and she was then duly dispatched to the convent!
She loved it at the convent and met lots of nice people, both nuns and other guests. She worked hard over the weekend and just – but only just – got her task completed. She emailed the work she had done to us on the Sunday night and we printed it out and drove over to deliver the finished project to her at 10 p.m, in torrential rain! It was all worth it, as she found out by the end of the next day that she had passed that part of the course! She spent the whole week at the convent and has now moved on to our Greek teacher’s house to look after her animals (this was pre-arranged months ago). She is due to come back here on Thursday. This week is actually the final week of the course (although she has some more work to do and send in later). It is so good that she has done so well in the course so far. She is really down at the moment though (more about that in another post later).
As for the bugs, we still have no evidence that we have got any here. We have continued to look for the tell-tale signs of their existence, but have found nothing. My husband and I have had one or two strange little red marks, but the trouble is you get to look at every little blemish and imagine it is a bed bug bite. The worrying thing is though that people often do not react strongly to the bites for some time and so they often do not realise they have a problem until there are hundreds of the things in residence. At least we are on the look-out! With both our children away, my husband has been sleeping upstairs, moving from our son’s room to our daughter’s to see if there is anything biting him there. I have stayed in our bedroom which is downstairs. We were very worried at first because when we initially found out about the bugs, my husband was sleeping in the lounge because I had had flu and was coughing a lot – and it was the lounge where our son and his girlfriend slept for a couple of nights when we were away!
Reading about these bugs is a revelation (though one I would rather not have to know about!). Even with treatment with horrible chemicals, these things often come back! Some places in the U.S. have a veritable epidemic: Cincinatti apparently has a particularly bad problem. Here in the UK, cases of infestation are reported to have increased by 500% recently. I am not sure I could survive if we did have these things – and I KNOW our daughter couldn’t!
We have seen our son once recently, very briefly. His attitude seems to have improved somewhat now, as he understands how stressed out our daughter was and how life would have been impossible with him here. Apparently, his girlfriend is still pretty angry with us though. She still hasn’t had an offer for her flat in Hungary, but they are after a flat together in Brighton at the moment, with the same landlord who owned our son’s previous flat.
I just cannot believe that all this has happened. I am still really upset about the situation with our son. And I am still worried about the bugs (though less than before).
Holes In The Sky 