My Bad Choice

There is this guy.

Who couldn't be more useless or forgettable, a crumpled gum wrapper of a guy. Who has oozed through a longish life, outliving better relatives, leaving behind debts and mildly annoyed women, who is oblivious in the most opaque way to his dishonesty and unpleasantness.

His middle name could be Shallow. Or Trite. Or if there were a word that meant ballsy with an overcoating of inadequacy.

He has left no mark on places or communities, done exactly nothing notably good or awful in his life, is so insipidly less-than that people don't remember his name except its barely odd spelling. It's hard to hate him; it takes more energy than his bad acts gin up.

I know him because he contributed half the genes to my child; I was married to him for a brief, smudged two years in my very early twenties. I was confused, on the rebound, and naive. I had not yet learned that hurting someone was sometimes unavoidable (and self-preservative), hadn't learned to say no. He was a salesman, his one middling talent. When my daughter was barely walking, I took back my old job in a law firm, her father hit on our teenage babysitter, and in 1974 we were free.

There is a long list of mildly crappy things he's done. His mother was a nice woman to me and to her granddaughter; she died suddenly three states away when AER was a teenager, and he didn't bother to tell us until after the funeral. He tried the same trick when his father died, but we saw the obituary and AER, home from law school, got dressed in a black suit and heels and walked into the church, surprising him. The trade for his never sending birthday cards was that we didn't have to invite him to parties or graduations or awards. He disappeared from our lives without protest or regret, either his or ours. AER is almost 41 now. Except for that once at Bob's funeral, she hasn't seen or spoken on the phone to her father since she was 12. He has never met or spoken to C, her husband, or their child, the fabulous S.

Except that he has, in recent years, via email, asked her for money, many times. I know. There is no word shameful enough to describe it. She and her husband decided how to handle things, and she told me what was happening, in broad strokes. I understand he is somewhat pitiful and vaguely ill. I still feel guilty - if I had somehow entered the Witness Protection Program, he wouldn't ever have found her. If I hadn't married him, ditto, but, of course, then she wouldn't exist. Since she is one of the finest people anyone knows, I stop short of wishing for that. AER and C manage him with grace, like they do the rest of their lives.

My Bad Choice has recently moved halfway around the world to marry yet again, this time some Pacific Island woman he met through a Christian dating site. Groan. AER loaned/gave him most of the one-way airfare, and we're pretty sure he can't possibly save enough to ever fly back. This last year has felt, finally, like he is gone. He still has AER's email address, but the contacts are rare, the fleecing seems to be over. She and C and I even joked about it, and then joked about knocking on wood. And then discreetly knocked. Whew.

And then.

Last week my website - the other one, the one that uses not my legal name but my first and family names, a name I haven't used since 1972 - the website I had designed two years ago and that I love, where I have written about the people who are the jewels in my life; about the deaths of my father and M, my mother, my brother's terrible, sad story; about my husband and our lives and our long, long love - that website, behind its public pages, showed that My Bad Choice had somehow found it. He wrote a very public comment (that I deleted) on my latest piece. It was smarmy; it presumed; it insinuated that he knows me and people in my life on a level that wasn't even true 40 years ago.
The IP address of the computer he uses to go online has left footprints all over my site, on nearly all of the dozens of essays, 10 or 20 times on several of the pieces. It feels like he is drooling on my words, has invaded my life. It feels obsessive and slimy, like stalking. Now I know why people write under fictitious names online, and maybe I will have to shut my site down and start over, become Rosie North for real.

I don't know. There are other options that I haven't discounted yet. Bold ones, even. I'll talk to AER and figure out what we're going to do that won't make anything worse. But I to write this because this feels like I've been locked out of my home, and I'm sad and furious and alone. First, though, I need to take a shower.