It’s easy to forget that your kids have not been in your life forever. When they’re almost 14 it feels like they’ve always been there, rolling their eyes and pointing out just how old you are. Granted, I recall life before Alex, but I don’t always clue in to the fact that things happened that he has no idea about.

I got home at one in the morning and he was still up. It took a few minutes for me to clue in that he was waiting for me.

Someone gave my brother my phone number and Alex had a nice long talk with him. There’s a reason my brother was not given my phone number, so I’ll be having an unpleasant discussion with someone soon. Alex knows there’s tension between my siblings and I but he answered the phone and what was he going to do, hang up on his uncle?

Supposedly, my brother wanted to know how Char is doing. Before the conversation ended he made a point of telling Alex to tell me that Kathy says hello. He apparently drove the point home. “Kathy really wants him to know she’s thinking about him and says hello.” My brother discussed Kathy at length, telling Alex how funny she is, and how pretty, and that they’re very happy together.

The problem with all that is that Kathy is my ex-wife, and Alex knew nothing about her. I did not intend to hide from him the fact that I was married for ten years to someone else. It just never came up. Char and I don’t sit around discussing my former wife, why would we? But Alex was delivering this message from an uncle he doesn’t know well enough to understand the mind games he plays, and of course he wanted to know who Kathy was.

He gets that I was in my thirties when I married his mother. He gets that I probably had a life in my twenties, but he never guessed that I spent it married to someone else.

I answered the questions that followed this revelation to him. No, I don’t have other kids that he’s never met and I didn’t leave my ex-wife for Char even though we married a year later, and I absolutely did not marry her just because she was pregnant. I didn’t know she was when I proposed. I was not the one who wanted to end my first marriage but I was relieved when Kathy did. We got married when we were only 22 and had started dating when we were his age; she is why I won’t allow him to date until he’s 16.

In all this he had to learn that not only was I married before but that his uncle is a head case and no matter what he was saying, he doesn’t have a clue where Kathy even is. They are not together; she is happily married to someone else and years ago moved several states away from my brother. She is just the thing he tries to goad me with, but I don’t know why.

My son’s disappointment is understandable. I am not supposed to have ever loved anyone but his mother and I certainly was never supposed to have been married to someone else. I’m not sure how I can make him understand that it’s like apples and oranges. My first marriage pales in comparison to my marriage to Char. I loved Kathy, but I *LOVE* Char. Somehow I have to make him understand that my life before his mother is not a betrayal to her, because right now that’s what it feels like to him.

He was up when I got up at six this morning and wanted to go to the hospital with me, but because of Char’s morning PT I had to tell him he needed to wait. I felt like crap for it but she needs to be focused on that. I promised I would call him when she was done and if she was up to it his grandfather would bring him over and I would leave them alone so that they could talk. And they did; while I went into work which gave them a good two hours without even a chance I could eavesdrop.

He is, she told me later, more than a little disappointed. He understands, yet he doesn’t. He’s surprised that she’s not bothered by the fact that I was married when we met. He’s not sure what bothers him the most, that I have an ex-wife or that he never knew about her. The only thing remotely funny in his how he feels right now was that he asked her quite seriously if she realized that if I was married to someone else that probably meant I’d had sex with someone else once or twice.

Yes, Alex, just once or twice.

We had dinner tonight with the kids in her room, and he was very quiet through the whole thing. When I got home tonight he was in his room and obviously did not feel like talking. I know I have to give him time to digest everything, but after that I’m not sure where I go with this.

First thing is bitch slapping the person who gave my brother my phone number and the blog URL. He may have meant well, but there’s a list of reasons we don’t speak. I can tack this onto the bottom. It’s probably number 3,000.