Essay #5---REWRITE!

              A few years ago, back when I was a single mom to my 16 month old baby boy and 3 year old daughter we lived in a 1 bedroom apartment on the back side of this wicked old building on the top floor. I worked a lot of hours at a local restaurant because at the time I wasn’t receiving ANY help what so ever for the kids. My cousin Amanda (and best friend) lived in the downstairs apartment with her boyfriend and she offered to help me out by watching the kids while I went to work. I worked so many hours that basically Amanda was raising my kids. Thank god she was loving to them and they really enjoyed being with her.  I told her that I would do my best to pay her. She really wasn’t bothered, she told me I was family and she didn’t work anyways so she needed something to do. So later on in the story I will give examples of just how much of a back stabbing, conniving, liar she is that lead me to deleting her out of mine and the kids life.

 Some nights when I finished work, I barely made enough tips to put gas in my car but I would do the best I could to pay her for watching the kids. I know that 15 bucks for 8 hours wasn’t very much but she always told me to just keep it and not give her any because she really didn’t mind watching the kids, and she loved having them there. On other nights when I made really good tips I would give her enough to make up for when I didn’t give her much. I would say that I was pretty fair most of the time. I even let them use my car when theirs broke down and bought them I don’t even know how many packs of cigarettes. When tax time finally came, I received a pretty hefty return and she knew exactly how much I got back. This is where everything just started to go downhill and suddenly she thought I was some rich person and became a totally different person that needed to disperse my hard earned cash in her direction! She started telling me about when she use to babysit for her friend she got 3 or 4 dollars an hour per kid and that I needed to start paying her even more because the amount I gave her was a slap in the face. She pretty much made me feel like a piece of crap. What the hell does she expect! Holy crap I was making just about minimum wage and she wanted 8 bucks an hour!

She finally convinced her mother to co-sign with her to buy a house that was down the street and they needed to fix up the house a little like painting and a few repairs here and there. She said she needed close to 300 dollars to do these things and of course being the nice person I am sat right down and wrote out a check for 300 bucks. Only because the fact she repeatedly assured me that they would be paying that back. Many months went by after asking I don’t know how many times for the money. They would always say the same thing; they will have it the next week. Well guess what, they never did and I never intended on paying it back. She didn’t even have the decency to call me and tell me that she did some “figuring” and said that I owed her that money and it wasn’t necessary for her to pay it back, instead she wrote it in a letter. What a conniving little coward she was.

After she moved into her house (before the bullshit letter) she told me that if I let her use my washer and dryer I had in storage that I could do my laundry there instead of the laundry mat. Sounded like a good idea at the time, so I agreed. I even borrowed my father’s pickup to deliver it. When I did find some time to do my laundry she was conveniently not there or she would tell me that I would need to give her some money if I was going to do my laundry there because it made the electric bill sky rocket. When I finally decided to take them back because she wasn’t keeping her end of the deal, she refused to give them back and said that I owed her money. Those became her famous words “I owed her money”. I often wondered how she did her tallying. I mean what the hell is she charging me for?! Parking in her driveway or using her toilet?!

                It all started coming together in my head and realizing that she wasn’t a very nice person at all. She came up with a conniving scheme in her head, which I knew she was capable of doing but never thinking that I was actually, in the end, the one she was targeting. I was her family and her best friend, how could she have done this without feeling badly about herself at all. I don’t know what else I could have possibly done to please her. In return she stabbed me in the back by spreading false rumors about me. This goes to show right here that you cannot trust anybody. In the end she lost the most important things, family, a friend and two kids that loved her all because of greed and money.