Blood

 Earlier this month I donated blood for the 3d time this year, the 132d time lifetime. INOVA loves my O positive blood.

I received a $10 Walmart gift card for my effort, the third such reward gift card I have received in the last three years for donating blood. Next winter I'll put one gift card in each birthday card for my three estranged adult sons and send it to the best address I have for each one, two in NC (their mother lives there and my sons are nearby because they are all, obvious to me, still in thrall of this, in my opinion, covert narcissist with pathological lying tendencies) and one in Richmond, I think, if he and his achieving wife are still married.  This last child I have never had an adult address for so I just send his card to my house addressed to him in care of me, and then I throw it in his box in my basement which he can have if he comes to get it or upon my demise unless the executors of my estate pitch those three boxes (one for each of my children) in the trash first.

I hope the cards will benefit each of them in some small degree. I also hope that my overarching message to these three special people will resonate with them to some degree that volunteering is beneficial to society as a whole.

 The last I heard from or of any of them was in 2007 when the youngest one was ready for college and he wrote to me ("Dear Peter") asking me to provide for the full payment of all his tuition and fees for the four years he attended, which I did. I was sad he didn't let me know if he actually graduated, although I know full tuition and all fees for eight full semesters were paid for over the next five years (I guess he took a year off, and hopefully he finished up by the end of his eighth semester). Basically he also went to two years of prep boarding school on money my mother left to me to be used for his benefit--which his mother sued me for (she was eventually assessed costs and penalties by the court of almost $50,000 for bringing forth unjustified and harassing litigation) and then used it anyway to get him out of state his last two years of high school because, I believe, she couldn't or didn't want to handle the little darling anymore and so she packed him off without even telling me about it; and then never has a single word been said by any of these three boys (now men) to any Lamberton in over two decades expressing any appreciation or acknowledgement in any form for my mother's (their grandmother) generosity towards them as they each received about a $100,000 fund from her in custodial accounts to be used for their benefit.

Children & Disappointments

 My dad used to joke that children are an expensive and gut wrenching form of constant entertainment.  As for me, I paid for child support for my three children for more than a decade at a rate that far exceeded my ability to pay given my liquidity and astounding legal bills at the time and expressed my love for them by physically presenting myself at their mother's curb for my court-ordered visitation every other Friday and every holiday only to suffer the humiliation of being met with an unanswered cell phone call during those moments and the regret that my covert narcissist (in my opinion) ex-wife was teaching them as juveniles to be as consumist scofflaws as herself in adhering to judges' orders and the societal norms of humanity in the four of them's disdain and contempt for mandated visitation.

However, love persists.  I had hoped that one or more of the three of them would have showed up to begin the first day of the rest of our lives after all these years of silence and unjustifiable estrangement for lunch today on this Presidents Day holiday, but being under the domineering and destructive thrall, still, of their deeply flawed mother is still too great for these three strapping men in their thirties to have exercised any decency yet towards their other parent and his family.

It was a nice day for being a February day in Virginia in the midst of an historic pandemic and I parked by the front door of the Lost Dog Cafe and at noon entered the premises, looked around but didn't recognize anybody there and ordered an Italian Pie and returned to my vehicle to await its preparation, watching the ingress and egress into and out of the restaurant the whole time.  Around 12:35 the establishment called to report that the pizza was ready and I picked it up, brought it to my car and enjoyed a lunch of a slice of pizza while I listened to the radio and watched the door.

The meal was delicious, marinara sauce and cheese slathered over sliced onion, pepperoni, ham and salami, and at the end of the hour I left three uneaten slices in the box as a talisman for Better Luck Next Time and drove away, disappointed a hundred or more times over.  Two of my boys have birthdays in the upcoming weeks and I'll be there then, again.

Five

 We used to be five. A family, three boys and a mother and father.

Then the divorce was filed in a sneak move, using spring break to remove the children from the home and going to her father's compound 500 miles away and calling from there to tell him to move out or she wouldn't return with them and when the children flunked out of school for for non-attendance, it would be his fault.

That was the tenor of the bankrupting, time-sucking (years) court litigation that showed him that Mother Knows Best when the two contesting litigants showed up in American domestic law court. The first time the court-appointed psychologist speciously stripped the father of all visitation ex parte for no account (this charlatan clashed with him because the dad wouldn't kow-tow to this preening Captain Bligh with a cracker-jack-box prize degree), with the first opportunity to appear in court in response a long ten weeks later, the father thought that was a devastating and soul-sucking time (70 days!) to be unable to see or talk to his children (she and they didn't answer his calls), but now, thanks to her Parental Alienation machinations, over a dozen years without seeing or talking to them, makes that 70 days mere chump change.

Oh yeah, the dad got plain vanilla visitation and full joint legal custody of the kids at the end and the judge termed her actions "unconscionable," but law is the minimum of morality and she was the underlying floor, sunk eyeball deep in the swamp.

That's western domestic law. Any man is a phone call away from disaster, and the children are the dangling hostages for the basest of players.

Four

 Three kids. Plus at least one is married, or was, several years back, so I guess the number is now four. Jimmy, Johnny, Danny and Laura, JJD&L. (Welcome to the family, Laura.)

JJ&D haven't spoken to a single Lamberton in over 15 years (that is a hallmark of PAS, to smear all the relatives on the side of the cut-out parent with the same lies and notions of unworthiness that the estranged parent has been painted with). These children, when their wills were being overborne as tender minors by their covertly narcissistic mother, in my opinion, a form of child abuse according to some, were not responsible for their actions then but now that they are all in their thirties their continuing actions speak to their characters as the people they are. They take after their mother obviously. (She looks like such a nice person.)

Jimmy is sort of shiftless and unfocused, a bit of a user, he went to the best magnet public high school for science and technology in the country, Thomas Jefferson in Northern Virginia, but he didn't get their degree, rather after four years they in effect discharged him with the third tier of a Virginia public high school diploma, the equivalent of a shop degree as near as I can figure because he slid through his four years taking advantage of the chaos of my and Sharon's quarter million dollar multi-year divorce. He never went to college. His mind works like this: On his 18th birthday he legally changed his last name from mine to hers knowing that I would eventually find out and be hurt by it he hoped I am sure, and another time he came into the neighborhood and knocked on the neighbor's door to say hello but not on mine, knowing that months or years later it would inadvertently be mentioned to me by them and I would be, he hoped,  hurt by learning that he eschewed to knock on my door when he made a point to come to visit in the 'hood. (He looks like such a nice young man.)

 

What was it that Melania Trump's dumpy jacket said when she went to the southern border a few years back to inform herself on the state of caged children down there--I Just Don't Care? It's been so long since I saw or heard from or about any of my children (over a dozen years) that I  doubt that I'd recognize any of them if I walked past them on the street. Jimmy was the only child of mine that was ever held by my father, just before he died at age 61 of lung cancer in 1986,  and I'm sorry that Johnny and Danny didn't have the honor to feel the embrace even as babies by that once-strong, capable man; I think that probably Jimmy would express Melania's heartless refrain--I Just Don't Care--about having been in his grandfather's arms. (Grandad, Dad, Auntie Kate.)