Me And My Big Ideas

It all started with a starstruck love in the last days of ‘99. A lot of people my age were doing dumb shit. I might’ve been fifteen at the time, but hooking up with a college chick before the robots took over the world? We both had things on our bucket lists and we both checked a couple of things off that night, even if that unfortunate took her time in figuring out that I wasn’t really legal. In my defense, I’d done the same thing to Elizabeth Curie Franklin as my own Mom had done to my Dad, which was probably why he left us in all honesty. Again, I was fifteen at the time and my Mom was… Well, she wasn’t much of a role model. Having had me at the same age I had my own son, it was no surprise that neither of us was fit to be a parent, but unlike my mother, I actually wanted the result of my fling. Lizzie? She wanted the accessory. The special treatment that came along with being pregnant and having a newborn. I might have only been sixteen at the time of Connor’s introduction into the world, but I was more ready at that point than she was to take care of another living being.

Hell, when I was young dumb and full of piss and vinegar, I was working illegally at a factory before I was even out of my junior year to make child support payments, still saw my son on the weekends, and managed to pass every class from my sophomore year forward with at least a C average. It wasn’t the best work, my grades still slipped from time to time, but you can damn well be sure that I was never late to see Connor. Even when my mother kicked my sorry ass out of the house for getting a girl knocked up, I still made damn sure that I at least saw my boy both days of every weekend. Keeping my nose clean while I was living on the street was hard until I caught a lucky break in the form of a friend named Rick Neal, and that bastard saved my life. He never knew it, but Lizzie stopped me from seeing Connor two weekend in a row and I was ready to put a bullet in my chin. I had the revolver I’d stolen from my Mom and one .38 round, but as I sat on that damn bench and pulled my piece out, Ranger fucking Rick (Yes, Rick was actually a Park Ranger) sat down next to me and just gave me the blankest, most unperturbed look I’d ever seen on a man’s face. He didn’t take the gun, he just asked for the bullet and told me to go to church.

After that, I can’t say shit got better right off the bat because I still had to scrape, save, sand shake down the change-purse from time to time to afford my own apartment at seventeen. My Mom was being… ‘Unnecessarily contrary’, as my appointed attorney put it, about emancipating me from her guardianship or whatever, but then we cornered her with some witness testimonies from our neighbors. It wasn’t like any of them were terribly familiar with myself or my mother, but the cops had been called multiple times on her boyfriends throughout the years and I was usually the one explaining the whole thing away and acting like an adult. When she’d thrown me out, I could have pressed charges for the beating I took, but there’s always leniency for your family, and doubly so for the mother you’ve known your entire life. There were a lot of things messed up about my life from the time I developed object permanence to adulthood and they were all pieces of bullshit I wanted Connor to avoid no matter what. 

When I turned twenty-one as in on my twenty-first birthday, I decided to work instead of going out and celebrating. That turned out to be for the best because some kindly officers were none too gentle about escorting me off of the premises on the grounds of there being a warrant out for my arrest. When I learned that I was being charged with sexual assault from earlier in the night, my first question was when the supposed attack was supposed to have happened. The fellow who was interrogating me looked at me in my work-clothes, stained with grease from head to toe, and asked when I went into work. I was on a second shift schedule at the time so I could have more time with Connor on the weekends and said as much and was released after my alibi was proven air-tight. As with the American ‘Justice’ System, it was still a near miss for me. Lizzie Franklin kept custody of Connor, despite the clear and flagrant case of perjury and fraud that could’ve been levied against her, but it was the first building block in my big idea.

In ‘08 Connor turned… Well, eight, but he also explained something to me for the first time. Lizzie had another kid with some guy I frankly felt sorry for, but as I’d expected, Lizzie was treating her daughter with a lot more bias than I felt a parent should show. Connor told me all about how his birthday money was spent on a new pair of shoes for Krysti, his half-sister because she’d apparently said that he’d messed up another pair. Why an eight-year-old boy would wear a six-year-old’s shoes…? And why he would color them in pink and purple. That was the part that got me. Either way, Elizabeth deigned it worthy in her eyes to sell the DS I bought for Connor in exchange for children’s makeup and another pair of shoes. Whenever Connor had a problem, I made sure to write it down and have him sign his name next to it. Anything valuable that Connor actually wanted to keep came to my house and with the joint custody agreement, there wasn’t a damn thing Lizzie or her hellion could do about it.

Four years later and my hard work paid off. I’d made a lot of friends in high places where I worked and managed to nab a position as one of the youngest supervisors in the plant. However, Garth Brooks had friends in low places too and I thought that was a good idea, which was why I started muddling around in rougher circles. I never partook of any of the hard stuff, but I smoked more pot and drank more in two years than I had in my entire life. Granted that wasn’t saying much, but it was enough for Lizzie to start slipping herself, especially when her husband left her for poisoning their child mentally. It became more pertinent than ever for my lawyers to get their asses in gear and I poured every spare penny I couldn’t give to Connor into Alger & Omell, trusting a Christian firm to do right by both my son and the lord. They dragged ass and ate my money, but twenty-twelve was a great year. Connor was officially old enough to decide who he wanted to stay with and his testimony would hold water if he really wanted to give it. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that my endeavors for the past decade had paid off, especially when I started noticing certain… mannerisms in Lizzie.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

She’d taken my son from me when I was the only one out of the two of us that even wanted him. That was willing to work for him. I knew that what I did was wrong, but sending some of my less reputable, more charismatic friends to go and parlay with Lizzie? Starting with pills and moving onto the hard stuff? All I needed was one solid accusation, one picture, and for Connor to lie just one time so that he could get the hell out of that house. October of twenty-twelve came and the court date I’d been waiting for since I could remember came. The evidence that I’d submitted was rock solid., Pictures of Lizzie’s track marks, pictures of her room and Connor’s room as opposed to Krysti’s living space, and the entire journal of the inequalities my boy had to go through before I could get everything set up. However, a woman has an immense amount of power in the American Court and she came up with a sad-sack sob story that the Judge only half-believed. Sure, depression could have very well been part of her addiction, but my lawyers, Christian as they were, had the gall and bravery to point out that Elizabeth Franklin had preyed on a younger man before and had effectively ruined his life. If she'd done it to me, why would she protect our son?

It was one thing when she tried to say that she didn’t know how old I was even in the present day, but it was another thing when her previous attempt at perjury and a few misdemeanors I hadn’t known about got dredged up. The work I’d done in keeping my hands dirty and nose clean had paid off. My worst offense in the years since Connor was born had been the fraudulent rape charge, and the only charge that had actually mattered in the long run was a speeding ticket I got when I was eighteen. Things were looking good for me and Connor; my boy was finally going to come home and it would be everything I imagined. I’d teach him how to cook as my Grandmamma taught me, and we’d eat knock-off Oreos like my Granddad and I used to. I’d take him fishing, out to the library, and encourage him to get into sports for the sake of his future like a real father- no, a real parent should have been doing consistently all along. Then, a couple of months before we were truly close to the goal, a Mother’s Rights advocacy group stepped in and damn near turned the tide of the trial.

Instead of looking at the treatment and general care that Connor got, they used the potential they saw in how Lizzie treated Krysti as the benchmark for their argument. IT didn’t really take a smart man to know that favoritism was readily available in the household, but it was Connor’s testimony that sealed the deal. Lizzie and I both got a few minutes to speak with him (Supervised, of course) and I just from the look in his eye I knew that we were on the same page. It wasn’t just me and my big ideas anymore; it was my son and me against the world. I made sure that he knew that I would love him no matter what happened, but then he said something that would’ve been great on the stand. When the words, ‘I don’t have to worry about Mom’s friends at your house.” left his mouth, I asked what he meant, but my lawyer told me to save it for the trial. My blood was cold in my veins and I couldn’t help but wonder what bomb he was about to drop. It must’ve been something that he hadn’t even told me to that point because I wasn’t sure what he was going to say. All I knew was that the look in his eye reminded me a lot of what I saw in the mirror when I thought of his mother and I was ready to see if he could take a stand on the stand.

Connor was called to bear witness and give his testimony. He told the truth. There were a few things he mentioned that he’d never told me, such as when he would get spanked along with Krysti whenever she messed up, even if he had nothing to do with it. He talked about countless toys being broken by his sister and the things I’d bought him that had been sold by his mother for ‘more of the stuff in the little bags’, and the damning truth was still yet to be spoken. The obvious question of abuse was asked and Connor opted to whisper his answer to the Judge, His Honor Theodore Wilson, and from the look of outrage on his face I had a funny feeling why Connor had waited to say anything. Over the course of my short-ish life, I’ve gotten into scrap after scrap. Nothing usually came of it and it was usually self-defense, so again, nothing ever really came of it. However, even as little as I liked fighting, I swore to my son that I would dutifully break the hand that offended him as long as it was on an adult, and from the echoing slam of the judge’s gavel I knew that Connor was a better man than I had ever been or would ever be. When Judge Theodore damn near flew into a rage, my son made sure he had my eye and shook his head.

If he hadn’t done that I would’ve killed Elizabeth Franklin/Lindol (Whatever her last name was at the time) then and there for letting my son be sexually abused. I didn’t know the extent and I didn't know the severity, but there was no promise I was more willing to keep than one I made to my boy. Connor saved that wretches life because he got her arrested that day. I was awarded custody when the case was all said and done and his egg-donor was exactly where she belonged in the first place; behind bars. Counseling was mandatory, but it wasn’t as if I was going to let my son carry battle-scars for no reason. I wanted him to heal from his time in the Pit and it was going to take time to get him where he needed to be for his age, but I did it. I shed so many tears over my fears only to have them come to light anyway, but… My son… Connor Burse carried me through every tribulation, backed me over every obstacle, and pushed me through every step to bring him to my- our home, and our first night with him under my full custody? Spring Break was still a couple of days away, but I signed him out of school early to take him to meet my Grandparents. They’d passed away when he was six and he’d never got to know them, but our trip down to Georgia to visit their resting places? Nothing short of pure magic.

I never did meet my own father, and my Mom eventually passed away in a car accident, but there were worse things to experience. There had been so much on the road to just getting my boy, the fruit of my loins, back where he belonged that it was hard to care about my own parents and their lack of a presence in my life. After thirteen long years of custody battles and throwing money at the issue, I got to introduce Connor to Beatrice Jo and William Thomas Burse, the only real parents I’d ever known. It was a case of just being too late, but… They still got to meet him. They still saw me win. They still got to see my boy come home.

-Love you, Padre. This one’s for you.