Wouldn't it be nice

If when the phone rang it wasn't someone wanting something from me? I think dad is the only person who calls just to chat, and that is because he married someone who shares almost no interests with him and he wants a play by play on how the kids are doing that day. 

Mike calls only when he wants to barrow money from me, or to pester me abouthis situation. He wants me to let him claim one of my kids on his income taxes this year. HE thinks that with an earned income credit he will be able to get out of the living situation he is in. It is a bad place. He is living with that woman, who has four kids, her mother and two little kids the mother has adopted, and two grown soblings of the woman, in a one bedroom rental house. I would be going nuts too. The woman and her mom are both pressuring mike to go in with them to rent a bigger house. 

He doesn't have romantic feelings for her, but shares her bed. HE doesn't want to be tied down like that. I think she is schemeing to tie him down. I'm afraid she is going to get pregnant. 

He still owes me money. HE doesn't even bring Lexi by to play anymore. What good is it living near family if you never get to play with them?

Of course I never hear from TOm at all. Dad says he gets inebriated text messages from him occasionally. The guy will be 26 in february and still blames everything that ever went wrong in his life on dad. HE is convinced that I got some sort of extra help from mom and dad that he was denied. What he forgets is that mom was harder on me then on either of them. I was the one getting them up fro school from the time I was 11. I was the one making sure we had clean clothes to wear, and I was the one who was made to go get a job as soon as it was legal. 

I also managed to not make decent grades and not acquire a crimnal record, I also didn't drop out of hish school, join and then desert the navy, live the life of a street punk or decide the life sober was not worth living. 

So now he lives on abandonded houses and with friends who basically work him in exchange for room and board, and I have three wonderful kids, a decent place to live with my own name on the lease, and a job that is both clean and respectable. 

But it would be nice if we were all closer. If my boys had cousins to run around with at family gatherings. If I wasn't a complete social retard who was incapable of building that kind of friendship with someone I wasn't related to. 

Oh well, I go back to work in the morning. I am both looking forward to it and dreading it. I've gotten awfully lazy in the past two weeks. But I tend to be a hermit, not leaving the house unless absolutly necessary, and the people contact I get at work is almost as valuble to me as the paycheck.