Sam continued to work out of the country for the next two years. Sometimes he would be gone for three months and other times, he was gone for five. He came each year for a month and then any other time, we met somewhere else for the month. His next time in the U.S., we went back to visit his mother who was having a toe amputated, which was the result of poor health, diabetes, and poor circulation.
Sam's mother was a pleasant woman. She was weathered and slow moving, but she always seemed polite in her mannerisms. He always said that she was a great provider but a terrible mother. When they were younger, she worked several jobs to make ends meet, as his father left her when he was just a baby and his younger sister was still in the oven. I recall him telling me that their house was a revolving door for men, and the shittiest of kinds. One day, the kids came home from school while their mother was still at work, and found the house to be completely empty. Nothing was left, not even their clothes.
Sam told me that his brother beat him up daily He often slept on the floor of his sister's room because they offered some degree of protection to where he at least didn't get his face punched in while he slept.
When Sam was about 14 years of age, his mother suffered a massive stroke. Her children banded together in order to make ends meet and hid from child protective services their true circumstances of lack of competent adult supervision. Heck, they had done that all along anyway since their mother was never home to care for them in the first place.
I don't know much more about his childhood, other than what I just told you and that they had a large fire in another home and lost everything they had. I am unsure if that was before or after losing all of their stuff to mom's boyfriend. I know his circumstances growing up were not ideal and to say that they were 'difficult' would be an understatement.
The impression that Sam gave me when it came to his family, was that they weren't close at all. One sister, owned her own furniture business and he claimed to have lent her money to keep it afloat after a fire, and never getting the money back. Another sister worked for an insurance company and helped do the books for the other's furniture store. The baby sister worked as a teller for a bank. I'm still not sure what it was that the oldest sister did for a living, but she lived upstate in Albany, NY and didn't come around as much. I don't think I ever knew what his brother did either, but he went off to the Bahamas to go to Med School and is in the process of his internship right now.
Their mother lived with the sister who owns the furniture store in her Port Chester, NY home in a cluttered small bedroom upstairs. She still cooked and did motherly things around the house. She and the girls were much closer than her boys were to her.
Their mother passed away in January of 2012. Sam blames me for him not seeing her before she died. You see, he decided that he needed to go back overseas doing contract work and was gone on a few weeks of training for this company at the time. The reason, he said, that he needed to go back was because I was just a paramedic and made shit for money and I decided to have a baby, so now he has to go away all the time to make enough money to support us. Yup... he said that I decided to have a baby.
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