Back home...

So the kids and I are back in Salt Lake.  We ended up living with my mom and dad for about a month.  In that months time, I found a job and got us an apartment in Murray.  We were doing really well at first.  I worked 10am to 730pm and that worked out well.  My dad had retired and so I got Galen to school, took Maddy to my dad in Sandy and went to work.  My mom would get home from work, feed Maddy and go get Galen from Boys and Girls Club (which is where he went after school) and meet me at home with the kids.  It was a great situation.  I received a letter from a person that I had met through Jeff that he had served time with.  His name was Wayne.  He was scheduled to get out of prison in two weeks, and needed somewhere to go.  In an effort to help him, I agreed to let him come stay with us.  That was probably one of the single biggest mistakes of my life. He was a really hardcore crackhead and didn't like to work.  In a nutshell, we went from having the ability to survive and live a good life, to struggling really hard.  I started using with him again, and it came to be that during this period of time was my heaviest using at all.  I stopped working and just spent my life using.  The kids were with my parents a lot.  We moved from Murray to Sandy and everything just got worse.  Jeff came to Salt Lake and got in the mix of things and that didn't help much either.  During this time, Galen's mom decided she wanted Galen back.  She went to court and regained custody of Galen from Jeff.  Partly due to the fact that Jeff didn't even show up for the court hearing.  Things went from bad to worse during this period of time, as I am sure you can imagine.  Wayne was a abuser.  It's funny because you really don't see it coming.  If they hit you the first time you met them, there wouldn't be a second time.  He would berate me, and being down on myself at that time anyway, I believed what he said.  It start out as physical abuse, just mental abuse.  It got to the point where he would literally throw me around like a rag doll. I was so underweight anyway because of the drugs, that it wasn't hard to throw me across the room.  The violence got worse and worse, but I stayed with him.  My relationship with my family was becoming a problem.  They were not happy about what was going on, so instead of running to them, I saw less and less of them.  I really didn't want to disappoint them and have them see what was really going on.  So, I distanced myself from them.  The addiction got worse and it was very much out of control.  I told myself I liked what I was doing, but I was actually hoping for a miracle.  The distance that I was putting between myself and my family is what took me to the next point in my life....leaving Utah again for Las Vegas with Wayne and Maddy.