So… Yeah. Remember when I said before that I’ve had some legit insane neighbors? I wasn’t kidding. And these people weren’t just the typical kind of crazy… They were legit BONKERS. Lost their marbles, nutty as a fruitcake, a few bananas short of a bunch, etc. You get the picture. They were (and probably still are) nuts. And unfortunately my family had to suffer for it. These people played a huge part in my being so motivated to move. Their drama and malice seeping into my life has been a ridiculously irritating experience, and I’m tired of it. Even though neither horrible neighbors live near me any longer, their living here has left a bad taste in my mouth. We’ve outgrown our house anyway, and the neighborhood in which we live is notorious for drama. I don’t really feel like sitting around and waiting for the next neighbor drama to strike, because this is the kind of place where there’s neighbor drama everywhere you turn.

So who was involved with neighbor drama #1 and what happened? Let’s call the wife April and the husband Erin. April and Erin had a son together about the same age as my son (they were born a month apart), which is how I came to know them. April started inviting us to play outside with them, so I would take my kids outside and my son would play with hers. The first weird things I started to notice were her troubles with keeping an active phone. Her phone always seemed to be having issues, so she wouldn’t always be able to contact me or our mutual friend. Soon enough I found out her husband did steroids. It made sense. He was hella gross looking, all enormous and ill proportioned. He looked as if he’d shoot away in a gust of released air if someone held a needle too close to his bulbous, balloon animal esque body. Keep in mind, this man is enlisted in the military. Doing steroids while in the military is something that will screw up your career real fast if you get caught. So not only was he ugly, he was dumb, too.

As time went on, she confided in me more and more. One of our mutual friends shared walls with April’s apartment (they were nextdoor neighbors) so I heard some concerning things coming from this mutual friend as well. April revealed to me that she was so often lacking a working cell phone because her husband would break her phones in anger to punish her for upsetting him. And that’s not all he broke. Over the course of their living here, he bought probably close to a dozen TVs and would break them dur8ng arguments as well. April would vent to me and our mutual friend because he caused her to lose all her friendships from back home, so she didn’t have anyone to talk to. Her father didn’t seem very supportive of her either, despite being the one who had to give permission for her to even get married.

You see, she wasn’t just a military mom and wife… She was still a teenager. She had her father sign the appropriate paperwork so that she could get married at 17. Her relationship with this ugly man (her husband) seemed to me to be just one bad decision after the other. They started trying to conceive a child after dating for about two months… Even though she was a very young teenager at the time. I was internally shaking my head when she was telling me all this. This girl was just not particularly smart. I’m all for marrying a man with dreams, but Erin thinks he’s going to be some kind of professional body builder someday. That’s literally what he thinks will happen after his contract in the military. His plan was to join the military, pump himself full of steroids all balloon animal style and whatnot, then get out after his 4 years and enter the world of body building and make loads of cash. I’m embarrassed for him at this piss poor attempts at life planninf and I don’t even like the guy. Yet somehow this douchebag convinced a girl, April, that his life plan was solid. She would make excuses and dish out very immature explanations any time someone tried to ask questions that challenged the solidity of their life plan. I could see from the very beginning that they would not work out and decided to try to help her as best I could for the sake of her innocent son who was suffering the most from living with Erin.

My first tactic was to be as supportive as possible for April. My hope was she would feel confident enough to leave if she knew she had people to catch her if she fell. I was there for her every time her husband broke yet another phone or TV. I was there for her every time her husband put a new hole in the wall or broke another appliance/piece of furniture in their home. I was there for her when she found out he had been cheating for months, and was there when the cheating continued to the point where he had been cheating on her for about a year. I was even there for her when she couldn’t afford to feed herself and her son because all of their money went to her husband’s workout gear and his steroids. My husband and I bought her a cheap smartphone and month of cell service from walmart once because her husband broke her phone and she needed something to be able to contact people on her layovers since she was flying back home with her son to visit her family. I was there that one time her husband hid their child in a stranger’s house, sitting in a poopy diaper for hours, just so he could watch his wife panic and sob due to her not knowing where her child was. This man was scum. He was the sh*ttiest excuse for a human being I have ever layed eyes on, and by the time this whole drama came to a close, I hated him with every fibre of my being.

Police were involve quite a few times because of his domestic violence. The only reason he would go free is April would lie. She would lie and take blame for stuff that happened, stuff that he did, because she is ultimately a stupid little girl and does not realize how much doing so endangers her keeping custody of her son. A CPS case was opened on her family because their glass screen door was shattered from her husband chucking her phone at it in attempt to break the phone (she lied and told police she was the one who threw it) and police ended up getting involved. Their son was in the house when it happened so CPS automatically opened a case. She freaked out because their home was in a constant state of squalor. The housing company that owned her apartment had given her many notices for leaving trash outside her house and even went as far as gave her notice of a home check once because maintenance workers going in to fix something in her house found their house was in “unlivable” conditions. She battled with a constant rodent problem and killed well over two dozen mice in her house before she eventually moved out. Between the trash and the destruction in that house, I can only imagine the horrors maintenance faced when repairing the house for the next tenants. And her move out bill must have been astronomical.

Stay tuned if you want to hear part 2 of my experience with these crazy neighbors!