Okay, Letty gets a wee bit of venting time here: Why does anyone ask any other advice columnist anything about anything having to do with love and relationships? I just read the latest Advicemama column, and she is not only dull, she is not incisive. The question was about how long to wait before letting your ex have your kids around his new SO [significant other]. This woman has a man who is still with the last woman he cheated on her with, and he has their kids all up and around this woman. The mother said the kids are young. She didn’t tell their age. I think that the advice advicemama gave was weak, at best. She said to wait six months after the divorce of the parents to introduce the kids to the new lover.
Um, really? Even if the situation is like this one, where the man is going to leave his wife and stay with the woman he left his children’s mother for? These two aren’t even divorced yet! Yeah, I know! Right. They aren’t divorced, and he already has her kids around this woman. That’s wrong in so many ways. Six months is a long time to a high schooler, but to an adult, six months is no time at all to know if the new person is going to be able to meld cohesively into the family. It isn’t even enough time for a person without kids to know enough about someone new. I mean, come on. Advicemama, take some advice and don’t help people screw things up. Waiting for kids to heal and become okay takes longer than six months. I want all the people who commented on her AOL page to come to my advice column at www.fixmylove.com. My Let Letty Help column is the real deal!
Ah, I feel so much better. I am not going to pussyfoot; I have some serious business going on in this D File. Bea dropped a bomb in the last edition, and now there is a plan in the works to find a person who may—or may not—want to be found.
That’s it. Read on. And let us know what you’d do.
Click below to continue reading…
The D Files
Sam I am. But Where I am, or am I? Is Really the Question
Part I: It takes a village
By Letty Livingston
The winter was awesome, and springtime has given all of us here in the city of brotherly love a new perspective on life. I really don’t know if it had anything to do with how bad the economy had gotten and how broke some of us were (and you really found out who your friends were and weren’t), or if it was the groundbreaking, earth shattering, sobering news about Bea, via Tyler, her secret ex-husband (and our ex-stripper.)
If you haven’t been following The D Files novella—which started with Allergic to my Orgasm and introduced you to most of the people in the storyline, then took you to Germany for a few months for lessons on Internet dating, then went through a couple of months of Confessions of a Male Ex-Stripper, and is here now with Sam I Am—you simply must order back issues or check out the snippets at www.mytruelovestory.com. Follow this link to get caught-up on all of the juiciness; just look for my The D Files blogs.
For all of you who have been keeping up—we had the meeting at my place, the meeting that broke the news about Bea and her now “missing” daughter—all of our usual suspects were in attendance: Lisa and Angelica, Nikki and Freddie, Yoko and Tran, Bea and Todd, and Lauren. Yes. Bea and Todd. But Todd didn’t stay for too long because Tyler was there. No, Bea and Tyler have not gotten back together; however, Bea has changed. Honestly, she was like this wildly attractive caterpillar that sucked money—and God knows what else—out of wealthy men. And now that her secret, and the weight of it all, has been lifted, Bea has emerged as this ethereal butterfly.
She somehow has changed, done a complete 180-degree about-face. She was gracious and took Todd, who would have built a shrine as big as the Taj Mahal for Bea, into the kitchen and expressed that his services would no longer be required. I was making guacamole and heard the whole thing. Todd was good about it. He said his goodbyes to everyone and made a quiet exit. I guess when you live life waiting for the other shoe to drop, when it does, it comes as a relief.
Bea was the one who formally introduced the gang to Tyler, though most everyone had already met him or had heard of him. She sat Tyler down between Lauren, who is still single, and Freddie, who has kind of a bromantic inclination toward Tyler already. New news fizzles fast here in Philly, and even news as sexy as Tyler can seem superfluous in the shadow of something as juicy as a baby whose location is unknown.
Bea was calm and even-toned as she recalled the story of how she was lied to by Tyler when they were married. She was playing the good wife, staying home after shaving his back, as he went to shake his moneymaker for lewd and lascivious women. He came home disinterested in sex but smelling like one would imagine a whorehouse would. She talked about how she cried for Tyler to try to get her pregnant. She so wanted a baby with him. He didn’t want one. He always told her she was not old enough to be a good mother.
When Tyler left and never called, she was frantic. She didn’t sleep for a week and had her brother-in-law Guido, who was a NYC detective, look into it. Guido found Tyler in the matter of a few hours. He was at the gym, at the clubs, and at his regular tanning appointments. It was as if he was living life as usual except for coming home to Bea. Guido also found out where Tyler was laying his head at night. He reported to Bea that Tyler was shacking up with some hotshot lawyer’s daughter, in New Jersey.
The news shot through Bea like a lightening bolt. She fell into a state of shock and despair. She began showing up to work late and was in a zombie-like daze. Her boss, a tragically odd and strangely handsome multimillionaire, didn’t want to see Bea in such pain. She told us how he put her up at the Four Seasons in the city and sent her for massages and limo rides to and from work. He began treating her like a princess, which helped her feel a sense of self-worth again.
Then one Friday night, her boss showed up at her suite at the Four Seasons. He was drunk and so was she. He was tired of his life as a dad with two kids and having a wife he was with for the last twenty or so years. Bea was so sick of feeling alone. She let him in, they ordered champagne, and undressed each other. They remained there for the entire weekend—eating, drinking and pretending that they were okay together. There were no empty condom wrappers. Bea admitted to wanting to get back at Tyler. She would show him. She was old enough to be a mother. She didn’t need him. She had a millionaire now.
Bea had moved into an apartment on the Westside in the short span that Tyler was away. When he came back to their home on the Eastside, all of her stuff was gone—closets bare, drawers left askew and with nothing in them, pictures removed from frames, and an unforgettable stillness. Her new place was way out of her league—well, unless it was rent-controlled. But even then, the building was the home to A-list actors and celebrities and some of the cities’ biggest names in the restaurant business.
For a couple of months, Bea and her odd millionaire lived in a state of manufactured bliss. They played house and made love on every square inch of surface area. They went to the Grammy Awards, red carpet openings of new nightclubs and restaurants, and flew to Europe every weekend in his private jet. They lived life in the clouds. They were both afraid to put their feet on the ground; for fear that reality would surge back to them with a vengeance.
After three months of dreamlike luxury and a day after Bea told her millionaire that they were going to have a baby, she was served with a restraining order. She wasn’t to come within 100 yards of her now estranged lover. The locks were changed on the apartment and the doorman had her belongings behind his desk, waiting for her. She called her job, and even her away message was changed. She was out of a job, a home, and out on the street at 19 years of age, in a city that ate up even the strongest of our breed.
She headed east, to her not-so-old nest where Tyler was still living. She buzzed and was let in without questioning. She got out of the elevator and her heart was in her throat. She didn’t want to go back, at least not like this—homeless and pregnant with another man’s child. She pressed the L button and went back down. She wasn’t going to swallow her pride.
Once in the lobby of her old building, she opened her mobile phone and called a friend of her wealthy ex. He was an older man who always ogled Bea, and she knew he had various real estate investments around the city. She was in luck; he answered his phone and was happy to assist as long as Bea knew that she’d have to scratch his back too. Within an hour, she was lying on an overstuffed mattress in a huge apartment in Battery Park. It was an artist’s loft—three thousand or so square feet of the sweetest space in the city with an unobstructed view of the still-standing World Trade Center.
She lived there for a month. She could hardly stand the smell of the old guy who owned the place and visited a few times a week to pick up the “rent.” Then a neighbor introduced her to an Academy Award-winning actor who owned a good deal of real estate in Tribeca. So, she packed her bags and spent some time on the arm of an ostentatious actor. She dodged paparazzi and used only back doors to enter and exit buildings. When her baby bump got too big, the actor’s handlers thought it would be detrimental to his career if she was found to be living with—not to mention sleeping with—this world famous man.
This is when she admitted to calling Tyler. They met at Time Café, and it was tense. She knew she wanted her old, simpler life back. She liked—no, strike that—loved money and all that came with it, but she also loved Tyler and the small, not-so-complicated life they once shared. She told him what had happened. They both made their apologies and then she dropped the question in his lap. She asked if he’d take her back, if he were willing to start anew with her and her baby. He said no. And just like that, they were finished.
Unbeknownst to Bea, Tyler had filed for a divorce. He told her that the papers were being mailed to her grandmother’s home in Philly. She said he did this because no one knew where to find her and that he knew she’d show up at her grandmother’s eventually. A light bulb went on over her head—the idea of moving to Philly sounded wise.
She said goodbye to Tyler and spent a couple more weeks in New York City ensuring that her connections with the rich and famous were intact, and then she hopped on an Amtrak train and showed up at her grandmother’s home in Center City, Philadelphia. Betsy already had a room set up for Bea. She knew she’d show up.
Divorce papers weren’t the only legal documents waiting for Bea. There were a couple of other envelopes, with the names of some noteworthy law firms on them, sitting in a pile. Bea was now seven months pregnant and wasn’t fairing too well. Her OB-GYN told her that bedrest and good eating was all that was important right now and that the less stress the better.
So, Bea let her grandmother Betsy take good care of her for six or so weeks. She didn’t open any of the mail that waited for her. She didn’t want to be divorced when she delivered her baby, even though Tyler would not be listed on the birth certificate. And she couldn’t have possibly imagined that anything that pressing would have found her in Philly.
The day Bea went to deliver her baby was a peaceful one. It was a sunny and cool Sunday morning. Betsy had just come in from service at the Episcopal Church in Rittenhouse Square and had fresh goodies from Metropolitan Bakery. Bea sat up in bed, wiped the sleep from her eyes, and greeted the day with a scream. Her first contraction hit at 10 a.m., and the baby’s head was crowning just past noon. She was pushing and breathing in rhythm in a bright delivery room in Jefferson Hospital, and then it happened. The baby’s shoulders made it out and the rest of her slippery body followed without effort. She wriggled into the world and let out a cry of her own.
The cleaned off baby was placed in Bea’s arms for a moment, and then Bea was told she would need her rest. She let the baby go and slipped into the deepest sleep she had had in over a year.
When she awoke and asked to see her newborn daughter, she was told that there had been a complication, that she couldn’t see her daughter. Bea exploded in fear. She wailed and her body heaved with sobs. She demanded to know how her baby died. She was told that the baby was not dead, but the father had come in with a court order, and the baby was released to him.
A day later Bea was back at Betsy’s, and she tore into the envelopes from the law firms. She saw documents that let her know that she had to attend an arbitration hearing in NYC to face claims that she should not be allowed to have any contact with her yet-to-be-born baby. The other envelope contained a document that stated that since she failed to appear in her own defense, she was found unfit, and the father of the unborn child was given all rights and full custody of the yet-to-be-born child.
We were all left agog! None of us could believe it. Bea told us that she spent the better part of two years trying to get her daughter back, and then tried to get visitation rights. She said that the father of the baby had too much power and money. None of her “friends” would go up against the father of the baby in a courtroom. She couldn’t make a dent in the case. She never saw her daughter since the day she was born.
Bea told us that she named her Samantha, Sam for short, and that she has no idea how she is going to find her, but she is committed to finding her and she wants our help. She trusts us, as her closest friends, to keep her secret and to do all we can to assist her in her search, no matter the cost. She never told us why she kept us in the dark up until now, and none of us asked. There were no apologies. We figured that it was time to tell. All of us have skeletons in our closets. Some skeletons die with us, and some need to be aired out from time to time.
We did the math, and Sam is turning 20 this year. She’s an adult and therefore could be anywhere in the world. We have no idea what she looks like or where to start searching, but with ten brains working on it, I am sure we will come up with something.
I will continue reporting on our progress in our search for Sam. I will keep you up on where in the world our investigation takes us and what happens along the way. I am sure that some danger will be lurking in the shadows, because when powerful people want to keep you away from someone they love, they will go to any length to make sure you don’t get what you want.
Come back next week to find out what first steps are taken in finding Sam, what Tyler is doing to help (and who he is sleeping with, or not), how Bea is coping and if she has returned to being Queen Bitch, and how I use my contacts as an internationally acclaimed columnist to assist in the investigation.
I will be answering my readers’ dating and relationship questions, so send them, along with your comments to me at help@letlettyhelp.com. All submitted material is considered for publication and all names are kept in the strictest of confidence. Come back next month for another installment of The D Files and you can read more of my work at: http://letlettyhelp.blogspot.com/, and www.mytruelovestory.com.
©MMX~Letty Livingston ~ The D Files are intended as inspiring and engaging sources for advice and entertainment and are not alternatives for therapeutic intervention, should it be needed. All names have been changed to protect the identity of the people mentioned herein. The situations are fictitious and do not reflect the lives of any people alive or dead.
