I have a confession to make; I have actually, and recently, wished someone would die. And I don't have a whole lot of remorse about it.

It all started last week when I decided to call up a friend (and former pastor) back in Nevada. This man and his family have spent the last half year struggling with his daughter's Leukemia. The treatments are going well, and she's on track back to being her former self, which is wonderful.

He let me know, however, that my mother had been calling him, pestering him for any information she could find about where we were going. As a pastor, he felt caught in between by my calling him, which I well understood, so I called her, although I wouldn't have except as a favor to him.

All I got was an answering machine from a friend of hers, but the gist of it is this; she has been trying to track us down alleging that we stole items of hers. We did not, as many folks who know us can attest (she abandoned the house where we had stayed two months before we left; we placed everything that we took from the house into a storage shed, and moved out on a Greyhound bus with little more than a few changes of clothing). The reason she is making these allegations, though, is simple. She is trying to enlist sympathy to employ others in her quest to gain custody of our children.

When we moved out to Pahrump (ostensibly to help her with her health conditions), we were not aware of the fullness of her duplicity. She twice attempted to put us in compromising positions in order to gain custody of the girls, and was repeatedly and consistently abusive to my wife and children while I was at work. Put simply, it was a HORRIBLE situation, and one we desperately needed to get out of. It came to a head while my wife was in the hospital due to early labor with our youngest.

My mother's history is such that my older brother and sister in law had to hide out for six months before my sister in law could accept her admission to move to Sydney for her graduate studies. The reason? My mother had threatened to file a "grandparent's rights" lawsuit to prevent them from taking their child outside of the United States.

Now, it may seem odd that a 56 year old woman who did not raise a single one of her 5 children to adulthood would want to take custody of her grandchildren. But such is the nature of her mental illness. She discovered many years ago that the way to hurt someone was to go after their children, and her actions are simply retaliation for a perceived wrong or series of wrongs. And thus, I will have to continue to fight her and to continue to live in semi-seclusion, until she is in the grave.

Which, as I stated at the beginning, I am beginning to pray will be soon.