Facnana was born back during the dog days of summer of 1989. She and her parents lived in a fairly rural area of the country (US) where hot muggy summers made you want to stay inside in the air conditioning. Her parents divorced when she was in elementary school. While this is common with many families, it does a number on the kids. I’m sure Facnana was affected in many ways.
Her mom was a nurse in and around their home town. Their home town was close to a Navy Base, so it was booming with young Navy personnel and businesses abounded there, unlike many rural towns due to this, but still had that small town feel. Her dad was an engineer who worked with a major company. His job involved a lot of national and international travel. This meant Facnana would be raised by other people, mostly her grandmother. Because he loved his daughter, and due to the places he worked internationally, he was able to cultivate relationships with companies who manufactured nice things girls like, such as pricy purses from companies like Louis Vuitton and Gucci. On at least one of his trips, he brought home one of these bags for his daughter. She was in love! From that moment on, she was hooked and wanted to get more and more of these famous (and expensive) bags.
Things seemed to go okay during her school years. She lived primarily with her mother at first. She would visit her dad when he was in town, but didn’t really live much with him during these years. She also spent a considerable amount of time with her grandmother. She was close with her grandmother due to the fact that she did a lot of babysitting of Facnana and her second cousin throughout the years. At some point during childhood, Facnana wanted more attention from her grandmother, so she began telling her father that her cousin was doing things to her, taking her toys, or maybe hitting her, just generally annoying her (as kids tend to do), so her father raised a stink about the bad way that Facnana was being treated. This caused rifts in the different families (between Facnana’s immediate family and the cousin’s family).
Facnana’s Father was an only child. His mother had a sister who also had only one son. This means that Facnana’s father had only one first cousin. He eventually married and they had a son. He is Facnana’s 2nd cousin. Now, Facnana’s mother did have siblings, one of which was her uncle, whom she loved and even named her first Service Animal after, as he died far before his time, it is hard when someone passes before we think they’ve had a chance to live out their “entire” life. But we all know, some people are not meant to live to be 100 years old. There are “averages” and to get to those averages, some die earlier in life. But I digress.
Facnana changed schools more than most even though they didn’t move that often, they weren’t in the military, but they did change houses from time to time. She seemed to not get along well with other classmates, but the reason for changing schools so often was not really known, or at least not discussed. Once she made it to high school, she made a few friends, especially boyfriends. Once she began dating she would date a particular boy for a week, two weeks, but not much longer than that and she would move on to other boys. She had a pattern of only dating a guy for about 2-3 weeks before moving on.
In her senior year of high school, however, she began dating one guy. She made it past the two week mark, then through the four week mark. By this time, she had a new step mom in her life as her dad had remarried during her junior year. The step mom had noticed that she would talk about her current boyfriends for the past couple of years and would notice that they simply didn’t last that long. But when this most recent boyfriend came and stayed, she got concerned that Facnana might need to be on some sort of birth control as of course, some kids do what they want without regard to what could happen.
Step mom spoke with Dad about this. She suggested that he call Facnana’s mother to talk about getting her onto some birth control to avoid an unexpected pregnancy. Now, whether or not Facnana’s father did this is unknown, but what is known is this: Facnana was not placed on any sort of birth control at that time.
The second semester of her senior year, Facnana came to her father and told him that she wanted to quit high school and just get her GED so that she could begin her own adult life with her boyfriend. Her father was not on board with this, yet he rarely stood up to her. Fact is, Facnana didn’t live with him full time at this time, she only visited. I use the term visited loosely. Basically she would stop by (with the current boyfriend of the week) and ask dad for money. Dad would open his wallet and give her money, then she would leave again. Dad was her ATM. So, for her to come by and request money and then drop the “I’m dropping out of high school bomb” on her dad was just par for the course. Stepmom on the other hand, was not accustomed to this sort of thing and being a professional woman herself (spending many years at the same international corporation) knew that to not have a high school diploma was a huge mistake if you ever want to be hired by a “career-type” company. Sure, there are many jobs you can get without a high school diploma or with a GED, but there are many who will not even look at your application or resume.
Stepmom took it upon herself to go to the high school to speak with the principal or counselor to discuss options. During this trip, she discovered that Facnana was failing her last semester. She was not on a trajectory to graduate. She discussed options with the administration of the school and discovered that Facnana could take classes over the summer through a gateway to make up the failed classes and get a GED.
Facnana was placed on this course and did manage to finish her schooling the summer of 2007. She also stayed with this same boyfriend during this time. He had already dropped out of school, which is why Facnana really wanted to drop out. She thought they could spend more time together. He was employed in the construction industry, so he was able to work without having his diploma. As we all know, his future would forever be limited without a diploma, but he didn’t care.
Lets spend a few moments talking about Facnana’s dad and stepmom. They married in 2006. They enjoyed a few adult beverages from time to time, like after work watching TV they might have a few beers. When they would go out to eat, they may have a few other, stronger drinks (alcohol), but they weren’t the kind to get drunk through overindulging. They were both professional and had some really great carreers so they were able to live a nice life as well as, dad was able to not only pay for Facnana’s child support (over $800 per month), he was also able to pay for a car and its insurance (also over $800) for his daughter. Every time she would come and ask for money, he literally gave her whatever was in her wallet from $20 to $200. He never denied her, but this started placing a wedge between dad and stepmom because it started involving not only dad’s pay, but also stepmom’s pay. Dad of course should pay his share of child support and the overage by paying for her car and car insurance should have been sufficient. To even give her an allowance is not beyond normal, but the numerous requests for cash were far more than most kids would get. When it started to come out of the joint account dad and stepmom held together, stepmom put her foot down and demanded that he limit his gifts to Facnana as it was beginning to become a problem. Stepmom didn’t sign up to support Facnana’s every whim, but this is what had begun to happen.
At some point, dad gave Facnana a credit card; BIG MISTAKE! Who of you have ever gotten a new credit card and have not spent more money on it just because it was fun. Then you get that first bill and gasp, knowing you have to pay all that back and then wonder to yourself, what in the world did I buy!? Now imagine, you don’t have to pay the bill, you don’t even have to SEE the bill, so you have no idea what you spent, nor do you care. Welcome to Facnana world! Unlimited funds. She started off small, maybe spending a few hundred dollars the first month, but no one yelled at her and of course she didn’t care to keep track of anything, so each month she spent more and more. She would eat out almost every meal from McDonalds, to steak houses. She would get her nails done. She would visit the mall and shop at all the trendy shops, Forever 21, Abercrombie and Fitch, Victoria’s Secret, etc. She also had a dog, so she charged items at Petco and Petsmart. She was living the high life. Over time, she would spend between $2000 to $10,000 per month. This credit card had at least a $17,000 limit, so she was pretty much able to buy anything she wanted.
At some point dad stopped using this card that he shared with his daughter because he never knew if there would be enough credit on it for his needs as he traveled. (Hotel rooms, meals, rental cars, flights, etc.) so he began using his work card exclusively. He was sure to pay for his personal expenses back to his company and they were okay with that.
At one point she owned a 2008 Hummer. She put almost $10,000 onto the credit card for a lift kit for the Hummer. This is when dad decided he HAD to somehow limit her spending.
He discovered that the interest payments (which would be over $200 per month), were more affordable than to pay off the entire credit card each month, giving her back her entire spending limit, so he began to only pay off about $2000 each month (part of that being an interest payment). This limited her to only that much spending ability each month. Now it wasn’t daddy limiting her spending, it was the Credit Card company. He wasn’t the bad guy.
I’m sure she didn’t like it, but she continued to live this way for quite some time. Remember when I said her dad and stepmom weren’t heavy drinkers, just a few social drinks during nights out, or a few beers at home. Well, one day, Facnana came to dad’s house one day and announced that she was pregnant. She was still dating Mr. High School Dropout and had barely gotten her own GED. Stepmom remembers that the day she told her dad this, he went to the liquor store and bought some heavy liquor and began to drink in earnest. He KNEW he should have insisted she get onto birth control. He knew he should have insisted that his Ex wife should have had “THAT” talk with her especially since she was an RN, but kids will be kids. Kids will do what they want to do especially when they play one parent against another parent and the parents give their kid money to keep them happy and due to her age, driving and almost on her own anyway, she didn’t have any type of supervision. She could tell one parent she would be sleeping at the other parent’s house, while telling the other parent the exact same thing. Enter Boyfriend. It was only a matter of time, unfortunately for the strong-willed Facnana. It was probably around May or June of 2007, some time between her senior year and summer school that Facnana got pregnant because in February 2008 her bouncing baby boy was born.
Enter Zestien.
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