It just wasn't anything like she sold it in her pov sob story. This is how grifters and narcs often operate in my opinion - they actually tell the almost-truth or take true events but put them through a fun house mirror so they become distorted e.g.
House sale of expensive items like wedgewood to raise cash BECOMES sale of all necessary items of low value like cheap cultery and plastic dinosaurs because destitute like Fantine selling her hair in Les Mis
Advertised on FB and invites local press, mum jokingly reminds me to keep my camera, it's all very cheery BECOMES totally alone, no one knows, too shamed to tell anyone and in any case there is no one to help.
As a previous poster (in fact I think it may have been you,
@FlirtyThirty !) wisely said, this is why her written accounts of the pov time have disconcertingly distant and melodramatised language e.g. instead of something which sounds truthful and factual e.g. I had to hide fro bailiffs and was scared of a knock on the door" it has to become "You feel the painful scars of trauma in your abdomen, the evil bailiffs leering at a fragile little bird in traazers, howling and clutching uselessly at the floor of the RENTED bungalow, yes this is my story as I recall it" ... it's distanced because there is a subconcious acknowledgement that it's not true.
I'm also interested in how and why she went from having custody of SB almost all of the time to, it seems, fairly little of the time if he goes to school elsewhere. Whether this was his decision, her decision or dad's decision and when it happened. Obviously whatever is best for the boy is what needs to happen. I'm just confused as to why she tries to hide it. I had to move out of my home in my teens and live elsewhere due to stuff going on at home that wasn't good for a young person to see or be involved in. I know it was a wrenching decision for my mum to make but she did it because it was best for me and I am grateful to her for that, very grateful indeed, in fact I shudder to think of the alternative. For me, making tough decisions like this are what motherhood is all about. So i don't understand why jack hides it. It would be different if she didn't mention SB at all, in which case none of my beeswax, but she utilises him all the time, so therefore why give the impression he's there all the time.
).
narc high