By Carol Swantek, August 2, 2017 — I was able to stay home and take care of my sons, because they were a handful. I was in Cub Scouts and in the PTA. I really enjoyed those years. We changed schools a lot because of my dad’s job, I never had a close friendship for that reason.
Then I met my husband on a blind date and we had dated for a year and a half before we got married. My husband was an Erie School teacher. We had three sons. When they became teenagers, they started getting into stuff. My oldest son, Mark, started getting into some trouble with drugs. He was only 4 foot 10 and 85 lb when he was 16 years old and he seemed to get in with the wrong people. Then he started teaching his brothers that, and they were following in his footsteps. Then when Mark was 24, he passed away and the other two said they didn’t think that the same thing would happen to them. My middle son is 47 and he owns his own business, but he is like a workaholic, and he goes to fast food places, and he’s been in the hospital. He was drinking in between because he couldn’t get anybody hired to help him. He was in Hamot for 12 days and he detoxed, so that is good. My youngest son looked at his brothers and doesn’t want the same thing happening to him or his family. But he dropped out of Edinboro University and did not tell us and here we were, paying for him to go. Unfortunately, after Mark died, we went through a divorce because it hurt too bad and I just didn’t want part of anything anymore. I wanted to move, my husband went through a mid-life crisis, he got a toupee, bought a sports car, was hanging out with Mark’s friends, and it was just too much for me. I had to escape. Kevin, after his father stopped paying for college, stop paying for college on the one to Vo-Tech and learned welding. All of these businesses called him, and he is doing very well right now.
I met my husband 3 years later, and we both said we did not want to get married again. I don’t know what happened, but a year-and-a-half later we got married and have been doing very good!