A Game of Chance

By Kelly Delaney

Kelly is naïve and impressionable. When she is introduced to a young man on a blind date, she is immediately taken in by him. On the surface Luke is funny, smart and caring and easily impresses Kelly with his plans to settle down and have a family. Luke appears to be everything Kelly has been looking for. She is swept up in her dreams for the future and has no idea what dangers lie ahead for all involved.

When Luke’s true colours begin to show, there is no one she can call on for help. Kelly becomes trapped in a cycle of guilt and commitment to someone who tries to take everything he wants. Her dreams are shattered by the man who was supposed to protect her and her children but instead brings danger to their door.

A Game of Chance is a true story about the impact gambling has on families. Kelly is not alone, as gambling can impact anyone’s life, regardless of social status, age, or sex. Due to it being a mental health issue, gambling addiction can be stigmatized, but it’s time this disease is brought into the light.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Jan 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781982296568

Kelly Delaney

Hayley Baxter, writing as Kelly Delaney, wrote this book to highlight how gambling addiction can impact the lives of families. She wants people to know how young advertisements target young men and how to avoid traps associated with this form of addiction. She feels lucky to now live a peaceful life with her husband, Gary, and their dog, Riley, in country Victoria.

Book preview

1

Life is a journey each of us travels on our own. It is a game of chance, and nothing is certain for any one of us. Look around the world at children born in Third World countries facing famine and a questionable future from the minute they take their first breath. What about children born into countries deep in civil war, whose parents are unsure whether their baby will survive for even a day?

For children born into families with parents not equipped to care for them, it is ultimately all a game of chance. Even as those children grow up, there is still uncertainty as to where their futures will take them. It’s a risky business when they have so many choices to make.

People who come into our lives can leave their mark in so many ways. These marks can be both good and bad; it’s how we deal with them that dictates how we survive. The choices we have to make in our lives are at times difficult, and we avoid making some until we are forced to, leaving us no other options.

As we travel the journey of life, fears and anxieties can weigh heavy on our minds. We will ultimately have to face the consequences of our actions. We can only hope that as we grow, how we choose to live our lives on this journey will allow us to evolve into healthy human beings and won’t negatively impact us or the people we love and care about. We can only pray that the bad choices we make will help us learn and, in the future, improve ourselves to move on and grow and make better choices in the future.

Then there are the experiences it just never seems possible to change. They are repeated continually and seem to hold us in a never-ending pattern of pain, fear, anger, disappointment, and, of course, regret. Being human, our emotions come into play; we are all emotional beings. Left unchecked, emotions can impact our rational selves, blurring our reality so we can’t see what is real and what is imagined.

You can make yourself believe life is completely unchangeable, no matter how much you try to alter what is happening. You can also trick yourself into believing life is very different from how it really is, just to survive. All these experiences can leave us with everlasting scars that lie hidden. They hide in the recesses of our minds waiting to pounce when we least expect it.

The domino effect from our decisions is incredible, and as families grow and more people are born into this game of chance, each person becomes involved in the machinations of the consequences of other people’s actions. Children are usually little victims of the choices that adults make. This was the case in my story.

Children are born reliant on their parents to keep them safe from harm, to be their voice when they are too young and fragile to speak for themselves. Parents need to make healthy and safe decisions on behalf of their children and never put their safety and security at risk.

2

Everywhere we go, we see advertisements for gambling—on television, social media, the Internet, and in clubs and pubs. They show how easy it is to place a bet on anything you want. Gone are the days when horse racing and poker machines were generally only found in New South Wales. All Australian states and territories now have poker machines. They are easy to access for everyone.

It is not as easy to find help. Gambling assistance services may be difficult to access if you live outside of metropolitan areas. In fact, I did a search online, and although Gamblers Anonymous immediately came up, above and below the link were other links for casino slot machines and other forms of gambling. Gamblers become desperate for funds to feed their habit, and when I say desperate, I mean truly desperate.

Gamblers will put gambling before anything else in life, including their family, their home, even their own well-being. Bills go unpaid, and food can become hard to purchase due to lack of money when you live with a gambler. Gamblers are taking immense risks; after all, almost everything in life is a gamble for them. They live with uncertainty, as do the people who live with them.

As you will see, this is a story of gambling and the destruction it caused in my family. It’s also a story of lies, cheating, ultimate heartache, and complete and utter pain. It is a true story, although some of the details, dates, and names have been changed to respect and protect people’s personal privacy.

The aim of this story is not to humiliate, embarrass, or blame anyone, or try to get sympathy for myself. It is simply to shine a light on the destructive effect that gambling can have on people’s lives and how difficult it is to stop the process for the gambler. It is an illness that so many people are afflicted by, but that illness also affects the people they love.

As I stated earlier, I have held onto this story for a long time, but I needed to write it for me. I want people to see the extent to which gamblers will go, to continue headlong on a destructive path, and how desperate their loved ones, friends, and family feel as a result. This book will shine a light on how completely desperate people can become, and how they will make decisions that are reckless and damaging to so many. They do not consciously set out to ruin lives, but once the dominoes start to fall, sometimes there is simply no way of stopping them.

Gamblers are very clever people. They are intelligent, smart, and popular, and they can charm, impress, and fool those around them very easily. That’s the only way they can succeed in their deception successfully and not be caught out.

3

I look at my role in this story and realise I had the power to change parts of what occurred, and possibly the outcome. But at that time, I didn’t have the tools or skills to be strong enough to do so. I could have changed the outcome for so many people, but I just didn’t. I allowed myself to be manipulated and moulded into the person the gambler needed to feel successful.

As I write this, I can see so many glaring opportunities where I should have been firmer, spoken out louder, or simply asked the outside world for help. But I didn’t want to ruin my husband’s reputation, humiliate him in front of his peers, have his family realise what he was doing, or bring shame on him. To me, it felt like I was going to destroy him and cause him irreversible pain. It would be my fault.

Codependency is like that. We make excuses for the wrongs of the people we love. I had emotional and psychological reliance on a man who had an addiction. Having this need for the person who is addicted means we enable people to self-destruct. Somehow, we tell ourselves that protecting and covering up for them is the right thing, when, in fact, it’s quite the opposite. It enables them to deceive us further!

I also had to think about our children and the impact a father losing everything under humiliating circumstances would have on them. How would they cope knowing their mother had caused their father to lose everything? How could they cope going to kinder and school with the children of his colleagues? How would they manage living in the public eye? As we know, children can be cruel, with or without intent.

I couldn’t see where there would be any other end for him—not at the time the story was evolving. The children were too young to understand. I believed they would hate me, never forgive me, never love me again. I also thought his family and our friends would never support me and would never believe what was really happening in our marriage. They would think I was lying, that this could never be the truth.

I had no concept of how alone I already was, how isolated I had slowly become. I couldn’t see any way out of this situation. I couldn’t see a way to change things for the better, without pain and consequences. There was no one to turn to. I had no one out there to help me.

I think I was just too young from the start of our relationship. I came from a dysfunctional family, so I wasn’t equipped with the necessary life skills to survive in a difficult marriage. So read on, because as I write this story, I find it hard to believe any of us emerged from this period as well as we have without being permanently damaged. I don’t know how we survived this and came out of it relatively unscathed.

4

A co-worker introduced me to Luke in the late seventies. I worked with her in a pharmacy in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, and we became good friends. She told me her husband worked with a young man who was finding it difficult to meet someone, and she felt we would be a good match.

At the time, I was eighteen—young and, frankly, naïve. Luke was twenty-four and worked for one of the big banks as a teller. From what I was told, he was a really nice young man. So, after some planning, I agreed to go on a blind date.

The night was arranged by my friend and her