Story of my Life: Part the Sixth

(Read previous installments: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five.)

I ran out of the house, barefoot in a t-shirt and undies, certain that my ex must be right behind me. I jumped in the car and backed out of the driveway just as he was opening the front door. He hollered something indistinguishable as I drove away.

There was only one safe place that I knew of that I could go, at 11:00 p.m. on a Sunday night, in the condition I was in. Minutes later, I pulled into Calvin’s driveway. When he answered the door and saw me standing there, shivering (it’s damned COLD in January in Arizona), he exclaimed, “What the hell?” and ushered me in. He grabbed a robe for me to wear while I told my story to him and his ex.

Let me pause here in the telling of this tale to mention that, despite everything that came after with Calvin’s ex, and my current opinion of her (and vice versa), I am still grateful for that time in my life when she and Calvin opened their home up to me and gave me a safe place to stay.

So. It seemed like I no sooner stepped into Calvin’s house that his phone began ringing. It was my ex, who knew that Calvin and his ex were the only people I knew well enough to drop on their doorstep like I did. I didn’t want to talk to him. That message was relayed. And yet he continued to call until Calvin took the phone off the hook.

The next day at work, the phone calls continued. I took the first few, but since my ex was vacillating wildly between contrition and abuse, I stopped taking his calls at about mid-morning. Which is when he showed up at AcronymCo, insisting to the security guard that he be allowed to pass so he could go to my desk. The guard, of course, refused. My ex had to be escorted off the property, without seeing me at all.

That evening my ex showed up at Calvin’s. Calvin’s ex went out to speak to him (Calvin was still at work) while I stayed in the house. I could hear my ex, wailing on the front stoop, while Calvin’s ex tried to talk sense into him. Finally, my ex went into some weird sort of collapse. An ambulance had to be called, and my ex was taken away for evaluation. It was a quiet handful of days while he stayed in the psychiatric ward of the hospital. But he bounced back in full force, calling me that evening from the hospital and sounding in fine fettle.

I stayed at Calvin’s for a short time, long enough to convince my ex to leave our house and stay with his sister, so that I could be allowed to “have some space to myself, and sort things out in my own home”. I caught him at a moment when he would grasp at the slim hope that I would “come to my senses” if I just had enough time, a fallacy that I fully enabled at that point, just to get him to cooperate. The first evening I went back to the house, I was met with an absolute AVALANCHE of discarded beer cans, dirty clothes, fast food wrappers, broken stuff, and dirty dishes. I’d never seen the house so destroyed in my life. I stayed up until 2:00 in the morning cleaning up and changing the sheets and blankets on the bed.

After about the first week I was alone in the house, I changed the locks on the doors and the mailbox. My ex had been coming and going freely while I was at work, and was being selective with which items of mail he’d leave for me. Since his psychosis-by-phone had not abated in the least, and had in fact grown worse, I felt distinctly uncomfortable with the thought that he could just waltz in whenever he wanted - perhaps even at night while I was asleep. Plus, by this time AcronymCo had banned him from any of their campuses, worldwide, as he continued to try to push his way through the guards and into my building.

He’s still banned to this day. Security has his picture in the “mug book”. Heh.

The day after I changed the locks I received a call at my desk. The caller ID said the call was coming from inside my own home. I answered, and my ex spewed forth the vilest diatribe I’d ever heard. How I was a bitch for pushing him away. How he could prove that he could get to me wherever and whenever he wanted. That there was nothing I could do to stop him from getting into his own home. That I had every reason to feel unsafe, because I wasn’t safe at all. Plus a lot of other, more colorful observations from his perspective.

When I got home I saw that he had broken into the house through a window in the side yard. I called “the guy” to come fix it, then immediately drove myself over to the courthouse and filed for a Temporary Restraining Order. I hired a very nice, speedy process server who successfully tracked down my ex and served him that very evening. More vicious phone calls ensued.

The flowers started arriving the very next morning. Day after day after day, for several weeks, my ex sent bouquets of flowers to AcronymCo. Each time I either threw them away or gave them to the security guards to decorate their stations. At the same time my ex would leave me voicemail messages (caller ID is so glorious for avoiding people you don’t want to talk to, but they can still leave messages). Some would be weepy and conciliatory. Some would be angry and threatening. Some would be songs recorded from the radio that apparently reminded him of me. Some would be just him crying for several minutes before hanging up. Some would be long strings of epithets, barely discernable in his raging voice. Some would be just silence, then a click.

He even tried getting through to me by calling my boss - a practice that she put a stop to in Very. Short. Order.

My ex and I were still seeing the counselor, separately. The problem was, my ex knew when I was going to be at my appointments (as I knew when he would be at his). I asked the counselor to walk me to and from my car when I had a session, but the counselor blew me off as being overly paranoid. So of COURSE one evening after a session I walked out to my car to discover my ex leaning against it. I reminded him that he was in violation of the TRO. He responded quite sunnily, making small talk and refusing to directly address what I was saying to him. He wanted to “go somewhere and talk”. He wanted to “get our friendship back”. He wanted to “go back to the beginning.”

He wouldn’t get out of my way so I could get in the car and leave, and even grabbed my arms when I tried to move past him. So I bumped the remote and set off the car alarm. People in the parking lot stared at us, so he let go of me and moved away from the car door. I got in and locked the doors. He started pounding on the window and hollering. I drove away. He got in his car and followed me. He harassed me all along the streets, swerving at me, racing to cut in front of me and then slowing abruptly, following so close behind me the bumpers touched. I drove toward Calvin’s, knowing it would be foolish of me to drive home where I would be alone and trying to race to safety into the house.

As soon as my ex saw where I was going, he peeled away, shouting and flipping me the bird as he passed me. So, I went home. I called the police and let them know about my ex’s actions. They tracked him down and gave him a warning to follow the terms of the TRO and stay away from me.

There was no longer any doubt in my mind that I should divorce my ex. Really, there hadn’t been a doubt since the night I walked out, but I was hoping to settle things peacefully and amicably, without the lawyers and the drama. Well, drama I already had in spades, so I decided to file on my own. I got a divorce kit from a stationary store, filled it out, filed it with the court, and then hired my trusty process server. I told him the date and time that my ex would be at his next appointment with the counselor. I figured that would be the safest place for my ex to be served, because he would surely flip out when he received the paperwork.

Maaaaan, was I right.

To be continued…

Story of my Life: Part the Fifth

(Read previous installments: part one, part two, part three, part four.)

The most profound things that happen in your life can take place in a throw-away moment; in an instant that you don’t recognize for being the creation point for the new life that lies ahead of you.

For me that moment came early one morning in April of 1995. I was making coffee in the back of the construction trailer, and Calvin came sauntering in to grab a cup before a meeting he’d arrived for. Our eyes met - I smiled, and he did that, “How YOU doin’?” look that has become OH so familiar to me now. I raised my eyebrows at him, he grinned. I may have rolled my eyes. He went to his meeting, I went to my desk. Later I asked a co-worker, “Who was that guy that came in for the meeting this morning?” She said, “Oh, Calvin? He’s repping AcronymCo for the building controls. He’s funny, isn’t he?”

Hah. Yeah, he’s funny.

Befriending Calvin was one more step on my way to regaining myself. I ended up working with him over a period of a couple of weeks monitoring alarms in the mechanical support building. He and I were stuck together for hours on end in a tiny little office. We got to talking. He got ME talking. And he listened. The more he listened, the more I talked (and I’m not the only one who has blurted their life story out into Calvin’s very sympathetic ears). And then HE talked and I listened - for he himself had an unhappy relationship and unhealthy home life. Both of us discovered in one another what we had been lacking; friendship, understanding and respect. We encouraged each other and commiserated with each other; we advised each other on how to make our individual relationships work.

I told my ex about this friendship, and my ex in turn was rather indifferent about the prospect of fostering any “couples” friendships. Still, the four of us - myself and my ex, Calvin and his ex - went out on a few occasions. We met up for movies once and dinner a couple of times. We had them over to our house for a meal, and they returned the favor. We all went out clubbing when I turned twenty-one in July of 1995. Every time we all went out my ex would act his usual creepy self, and Calvin and his ex would be uncomfortable at best, embarrassed or even angered at worst.

Months went by. The construction company laid me off, and I got a permanent position working for AcronymCo. Calvin and I, now working for the same company, had lunch together and hung out during breaks. Our friendship was as strong as ever, though we were starting to see in one another the qualities we wished our own spouses had. The unvoiced feelings between us grew, but we knew there wasn’t anything we could do about them.

Still, his friendship combined with my new job and trial-by-fire boss served to REALLY boost my confidence. To top it off, in June of 1996 I became the official and only breadwinner of the household. My ex quit his paying job to participate in a startup with one of the guys he’d worked with. A startup that paid no actual money, at any point ever, in the nearly three years that he ended up working for it. I struggled. I tried to be supportive, I really did. But my ability to be the good little wifey and put up with his bullshit was waning. I am all about following your dreams and pursuing what will make you happy. But I think we’ve established the fact that my ex does not have the ability to separate the achievable from the unachievable. I knew “startup guy” was scamming my ex and getting free work out of him, but my ex refused to see it. So I just let him go on his merry way while I worked overtime.

My ex started spending very long hours away from the house - which was fine by me, since when he was home he was usually drunk. He’d started drinking more and more to the point where an 18-pack would be gone in an evening. He kept very late nights, claiming he was working with “startup guy” long into the wee hours. Come to find out what he was REALLY doing was screwing some slutty little chick he used to work with at the paying job. AND frequenting a certain specific topless bar and a certain specific topless dancer.

Even though he was so very, very busy, he still managed to keep tabs on me. He’d page me if I wasn’t answering the house phone. He’d give me a list of things that he expected me to have accomplished by the next time we saw each other. He’d ask his sister or brother-in-law to “drop by unexpectedly” to see what I was up to. You know, while he toiled away from the house, working so very, very hard. If I wasn’t where he expected me to be, or doing what he expected me to be doing, he would rain a tirade of absolute poison all over me.

The thing of it was, the poison wasn’t working as well anymore. I didn’t believe him anymore.

I feel stupid about it now, but I have to admit that things became clear to me all of a sudden. Seriously, between one day and the next I suddenly came to the realization that I absolutely COULD NOT spend the rest of my life with this man. It was a weekend day in November of 1996. My ex was home, for once. He was upstairs on the computer (drinking his way through yet another case of beer), I was downstairs reading a book (oh, did I mention that we finally got couches, over two years after moving into the house?). He hollered down to me to bring him another beer. I closed the book and sat there thinking. Then I got up, walked upstairs, and said to my ex, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

He was poleaxed. And then he FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. He bawled. He wailed. He screamed. He fell on the floor and begged. And THIS is when I found out about the slut, and about the dancer. Because he assumed that was why I wanted to call it quits. Never mind the neglect, the emotional and mental abuse, and the fact that he was just a plain old creep. When he blurted all of this stuff out, it didn’t even anger me all that much. No, what was disturbing me was the complete and utter collapse I was witnessing. I backed away, and he leaped up and grabbed my arms and shook me - all the contrition and guilt turning in a single instant into violence.

I pushed him off me as hard as I could. He changed back in another instant into the sobbing ball of psychosis. He threatened to kill himself if I left. Which made me feel guilty. And trapped.

I scheduled us for marriage counseling. Really I just wanted to get my ex in front of someone who could diagnose his psychosis. I wasn’t overly interested in fixing our marriage - I wanted to get my ex stable enough so that I could leave without him killing himself. After I dropped the bomb on him, he alternated between being sickeningly sweet, and threatening. He’d apologize for his behavior, and then seconds later blame his behavior on me. Being around him started making me feel seriously uncomfortable. I told him I wanted to sleep separately - either he could take the couch, or I would. I just wanted some space away from him. For my own sanity. Plus I certainly didn’t want him touching me after he’d been with god-knows-who carrying god-knows-what.

The counselor was a nice enough guy - after the first session he scheduled separate appointments for the two of us. I told him a lot of how our relationship and home life was, and he didn’t have a lot to offer me in the way of a solution. My ex was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He was prescribed medication, which he took a grand total of twice. Then he stopped and refused to take any more, because he “didn’t like the way it made him feel”, and it was “stifling his creativity”. He believed that the inventive, creative part of himself came from his disorder, and rather than fixing it he wanted to encourage it. The drinking, if anything, increased.

He started getting more physically abusive. He would grab me when I would try to walk away from an argument, leaving fingerprint bruises all up and down my arms. He would scream at me from inches in front of my face, throw things, and break things. And then he would start crying and apologizing and try to hug me, then wail and throw himself on the floor when I wouldn’t let him touch me.

Finally, after an evening of this kind of behavior, I went upstairs to go to bed. He’d agreed to take the couch. I was just getting under the covers when he burst into the room, leaped on top of me, and “demanded his rights as a husband.” He held me down and tried to force me, but his drunken state combined with my own “OH HELL NO” enabled me to push him off me.

On the night of January 5th, 1997, I ran downstairs in my t-shirt and undies, grabbed the car keys off of the mantle, and ran out the door. All the while I heard him screaming behind me, “You come back here right now or I WILL KILL YOU.”

To be continued…

Story of my Life: Part the Fourth

(Read previous installments: part one, part two, part three.)

The drive across the country is kind of a blur to me, now. The night we left, my in-laws followed us to the Maine border to make sure the truck would hold up okay. We (and by “we” I mean my ex) were driving a fifteen year old 1/2 ton Chevy with over 100,000 miles on it. My ex and his father had built a plywood box to affix over the bed, into which we stuffed just as much of our belongings as we could. And then we attached a tow dolly behind the truck to tow our car, which was also stuffed full of more crap. Trust me when I tell you that we had a LOT of expectations for that poor old truck to fulfill.

We stopped at a Burger King along the turnpike at the New Hampshire border and the four of us had a meal and said our goodbyes. Then it was my ex and me, on the road for six days straight. He drove, I navigated. I kept track of how many miles we were driving because the gas gauge was broken (and the speedometer, actually, but we could hardly get up to speed in the truck so getting pulled over was REALLY not an issue). We only stayed in a hotel twice - once in Memphis and once in Albuquerque. The rest of the time we got what sleep we could in rest stops along the way. We had five hundred dollars to our name and had to save every cent we could. We were down to splitting fast food meals and washing up in rest stop bathrooms.

We got a flat in New Mexico and had to offload a lot of our belongings out of the truck just so we could get the thing jacked up. The brakes gave out on the way down the mountains from Flagstaff into Phoenix on the final day of our trip, and my ex had to use the ol’ downshift technique to slow us. He told me to keep an eye out for runaway truck pull-offs.

Good times.

We pulled off the highway in what turned out to be the worst neighborhood in Phoenix, so we could call my ex’s sister (who had moved to Arizona the year before) from a payphone (it was 1993 and who had cell phones, yet?) and get directions to her apartment. She was all, “You guys are WHERE?!? Get the heck out of there!”

Once we finally arrived I think we slept for two days straight. We did some tentative exploring around, but I absolutely refused to drive the car on Arizona streets. Coming from my own little back woods experience, the six lane surface streets of Arizona scared me to death.

I started applying to temp agencies, and got a job as a secretary at a flooring company nearby. My ex, his sister and I decided to continue living together, so we moved from the one-bedroom to a two-bedroom apartment in the same complex. Things weren’t so bad, with all of us living together. We split the cleaning and the bills, the grocery shopping and the cooking. My ex wasn’t particularly interested in going to the Tempe Kingdom Hall, so we stopped going to meetings. We didn’t quit being Witnesses, per say, we just kind of stopped going to the congregation. My sister-in-law stopped cajoling us to go after a couple of months. We stopped feeling guilty about it a few months after that.

About six months after we moved to Arizona, my ex’s sister started long-distance dating a man from a Kingdom Hall in Maryland. They “courted” and they married. Once they were married, he moved to Arizona and it was the four of us living in the 700sf two-bedroom apartment. Things were getting a little cramped. And testy.

My ex finally got a stable job programming for a company in Tempe, and we started thinking about getting our own house. I had changed jobs by then, and had a permanent position as a purchasing assistant for a general contractor on the AcronymCo campus. Assumable mortgages were still around at that time, and we found a little 1400sf two bedroom house that we could manage on our own. We moved in on July 19th 1994, one day shy of my 20th birthday.

Now, up until this point my ex had kept his crazy side pretty much at bay. It was always easier on me when we were around other people, and living with his sister and her new husband kept things on a somewhat normal level. Plus we had moved away from the old judgmental congregation and my family, two trigger points that got my ex into his “moods”. He still talked the same talk, about his grandiose dreams and status as a superior human being, but he was better enough to live with that it actually seemed to be an improvement. So I more or less ignored aspects of his personality and behavior that would otherwise cause question in favor of this somewhat amenable version of my ex.

Oh, the hars.

Moving into the new house took almost all of the spare money we had. Once all the paperwork was signed and everything was finalized, we had a couple of thousand dollars left with which to furnish our empty home. We had our bed and a computer desk to our name. No couches, no kitchen table, no decor of any kind. On a weekend day, two weeks after moving into our new house, I was contemplating how we could furnish our house for two thousand dollars. I answered a knock at the front door, and opened it to find a stranger standing there, his arms loaded with a box full of scrap computer parts. A woman was right behind him, similarly loaded. And behind her was my ex, also carrying a box of junk.

He had bought out a garage sale being held by a neighbor down the street. Bought the WHOLE THING, for the two thousand remaining dollars we had. Boxes and boxes of junk motherboards, disk drives, memory chips, and similar detritus. The couple’s garage had been full from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. The man (prompted by his wife) was holding a garage sale hoping to get rid of SOME of it (and we all know how garage sales usually go). He must have thought my ex was a gift from God, handing him two thousand dollars for a garage full of junk.

None of it was working. NONE of it. My ex bought it ALL with the thought that he could use this stuff to build his own computers, build experiments and devices. FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST, I STILL GET PISSED OFF ABOUT THIS. My ex vetoed my protests, ignored my tears. The three of them walked back and forth, between our house and theirs, for HOURS, transferring all of the junk from their garage to my living room, my dining room, all the available closets, and the spare bedroom. I wish I had thought to take a picture of it, just once, so I could post it here. Boxes and boxes, bags and bags, with little paths in between the piles to walk among.

This was just one example in the MYRIAD that I have to choose from, that my thoughts and feelings and opinions had absolutely no value according to my ex.

I know I’m blocking out a lot of details, or maybe enough time has passed that they’re happily blurred. Our day to day life details are somewhat hazy - they involved us leaving in the morning, driving to his place of work so I could drop him off, me going to work, then going back and picking him up at the end of the day. I would cook dinner; he would mess around with the computer or his books or the MOUNTAIN OF CRAP that he bought. I would listen to music or escape into a novel, he would periodically lecture me about how I was rotting my brain and becoming more stupid with every piece of fiction I read. Lights were always out by 8:00, and we still didn’t own television. Not because we just hadn’t purchased one yet, but because my husband dictated that we would never own one. Some weekends we would visit with his sister and her husband, but mostly the expectation was for me to provide my ex with food and drink while he worked on his “projects”.

Going out for entertainment was a rarity, since my ex didn’t like spending money on anything. His idea of going out would be to see a movie at the dollar theater and go to Taco Bell for one soft taco each and a small soda to share. I am SO not kidding.

It all looks very benign written here, but I felt neglected and lonely and stifled. All I wanted was a normal life and a normal relationship, and a husband and home that I could be proud of. I wanted to be able to express my thoughts and opinions, I wanted to have goals and ambitions, and I wanted to NOT be belittled because of them.

Our sex life isn’t even worth mentioning. I’ll just say technique was lacking, and satisfaction was extremely one-sided. The side that WASN’T mine. There were occasions of border-line abuse, since for some reason he really got off on humiliation and submission. Mine.

He liked it when I cried.

ANYWAY. Not talking about that. Lalalalalalala…

I started to establish tentative friendships with the people I worked with. But I couldn’t invite them over to the house for dinner… because, well, you know why. “Hello, sit amongst this computer junk yard! Would you like some risotto? Mind your feet and don’t step on the processors!” We lived a very solitary life and I rarely observed my ex against the foil of other, more normal personalities and behaviors. My ex forbade me from going anywhere at all without him, unless it was to work or to the grocery store. He would listen on another line if I received any phone calls. He discouraged friendships of any kind, and had none of his own. If I expressed a desire or opinion that was contrary to his own, well… it’s hard to explain. He would kind of menace me until I came back into line.

It was the classic isolationist methodology of an abuser. So easy to see, now.

You might ask, as some folks who already know the full story have, why on Earth I put up with this behavior. Why I allowed myself to be in such a miserable relationship. All I can say is that I was young, I was naive, I was isolated from my friends and family, and I had absolutely no confidence in myself. I can’t even explain the mental manipulation my ex was capable of. He could make the most outrageous things seem reasonable, with ME cast as the unreasonable party. He could take the most wrong thing he was guilty of, and spin it so that I was the one that was wrong. He had this ability to make me feel small, unworthy, ugly, insignificant, and stupid. And then he’d confirm these feelings I had by saying them out-loud, as facts.

Gradually, though… oh, so gradually, I began to think of myself in a different light. I was growing up, I was doing well at work, and I was gaining confidence. I had friends at work that I could talk to. My inherent personality finally started to kick back in, now that it was just my ex I faced, and not the brainwashing barrage of nonsense from his family and the entire Witness congregation. Even my frequent telephone calls with my mother-in-law, in which I would STILL tell her how he was and what was happening, and how she would STILL tell me it was my Christian duty to submit to him, began to have less influence over me. I began, internally and to myself at first, to express my own outrage and anger at his treatment of me. I began to think that perhaps I wasn’t the foolish little piece of shit he said I was. I began to listen to that little feeling I had, which knew that the level of his psychosis was greater than I had previously admitted to myself.

I began to see what other people saw. I began to be able to compare him with normal, socialized people. How he’d say very little at what few social gatherings we did attend. He’d sit in the corner with his “observations”. He’d barely speak when directly addressed, and when he did it would be with a superior air. I would watch people exchange, “What the FUCK?” glances with one another, behind his back.

My original sense of loyalty that would automatically defend him, in voice and mind, when others would call his behavior and treatment of me into question, popped up less and less. People would ask me, in private, why I let him speak to me the way I did. They would observe the way he was with me… oh, say if I reached to hold his hand, he would hit it away. If I laughed too much or talked too much, if I started enjoying myself, he would reel me in with a “Laura, you’re embarrassing. Behave yourself.” People would get angry with him for me, on my behalf, but the fallout I suffered when my ex and I were back home was enough for me to ask them, “Please, just don’t say anything to him.”

I didn’t have an answer for them, as to why I let this happen. I didn’t have an answer for myself, and I knew there was so much more beneath the surface, that my ex’s “public face” didn’t let them see. Finally I began to feel ashamed about his behavior, his personality, who he WAS, and the fact that I was married to him. I was tired of having to explain away why we couldn’t go out and meet other people for dinner, or go to the movies. Why I couldn’t leave the house except to go to and from work. Why my husband didn’t like me taking calls at home. Why, essentially, I couldn’t have any friends. I was tired of excusing his behavior to other people, when I could no longer excuse it to myself.

I was sick of not being my own person. I was tired of having every thought and every action and every moment of every day dictated by him. I finally knew FOR MYSELF that I was smart, and good, and had opinions and thoughts that were worthy of expression. I finally realized FOR MYSELF that I should be able to pursue things that interested me - reading, journaling, photography, even going back to school - all things previously forbidden. I finally understood how very NOT NORMAL my life and his behavior was. I was tired of letting him talk to me the way he did, letting him belittle me the way he did.

I decided it was time that he realized his “little wifey”, whom he thought he would “bring up right”, was going off in an unanticipated direction.

So. Thus the seeds of my ultimate rebellion were slowly beginning to germinate. But the path I was about to take was fraught with more drama than I had ever experienced before in my life.

To be continued…

And now for something completely different.

(Edited to add: the third installment of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Laura’s Sordid Past is up just below this entry…)

I’m taking a pause today in the writing of my Epic Tale of Gloom. I go to a really bad place when I’m writing it, I’m finding, and it’s not healthy to stay there for long periods of time. Thus, a happy break. I don’t like to cast my mind back to that time, but I suppose it’s good for me. Call it an exorcism or something. Self-imposed therapy. It’s taking me a lot longer than I figured it would, though. Three parts already and probably another two to go before it’s all said and done. Calvin’s all, “Finish the story already! I want to know what happens!”

Um, Calvin? You ARE what happens.

Anyway. I’ve been playing around with the white balance settings on my camera (why it took me so long to pick up a copy of Scott Kelby’s book is beyond me). And I’ve been having GREAT fun with Photoshop CS3 and the actions provided (free!) by the generous and talented Miss Ree. Plus I’m doing some exploring and fiddling around with the new enhanced features that CS3 has over my old 5.5 version.

My only problem is that there’s not a whole heck of a lot of interesting subjects in and around the place that I live. Just plain ol’ boring Suburbia, until Calvin and I can get out of town this weekend and take a drive up north or something. I was just going back through my Flickr photos and using them to play with in Photoshop, but I REALLY wanted to take some new photos with some of the new camera techniques I’m learning. So I cast my eyes around for something vaguely interesting to take pictures of.

Lo, the subject of my happy break:

“Hellew. I have ze sexy eyes, no?”

“I claim zis basket in ze name of Spain.”

“Do you see how changing the white balance on the camera brings out my natural highlights? I. Am. Gorgeous.”

“My toes, zey are precious.”

Quoth Calvin, “How many pictures of Oz do you NEED, anyway?” I don’t know, readers! How many pictures of Ozzy do we need? A hundred? A thousand? A million?

How about just one more.

“My eyes, zey look blue in zis light. I am stunning regardless of camera setting or photo enhancement!”

Story of my Life: Part the Third

(Read part one here.)
(Read part two here.)

There were signs, which are obvious to me now, after everything that’s passed. Signs that my ex wasn’t what you would call overflowing with normalcy. His mother would tell me stories about his childhood, and the reasons he was removed from school in 8th grade to become home schooled until he got his GED. He couldn’t acclimate. He couldn’t socialize or get along with the other kids. He was “sensitive”. He was too smart to be treated like every other boy.

He was breast-fed until he was four years old. (Say it with me now… “Eeeeeewwwww!”)

My ex just didn’t have normal emotional reactions, and didn’t practice normal social behaviors. At the end of our relationship he would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but at the beginning of our relationship I just didn’t see it clearly - and how could I have, at sixteen or seventeen? I didn’t realize that what began as minor episodes of emotions incongruous with the situation, and “quirks” of personality and behavior, would grow to monstrous proportions.

A few months into our marriage I began to suspect that All Was Not Right. My ex had always had this unshakable conviction that he was absolutely smarter than every other person on the planet. I’m not even exaggerating. He believed he was a true savant. He believed that he wasn’t destined to live the humdrum, normal existence of a typical American family. There would be no nine-to-five job for him. People would pay him for his dizzying intellect. He was worth millions, and some day people would see him for the amazing creature that he was.

Damn, I wish I was exaggerating.

My ex is just one of those people who is fixated on his own reality, at the cost of all else. For six years, the cost was me. In the beginning of our marriage, I took his rantings to be the ambitious dreaming of someone who would Do Something With Their Life. Every kid in his early twenties wants to be a millionaire by twenty-five, after all. His job at Burger King was just something to pay the bills until his plans came to fruition. Plans with no form or substance, but which vaguely involved computers and inventing and programming and talking a lot and drawing little pictures on napkins. Plans that were all in his head and would not pay the bills.

A year into our marriage, my ex was fired from Burger King. The charge: sexual harassment complaints from another employee. Complaints I refused to believe at the time, but now I’m sure they were true. I, of course, quit as well. Now jobless, my ex was convinced this was His Moment. I got another job working 45-minutes away in Portland as a transcriptionist. It paid well enough to meet what little bills we had at the time. He focused on his books and motherboards, and briefly toyed with teaching computer usage and programming. He put together and advertised for a “free seminar” for people to come and listen him to talk about his greatness. I don’t even know what the topics were, but he had a list of them. He rented a lecture hall for a day in a nearby town and raved about how he was going to establish so many contacts and finally make it big.

I was not invited. And nobody else showed up for it.

He did not take failure well.

Now, a normal person would try the first time, perhaps fail, understand this to be the travails of success, and try again. Some people have to try for YEARS before things come to fruition. My ex took this failed seminar to mean that the universe at large was not ready for him, would not accept him. He went into a state of emotional collapse for days. He sat around and stared at nothing. He brushed off my attempts at encouragement. For the better part of a week I stuck food in front of his face, pottered around the house when I wasn’t working, and waited for him to get OVER it, already. Finally, he made up his mind that he, the great unappreciated genius that he was, would have to prove himself in other ways.

Things kind of took a crazy turn from there. He started talking about wanting to start a commune and only invite people “like him” who would “get it”. He wanted to be surrounded by people who would love him for who and what he was. He started talking about how he wanted me to share him with other women, because “If I loved him, I’d want to share him with the world.” He started talking about wanting to build or buy a sailboat (and we did buy a MacGregor 21′ and sailed it a grand total of twice) and live completely off the grid, sailing around the world. He started pressuring me to learn how to make my own clothes and to find every recipe there was for dried beans. He forbid me from reading books (I know! ME!) or watching television, because they only rot my brain and do nothing to help him forward his goals.

I know. Crazy, crazy stuff.

I started voicing my opinions about these plans and wishes of his. Which is when he started truly cutting me down. I wasn’t smart enough to understand. My role was to be his “little wifey” and take care of all of his physical needs so he wouldn’t have to expend any mental energy on them, and would thereby have more mental capacity for his plans. Any expressions of doubt or opinion on my part were met with icy cold disdain at best, or outright ridicule and anger at worst. How could I possibly understand, a mere little girl?

“That’s why I married you young. To bring you up right and make you into what I want.” He said.

Yes, my friends, you read that right. It boggled my mind. That, and his statement that if I truly loved him I’d share him with other women. AND the piece de resistance, “You aren’t my first priority. Maybe you will be in a couple of years, but you aren’t right now.”

I would talk to my mother-in-law, plead with her to try to get her son to act more reasonably. Tell her the things my ex had been saying and doing. She insisted that the more extreme things my ex was stating were just his way of “venting”. That I had to obey him and see to his needs. That he was very deep and needed a special person to understand him. That everything would work out in the end. That I was his wife and as such subordinate, and that this is just the way it would be “until death do us part”. I swear to God, his family believed that he really WAS as wonderful as he said he was. Their poor little misunderstood genius.

I would stand up for myself, in the beginning, when he belittled me. I would try to get him to see reason, try to convince him that he at least needed a job, try to get him to fall under the normal structure of a relationship. He wouldn’t have any of it. He would call me stupid, and worse. He would alternate between getting in my face and screaming, or ignoring me for days on end.

Our fighting came to my Grandmother’s attention. She asked me one day if she had heard him right, when he yelled that I was a “stupid bitch”. I tried to laugh it off, but she knew what was going on. When I went back into the apartment my ex asked me what my Grandmother and I had talked about. I didn’t want to say, but he finally got it out of me. He stormed into my Grandmother’s house, accused her of trying to brainwash me against him, and said he was going to take me far away and my family would never see me again. She called my uncle, and my uncle came over and got in my ex’s face for threatening my Grandmother.

Six days later, we were moving to Arizona.

I didn’t want to move. I didn’t ever want to leave Maine. Not in my entire life had I ever even expressed the desire to leave. I begged and pleaded and cried to my husband, but he insisted we were leaving to “get away from these people that want to control us”.  I pleaded with my in-laws to convince him to change his mind. I knew that if I got in that truck and drove away with him, I would lose myself completely.

To no avail.  I left, sitting beside my husband in the cab of a half-ton pickup truck stuffed with at least one ton of belongings, towing our car behind it.  The teachings of my role as wife and helpmeet were still so ingrained in me that I thought it was my duty to support and follow my husband.  Despite my feelings, despite my upset, despite a deepening and sickening feeling that this man I entrusted my life and heart with was not well, not sane. My mother-in-law and father-in-law were pushing me to go. My grandmother, even, said that I was married now and had to go where he went, even though she was sorry that it was my ex’s argument with her that triggered us to go. None of my other family members tried to stop what was happening, though I know they figured I was grown-up and was making my own decision.  But it wasn’t my decision, not really.  I felt like I didn’t have a choice.  I felt abandoned by anyone who would give me any help.  I felt like I was the only person who could see reason.  I started to wonder if I was the crazy one.  I was nineteen and completely lost.

And so, I said goodbye to my dog, said goodbye to my grandmother, said goodbye to the home of my childhood, and said goodbye to myself. We left at 6:00 on a crisp October night in 1993 to begin the six day, three thousand mile journey across the country, to a life in Arizona that held a plentitude of unknowns.

To be continued…

Story of my Life: Part the Second

(Read part one here.)

Grandma and I attended a four-day Witness convention in the summer of 1990, along with our entire congregation and all of the congregations in New England. One of the elders of our Hall (Witness churches are called “Kingdom Halls”) drove us in my grandmother’s car, from Maine to Providence, Rhode Island. He scolded me for listening to Simon and Garfunkel on my walkman because Cecelia is, apparently, a woman of loose morals.  I should have known better than to have said anything, since my entire tape and record collection had been taken away from me and destroyed, the year before, by the woman who was conducting my bible studies. George Michael, Def Leppard, and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack are of the devil, after all.

Anyway. I don’t want to turn this story of my first marriage into a free-for-all rant about the machinations of the Jehovah’s Witnesses… but like I said, it’s all so tied together that it’s hard to separate the two topics.

My ex and his family happened to be staying at the same hotel that Grandma and I were staying. I realized this fact when, with Grandma’s permission, I left her sleeping in the room and went down to the hotel pool to hang out with other Witnesses socializing there. My ex was there, chatting with a family friend. I joined a group of young people gathered at the opposite end of the pool. He watched me for a while, we exchanged smiles and nods a time or two, then he left his friend and came over to me. He asked me to sit with him on the lounge chairs for a while and talk. So I did. He asked permission from one of the Elders by the pool, then walked me up to my room later on. Everything was very proper and correct.

Throughout the convention (held in the Civic Center in Providence), during morning and afternoon breaks, and during lunch, we walked together or sat together and talked. We were not allowed to sit together during the sessions. Other people, especially the Elders, took notice of our interest in one another. We were reminded to stay in plain sight and behave according to the rules. On the last day of the convention, during the final break of the day, my ex expressed interest in pursuing a relationship with me. I agreed.

I had turned sixteen that week, he was closing in on twenty.

Things progressed rapidly from that point forward. I began to hang out at his house after school, and got to know his mother and sister very well. His mother would drive me back home in the evening, and we would frequently sit in the car for another hour, parked in my driveway, talking about life and relationships and anything else that came to mind. I think it was at that point that I realized how much I missed not having a mother. My grandmother was always wonderful to me and I could have gone to her with anything, but the generation and age gap were always obstacles in our understanding of one another.

My ex began to come over to my house for dinner, and sit and watch TV in the evenings with me and Grandma. We progressed - very, very secretly - to hand holding, then to embraces, then to kissing. We spent hours on the phone talking about everything that interested him - cars, sailing, science, computers. He got me listening to Led Zeppelin, The Doors, and Pink Floyd, in a grand gesture of rebellion against “the rules” surrounding what was appropriate to listen to.

It kills me, how sheltered we were.

Typical to teenage romance, we soon began to chafe against the rule that we had to be accompanied by a chaperonat all times. We wanted to go places and do things together, and his sister wasn’t always willing to schlep around with us. So he started to pick me up in his car after school, and we would go to the ocean or Freeport or Portland. His parents would think he was one place and Grandma would think I was another place, and it became surprisingly easy to sneak away.

Drama begins in the simplest of ways. The incendiary point came about when we were doing something we had permission from his father, an Elder, to do. My ex picked me up at my house, and we drove straight over to the home of another Witness couple, who were boarding my horse. We planned on riding together for the afternoon, and my ex was mounted on a horse borrowed from the neighboring stable. The Witness couple took exception to the fact that we had arrived alone together, that we were going to ride alone together (because our horses would SO behave and entertain themselves while we played Nookie In The Thicket), and that we were going to drive back home alone together.

They reported these facts to another Elder in the congregation, who brought the situation to the rest of the Board of Elders, who in turn took my ex’s father to task. In the end, after “testimony” from me, from Grandma, from my ex’s family, and from congregation members who had “observed” my ex’s and my “behavior”, they removed my ex’s father from being an Elder. He could not, quote, “Sufficiently control his son in the manner exemplifying the household of an Elder.” Now, for a family who thrived upon their standing in the congregation, it was a hugely devastating time. And it just made things harder on my ex and me - we were constantly being scrutinized, watched, analyzed, tested to make sure we were behaving like good little Witness children.

Which, well, we weren’t. We were behaving like normal teenagers, with all that implies. But we felt really guilty about it.  Honest.

When my ex proposed, I accepted. Our chance to get out from under the scrutiny of the entire congregation was a mere wedding away. My Grandmother and my ex’s family were thrilled when I presented them with my ring-adorned hand. My sister and my uncles… not so much thrill. I was, after all, a senior in high school and still six months away from my seventeenth birthday. But by then, because of everything we’d gone through, my ex and I had forged an “us against the world” attitude and we were determined to get married, come hell or high water.

I graduated high school in June of 1991. A month before my seventeenth birthday, and a year early, since I combined my Junior and Senior years.

Because I was so young, upon our marriage my ex actually had to be given legal guardianship of me until I turned eighteen. THAT was an interesting Family Meeting with my grandmother, sister and uncles, and a fun trip to Town Hall, letmetellyouwhat.

On August 17, 1991, my ex and I were married. Next to the pool at the Ramada Inn in Portland, Maine. I had been seventeen for less than a month, and my ex was not yet twenty-one. My sister was dressed shabbily and was entirely inebriated before the ceremony started. My uncle was grim and taciturn. My grandmother was beaming, my ex’s family was joyful. Though he was no longer an Elder, my ex’s father was ordained by the state to perform marriages, and so he conducted the ceremony. We held the reception in one of the Ramada’s banquet rooms. We danced “our” dance to “Thank You” by Led Zeppelin. A fellow Witness manned a keyboard and provided real, quality entertainment. The Electric Slide may or may not have been performed.

We were so ridiculously young.

Finally free of the stricture that had been surrounding us for the past year, my ex and I had a fun honeymoon. We drove leisurely down the East coast, stopping wherever sounded interesting. He taught me how to drive a stick-shift along the way (I had my learner’s permit at the time, but wouldn’t get my license until about six months later). We spent a week in Daytona Beach and learned how to sail. We went to Epcot Center. When we returned from our honeymoon, we settled into living in the in-law apartment adjacent to my Grandmother’s house. He was a shift manager at Burger King, and a month after we were married I, too, worked at good ol’ BK-USA. As a crew member. With my new husband as my boss. We worked the closing shift every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and every other Thursday. We visited his parents frequently, went to meetings at the Kingdom Hall dutifully, and things went along pretty smoothly.

For a while.

To be continued…

You go, girl!

Woo!

Story of my Life: Part the First

So, I’m going to have to approach this in a linear fashion. Those of you who are familiar with me in more than a passing sense know that this is the only way I can tell a story. I’m having to fight myself to write it here, in a series of entries, rather than write it all out in Word or some such thing so I can go back, add, delete, multiply, divide, and have a perfectly sensible and finished product that says everything I want it to say and doesn’t say everything I don’t want it to say.

That, my friends, is my struggle and my gift to you. So if I repeat things that you long-time readers already know, please be tolerant for the new friends we have acquired on this modest little website. The story of my abusive naive horrible fucked-up (let’s call it what it is, shall we?) relationship with my ex has tentacles in other stories. Repercussions. Waves upon waves. A butterfly flapping its wings in Taiwan a week ago gives me a bad hair day this morning. You know, that kind of thing.

I was born a poor black child in 1974 to a modest little family in a modest little home in Gray, Maine. Three years later, my parents divorced and my father was never heard from again. Five years after that my mother passed away, and I became my grandmother’s responsibility. I moved from a town that was rural to most people’s standards, to a town that was rural to Maine standards. That, my friends, is rural. With the exception of a close friend and neighbor who passed away when he (and I) was eleven, I had infrequent “sleep overs” with friends from school, my dog, my cat, and my grandmother for company.

I’ve always been an introspective person, and I believe my solitary childhood was responsible for that, at least in part. Note that I say that my childhood was solitary, but it wasn’t lonely. I never really fit in at school - I had no patience for adolescent and teenage drama. But I had acres and acres of land to explore with my Golden Retriever by my side.  Forests, fields, and streams to wander. Bright days filled with sunlight and fragrant breezes; silent dark nights with skies full of stars. I had a healthy imagination, a passion for the outdoors and nature, and a loving if stern grandmother to steer me in the right direction.

However, not every direction she turned me in was the right one for me. My grandmother was a Jehovah’s Witness, and while this is a very LONG topic for another very LONG entry, suffice it to say that it was my becoming a Witness as well that shaped the path my life took, for years to come. My entire family (well, what there is of it - my sister and my two uncles) were violently opposed to me becoming a Witness. But I did so, at about eleven, because it was such a big part of my Grandmother’s life, and I wanted to make her happy. AND I wanted the elders of her congregation to stop harassing her about “bringing me to The Truth”. They felt it was her duty to get me to become a Witness, and you wouldn’t BELIEVE the tactics they used on a little old woman and a little girl.

Like I said, another epic for another day.

So. I went to meetings on a very, VERY regular basis. Two hours on Sunday, two hours on Tuesday, one hour on Thursday, and “going from door to door” on Saturdays (which I HATED with the red hot fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. Can you imagine being twelve years old and talking to strangers about religion on a Saturday morning, accosting them unsolicited at their homes when they’re still in their jammies? Oh, good grief.) (Oh, and remind me to share with you a funny story about the couple of times that Witnesses have come to the door when Calvin and I were home.) We were taught to be very insular in our associations with people of “The World” (non-Witnesses). Only make friends within the congregation. Only trust those within the congregation (and what a joke that turned out to be).

(Sorry about all the parenthetical comments.)

Guess who else was part of our congregation? My ex’s family - mother, father, sister, and my ex. When I first joined the congregation I recall seeing my ex as a periphery walk-on in the grand orchestration of the congregational meetings. His father was an Elder (there are twelve of them to each congregation), his sister was planning on going into the missionary service after high school… basically, they were a very influential family amid the politics of the congregation. I had no interest at all in any of this - I was horse-crazy at the time, not boy-crazy. So I kept my head down, studied what they told me to study, believed what they told me to believe, and desperately tried to fit in with these people, while at the same time my inner sense of spirituality was diminishing, getting severely suppressed. They called it teenage rebellion that needed to be crushed, I realize now it was my inner self KNOWING that not only was the religion wrong for me, the religion itself was very, VERY Not Right.

All of this has relevance, trust me.

A few years went by, during which my ex was sent by his family to live with a paternal aunt residing in Maryland. Not until many years later (long after our wedding) did I learn that he was sent away because he (at sixteen or seventeen) was stalking a fifteen year old girl and disregarding the restraining order her family had on him. He said they were in love. He said her parents forced them apart. But when, on the WITNESS STAND (mind you), she said she was terrified of him and just wanted him to leave her alone, he was convinced her parents made her say that. He showed up at her house in the middle of the night, tapping on her window. He followed her to her high school. He kept it up and kept it up until, in a desperate bid to keep him out of jail, my ex’s parents sent him away.

Would that he had stayed away.

Eventually, he returned home. I had gone from being a horse-crazy teen to, at fifteen, dipping my toes in the boy and marriage craziness effecting all the females of my age in the congregation. You see, Witness teens are not allowed to date. No one is allowed to date without the “intent” to marry. An unmarried female and an unmarried male cannot be alone together, for any length of time, for any reason. Any expressions of interest have to be pretty much made in front of the entire congregation (before and after meetings, during conventions, during the “get-togethers” that were occasionally planned for congregation members), and dates have to be accompanied by a chaperon.  To violate any of these rules is to risk being publicly shunned by the entire congregation by being announced as “bad association”, or even “disfellowshipped”, which is to be kicked out of the congregation (and ALL Witness congregations) altogether.  And they DO make these announcements over the podium during Sunday service.  I’ve seen it happen, and in the end of it all, it happened to me.

On top of this nonsense, teenage girls are taught from the very beginning that they are “less than”. The man as husband is the spiritual adviser, head of the household, and superior to the woman in the eyes of God. The woman as wife is to be her husband’s “helpmeet”, and is to defer to and obey her husband in all things. ALL THINGS. Remember that, because it has bearing on the rest of the story.

It was in this poisonous environment (and trust me, I’ve only described the merest sliver of the whole horrific pie) that I developed during the formative years of my adolescence. It was all I was exposed to, all I was taught, all that was demonstrated to me. Even my former mother-in-law, during the times I would approach her in tears over what her son, my husband, WAS and HAD DONE, would only say versions of, “It’s God’s will,” and, “It’s our duty as the wife.”

It was to effect my self-esteem, my perception of myself, my mental health, and my relationships for the rest of my life.

To be continued…

PSA

In case anyone was wondering what was up with all of the activity and weird photos over on my Flickr account, I’m in the process of downloading all of the pics used in the old Snerkology on-line journal from my web host (Dreamhost, AWESOME, I tell ya) to my hard drive, then uploading them into Flickr. They’re organized into sets, “Snerkology 2000″, “Snerkology 2001″, etc. I think it wasn’t until 2006 that I started using Flickr, so as you can see, I have my work cut out for me.

I’m not going to even THINK about how much work it will be to caption and categorize/tag them all.

Carry on!

As requested: “Laura’s Life and Times, the Early(er) Years”

Yes, I know that’s not how you spell “earlier”. Parenthetical suffixes allow for overall word misspellings.

So, a reader requested that I post a bit more about my pre-Calvin, pre-online journal years. Specifically, the request was, “What’s up with your ex, and why did you have to run out of the house in the middle of the night in nothing but a T-shirt and panties?”

That, my friends, is a loooooooooong, drama-filled story. Which will probably take more than one entry to write. But I shall persevere, because I am filled with the love for all my readers, great and small.

So this is a head’s up that the entries are forthcoming. It’s been a couple of days since I posted so I thought you’d all appreciate the knowledge that I haven’t forgotten you. No, indeedy. I am, in fact, gearing up to pour my guts out in an epic tale of lost innocence, betrayed dreams, and fantastic stupidity.

BUT! It has a happy ending (as you already know). So, stay tuned!