Plain White Ts – 1234

My FAVORITE song right now. I heard a snip of it on the radio this morning driving to work and it just hit me deep in my core.. I wrote down the lyrics on the back of my hand because I couldn’t find a scrap piece of paper in a car that looks like I live out of it :: go figure :: and looked it up on Google.

This song could have been written for Chief so I’m dedicating it to him.

Convos

Mom: Hmm.. so you went to Chief’s church on Sunday

Me: Uh-huh

Mom: So.. how was it?

Me: Well.. Pentacostal services are alot different from Catholic services, I’ll tell you what.

Mom: Well.. was it strange????

Me: Nah.. it was okay until they sent the kids away and sacrafised baby animals.

DISCLAIMDER:  Pentacostal Churches DO NOT sacrafice baby animals but if you knew my mother and catholicism, you’d be laughing as hard as I am now!

Thinking

Why the hell can’t people push their own elevator button?

I Had A Dream

.. Recently, I’ve been doing alot of bitching, complaining, whining and violin playing

I always joke around that the reason why I took Pysch courses in college was so that I can lay on my own couch and save myself a whole lot of money.

But I actually took the courses because I have a fascination with people.. why they do the things they do.. what drives their choices.. that kind of thing.

I recently posted about my childhood and life with ex husband in a previous post. I did this not only to help YOU understand where I’m coming from and where I’ve been but to help ME understand why I’ve been so unhappy lately with Chief.

And as a beautiful soul pointed out to me yesterday … it’s not Chief that’s making me unhappy. It’s ME who’s making me unhappy.

I firmly believe that God puts people in your life for a purpose. And I know she crossed my path because I needed to hear the truth and the truth is that I was taking a back seat to my life and letting someone else drive.

I’ve been letting things that I’m not getting my way on overshadow not only the love I have for Chief but more importantly, the love he has for me.

Chief is the antithesis of The Jerk.

We are a like in SO many ways… same sarcastic sense of humor.. randomness.. and wit. We like so many of the same things that our dislikes are door of opportunity to engage in something new. Who the hell would ever think I’D be a Battlestar Gallactica fan!!

There’s a line in the P!NK song “It’s All Your Fault” that goes

… you called me beautiful

That line resonates with me because Chief was the first guy I was with that told me that. I’m not fat but have a few extra pounds and he didn’t care. He made me un-self conscience. He appreciated my intelligence.. He didn’t expect me to do anything but just be myself.

The problem is, I didn’t know how to be myself. I never was “just me”. I didn’t have a puppet master any longer.. he could care less and wasn’t threatened if I wanted to take a trip with my girlfriends or go shopping with my mom. He wouldn’t call me a million times to check up on me. Coming from the other extreme .. this was like culture shock.

Everything with him was unbelievable. I felt SO loved and SO appreciated and SO pretty… we had sex practically every night and he never felt asleep without holding me. He would tell me that he felt like I was too good for him.. that I deserved nothing but the best that I was amazing and he was so blessed to have me in his life. That I was everything he wanted .. a best friend, lover, confidant. He said he loves everything about me.. everything I do.. and everything I don’t do. I don’t bitch, harp, control, accuse.

It was things that I’ve been longing to hear and then I didn’t want it to stop.

Yknow… life evolves and relationships evolve and things become routine.. and that’s not a bad thing. What I realized yesterday is that it’s not so much “routine” but “comfortability”.

When Chief openned the shop, he started working 20 hours a day… literally. He was a one man show.. the place needed alot of fixing, painting, counters built.. and he did it all himself. He came home tired and went right to bed.. getting up and starting all over again. Our sex life made a sharp decline and so did the snuggling.

My damaged, scarred mind openned the door to my demons and my self doubt and low self esteem came for a visit in the back of my brain and never left.

He stopped loving me the way he used to.. I don’t turn him on anymore.. Why don’t he get the “awwww” moments anymore… why doesn’t he love me the same way back? Why did he have to change? Why can’t I be thinner? Why can’t I be prettier? Why do I have to live in a house that he used to share with his hold girlfriend? Why can’t he see that I’m the best thing that ever happened to him and appreciate me? Put me on a pedistal? Worship the ground I walk on?

Yea.. it gets that intense sometimes in my head.

And all this time, I’m blaming him when I should be looking inward.

Why is it that I’ll voluntarily do things because I know he’s too exhausted to and then get miffed BECAUSE he’s too exhausted to?

The answer to that is because instead of believing all the positive things Chief says too me or about me… Instead of relishing in the fact that everyday when he makes me lunch he writes me a note. Instead of appreciating that he orders things for the store thinking about how I might like them… Instead of appreciating that he’s working so hard to build us a better life and provide me the things that he’s said I deserve…

I believe the trash that my ex fed me.

Sick.. Sad.. but true.

I’d rather believe the negative about myself because I don’t have the confidence to believe the positive.

And it took an email from a stranger … someone who I hope will not be one for long.. to upside me in the head and shake me by the shoulders long distance.

All releationships change over time.. all relationships needs work.. no one is perfect and the only thing one can really hope for is to find a partner in life and love that will stand behind you and support you when you need it. To laugh with.. to cry with.. to be open and honest and without fear.

I think I was so anxious and controlling and wanting everything the way I want them to be because I, in effect, wanted to be like SEE! YOU NEED ME IN YOUR LIFE! WITHOUT ME THIS WOULDNT BE DONE.. THAT WOULDN’T BE DONE.. THE BOYS WOULDN”T BE LIKE THIS… and deep down, if I’m being brutually honest.. I want to prove that I’m better then the Crack Whore.

NOTE: Please. I know I am.

But it’s a girl thing and I have to accept the fact that sometimes I am allowed to have girly emotions. And he needs to know that sometimes I have to hear that from him.

Once, I had a dream.

I dreamed that I loved a man who loved me back and I had a family to care for and nuture. I dreamed that my man made me a better person.. that we neither stood behind or infront of each other, but shoulder to shoulder.

I dreamed that I would laugh every day.. be hugged every day.. be kissed every day.. be loved everyday.

I dreamed that I wouldn’t have to be afraid. That I would be protected and safe.

I have what I dreamed for. I am living that dream now. I was just too stupid to realize it.

I’m not stupid anymore.

Today marks a change.

When self doubt comes :: and I know it will :: I’ll remember the way Chief will sneak up behind me and hug me. I’ll remember his smile. I’ll remember the stupid things we do to each other that make us laugh. I’ll remember how he doesn’t ever fall a sleep with telling me that he loves me. I’ll remember the look in his eyes when he told me that being away from me for three days was the worse thing he ever went through.. I’ll remember the note he wrote me one morning in my lunch that said

… I want you to be happy. Just tell me how. I’ll do anything

Ghosts Of Relationships Past

WARNING: This is going to be a LONG post. I think it’s fair that I should let you know ahead of time in case you wanted an excuse to drink a whole pot of coffee.

“Satan’s Spawn” .. “Mindless Minion” .. “Simple Ass Mother Fucker” .. ”

Those are just SOME of the terms that describe my ex-husband. For the sake of time, we’ll just refer to him as THE JERK from here in.

I usually avoid even remotely thinking about the years that I was shackled to him but in all fairness, I truly believe that everything happens for a reason and while I may not be privy to God’s plan for me I know that He has one and my faith stops me from the TELL ME TELL ME TELLLLLL MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE mentality that would only drive me nuts.

I also firmly believe that I had to go through the bad in order to recognize the good.

I met my ex when I was 22 and looking back, there were enough red flags :: hell, NEON ARROWS! :: and signs that would make any semi-normal woman want to run far far away in the opposite direction.

Things like:

• calling me at work and staying on the phone with me FOR MY WHOLE SHIFT :: I was managing a dry cleaners then and 2 days a week I worked a 12 hour shift alone ::
• making sure I called him when I got to the super market
• when I was leaving the super market. Driving me to work
• picking me up from work
• Not liking how my boss interacted with me :: I had a great boss and we had a really comfortable relationship ::.
• making me feel guilty if I wanted to hang with friends. Especially because I had more guys friends then girl friends

Reading this now, I’m like ARE YOU FUCKING NUTS? but back then all I could thing about was

OMG.. HE LOVES ME SOOO MUCH! HE WANTS TO SPEND ALL HIS TIME WITH ME! HE WANTS TO MAKE SURE I’M SAFE!

I really believe that I was “swooning” so much I must have hit my head somewhere because I still can’t believe all I went through.

The thing is .. outwardly I was a strong, take no shit kinda gal. Head strong, independent.. all the Cosmo terms. But the truth is, deep down I just wanted somebody to love me. Somebody to see my value.

There’s always a beginning to everything. Something big or sometimes small that puts us on a particular path. I didn’t have a “bad” childhood. Not like ones you hear about today. I mean, my parents were married until my father died. We had what we needed :: maybe not always what we WANTED :: food on the table, clothes on our backs, blah blah blah.

But the thing is .. there doesn’t have to be DRAMA to cause negative affects.

My brother was born after a series of miscarriages :: 9, I think :: and so my parents were literally over the moon when he was finally born. The other thing is that he was a very sickly baby.. prone to really high fevers and convulsions. He had “spinal-something-or-other” and they were told that if he lived past the age of 5 then he would definately be retarded.

NOTE: Apologies if anyone gets offended by the word “retarded” but get over it. It’s just a word and I’m just relaying the sentiments of 1961.

ANOTHER NOTE: My brother far surpassed anyone’s expectations. Not only did he live past 5 but he’s also very smart. No common sense, but very smart none the less.

Because of this, every little thing he did because cause for celebration. They gave him everything they wanted, bowed to every whim and exhaulted him at every level.

And look.. who’s to say that if I was in their situation I wouldn’t have done the same thing. It was what it was.

Then I came along. The Golden Child cast a big shadow and a very high bar. I always say that the reason why my parents had me was so that the Golden Child would have somebody to blame for the things he did.

I’m only half joking!

But growing up, I always felt that I was second best. Always felt like I was being cheated out of “something” because of my brother. Hell, I was born on my father’s birthday in June. My father who thought HIS birthday should be a national holiday so he got all the fuss and because my birthday is at the END of June there were no parties with my friends because school was out and most of them did the whole go-away vacation thing.

Looking back, I was always fighting. Fighting for attention, fighting to be heard, fighting to seen, fighting to be recognized, fighting for attention… fighting for approval..

Someone said to me years later that a parent will automatically try to protect their weakest child. Looking objectively, that’s exactly what my parents did because they knew that I’d be ok.

So now here comes my ex who wanted to be around me 24-7 .. who worried about me.. who wanted to protect me.. who loved me for who I was and I fell for it :: not necessarily him I think :: hook line and sinker.

My mother always says that when The Jerk was good.. he was very, very good but when he was bad? Watch out.

And through the 18 years that we were married, I suffered the Four Horseman of Abuse :: Mental, Physical, Emotional and Verbal :: there were fights in the beginning where I was so afraid that he would shoot me that I hit under the desk all night.. afraid to even reach for the phone to call for help.

There were times when the tirade was so bad that I would sneak out of the apartment, jump the fence and run home to my mother’s.

There were times of complete and utter selfishness and uncaring. Like the time I was released from the hopsital after a 10 days stay with Hepatitis B and he drove right to Radio Shack so that I could open a line of credit for a 2500.00 computer. This was.. um.. 1991, I believe. OR the time when he was trying to win a bid for a job and I was in the process of having a miscarriage :: I didn’t know I was pregnant :: and he continued to try and find the site of this job while I was doubled over in pain crying my eyes out. Of course, he blamed me for getting lost.

Everything that happened in HIS life, he blamed me for. He’s alot like the Crack Whore in that he believes that the world owes him something.

He never really worked but wanted the best of everything .. he banked on winning the big lottery and moving to the country.. the whole time, I worked. And worked. And cleaned. And worked. And catered to his every need, whim, idea.

When things didn’t go his way or there was some little infraction that he perceived that I did.. he became a monster.

The alcohol and pain pills he popped didn’t help matters… nor did the fact that I honestly and truly believe he is bi-polar. He would get violent.. evil.. say the most horrible things to me that knew would push my insecurity buttons. I’m not going to repeat the things he said to me because that would just give them more life and even now typing this I’m reliving the pain of those feelings.

So why did I stay?

Well.. that’s a deep one. I’m not one to play the victim card :: hate that :: but I believe that on some level, I understood him TOO much.. I knew his childhood was rotten. I knew that he didn’t understand what a “family” really meant.. knew that he was continuing the cycle of abuse that he witnessed as a child.

At one point, HE wanted a divorce. It happened when I reconnected with an old friend :: male :: that I knew from my teenage days. The beauty of the internet. At the time, I didn’t have a computer. I had something called WebTV :: ‘member them? :: and it just so happened that this guy popped up in a chat room I was in. We were never romatically involved.. I just got along better with guys growing up then girls. I was a major tomboy and didn’t get into all the catty-nasty-bitchiness that girls are into. I shouldn’t have kept it a secret but I did because I knew how he would react. He would automatically assume that I was having an affair.. even though this guy lived across the country. He happened to have been in a bad marriage also so we would commiserate over emails and in private chat.

Eventually, The Jerk found out. And began reading my emails. Again, there was nothing in there even REMOTELY sexual or subversive but that didn’t matter. The demons in his head told him otherwise. I didn’t know it then but he would follow me.. had tape recorders hidden in my car.. in my bedroom. Near every phone.

No matter what I said.. no matter what I did.. he believed what he believed and that meant it was the truth.

On top of that, he was in a rage because we were getting divorced .. a divorce HE wanted.

Because of financial reasons, we still lived under the same roof. We had just bought a house that neither of us could afford on our own and for reasons that can never be justified, I stayed under the delusion that we could be and act like adults.

Menatally, I was drowning.. suffocating. No one knew what went on in my house because I was embarassed. I had all this emotion.. all this pain inside of me that I needed to purge.

I couldn’t write in my journal because he would find them and ripped them up. I couldn’t :: or so I thought :: tell anyone and so I began to self-mutilate ( aka: “cutting”).

I’m not going to lie. It tempered my emotions the same way that I imagine drugs and alcohol do for people who need the numbness. My only addiction was a sharp pointy object that would bleed out the pain.

I hid it well. Nothing obvious or nothing that couldn’t be easily explained but when The Jerk found out, he used it against me in a major way.

I’ll never forget the date. November 8, 1998. It as a Saturday and unbelivably, we were getting along in the sense that there had been no long, drawn out fighting. But that happened. I mean, he was always on one side of the spectrum or the other.

Anyway.. a song came on the radio. Aerosmith’s “Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” and he went ape shit because in one of the tapes he had of me talking to my old friend, the video had come on VH1 and I commented on how much I loved it.

In his mind, he took that to me it was me and my friend’s “song”.

I don’t know what switch went off in my head. The term “enough is DAMN enough now” comes to mind. But it what was pivitol is that I started to fight back. Hard.

I matched him word for horrendous word and punch for punch. I hit him as hard as he hit me and pushed his psychological buttons the way he was pushing mine.

And then he got scared. He wasn’t controlling me anymore.. his words didn’t matter anymore.. I didn’t care what he thought of me… so he called the police and told them that I was the police code for a mentally unstable, suicidal person.

NOTE: The important thing to know about this is that he used the actual police code. His oldest brother returned from ‘Nam a mental head and so he had first hand knowledge of the local mental health system. Using the code apparently gave him more leverage of believability.

The cops showed up and asked what happened. I told them my side.. he told them that I was a cutter. At the time, there really wasn’t much known or publicized about cutting. It was automatically assumed that a cutter was suicidal when in fact, the opposite is true.

So they take me to the local crazy house and at this point, I don’t know what’s going on. The cop had said that based on the way HE was acting, she didn’t feel comfortable leaving us in the same house so why didn’t I just take a ride with her to the hospital to talk to someone and maybe set up some outpatient counseling for abused women or something.

I didn’t want to be around him either so I was like “… yea, sure, whatever.”

But when I got there.. and wouldn’t sign admission papers :: Look, I’m not that dumb. I have really good health insurance and because I am in the hosptial field knew that my insurance would pay actual dollars. So yea, I figured I was looking at a good 30 days! :: the floor manager told me that the cops were signing papers saying that I could potentially harm either me or someone else. I had no rights .. at all.

The first thing I thought of .. and it really should have stayed in my head because saying out loud probably didn’t do me any good .. was OH, HE’S SO GETTING HARMED FOR DOING THIS TO ME.

I stayed a week. I’m way over my word limit now so I won’t go into details in this post. Maybe another because really, when you’re the only sane person in a ward of insanity it’s really pretty funny.

Anyway.. to move this along. You would think that after going through all that, I would have never let him back in my life again. But I did. I did because he had already contacted my friends commander :: he was in the military :: told him SO many lies that not only did my friend lose a stripe but was in danger of losing his career. Him losing his career meant he couldn’t provide for his kids.

And like Rock Of Love’s Season 1’s Rodeo says, “.. it’s all about the kids”.

Don’t ask me why I referenced that. Just popped into my head.

Another part of me thinks it’s because I didn’t want to be failure .. because I believed all the negative things he said to me .. because my self esteem was so low that I didn’t think that anyone would love me.. or want to be with me. As much as I inherently knew that it was all bullshit.. that one little cell of self doubt over took common sense and believed him.

Another 8 years go by and by this time, the drinking has increased.. he’s a major alcoholic and chewing valium and percs like M&Ms. My infraction this time is that I had the AUDACITY to go to a major league baseball game with a woman I used to work with.. who brought along her son and nephew. I had been given the tickets which were third row seats on the first base line but because it was a day game it was hard finding people to go with. The Jerk HAAAAAAAAAAAAAATED all sports so he was out of the question. I knew this woman loved baseball so I called her.

Her nephew was in the Coast Guard and when asked if they could give me anything for the tickets, I said no. They pressed and I saw a Coast Guard baseball hat in the back seat of his car and asked him for that.

NOTE: I love baseball hats

When I got home that night and put the cap on my night table :: we slept in different bedrooms :: he basically stuck an electric cattle prod up my ass asking me all these questions and calling me a liar. Funny thing about it is that he KNOWS this woman also.. all he had to do is talk to her. But yknow… when dealing with a psychopath…. !!!

I mean, he even stole the had and brought it to the police station wanting DNA testing on it.

But I was the one in the psyche ward!

So basically, everything started all over again but multiplied by 10 and the night he was so blacked out drunk and held a sword to my throat is the day I walked out of my house.. took the dog and went to my mom’s.

His world crashed and he got desperate.. angry and dangerous. He harassed me. My mother. My 90+ year old GRANDMOTHER.

This time I held to my guns. I knew where it was going and I didn’t want to be a statistic. I had been beaten down SO much.. so so much .. that I had not place to go but up.. so what if I was alone.. so what if I’d never find the love I truly wanted. I was safe.. I had my dog.. my family..

The divorce was final that September and the last piece of business was selling the house.

THAT’s another million word post that involves a 77 day stint in jail for him… forgery charges being brought against me… and a house load of funiture loaded up on my mother’s 3X3 front pavement!

I promise I’ll get to it one day!!