arkangel246-blog

[arkangel246-blog]

i’m not sure how to go about this, so i’m just gonna start & see where it takes me.  i’m going thru some serious depression right now.  if i told you everything i’ve been thru you’d more than likely accuse me of lying; no one person could possibly have dealt with so much.  that almost sounds like bragging, but believe me,  it’s not.  i definitely wonder why i’m still here, if not for some ‘purpose,’ but it all feels pretty pointless much of the time.  

i’m a 59 yr old mother of 2 sons, 2 almost-grown grandsons, and a lot of what’s eating at me right now is the fact that Mom’s Day (AND my b-day last month) came & went without more than a ‘happy birthday’ post from my daughter-in-law.   my youngest son hasn’t had anything to do with me for so long i didn’t expect anything from him, but usually my oldest will at least text me.  he did, after all, move me from the okc metro a few years ago 2 hours northeast to be closer to ‘family.’   at this point i’m not quite sure who’s pulling away from whom.  i just know i feel like an orphan without children, without family of any kind, and i don’t know how to really change anything.   people have said, ‘i’d go camp out on MY child’s front yard until we worked thru things!’ but i guess i’m afraid it might push them away even farther, and i guess i also feel responsible.  but part of me is also screaming that i haven’t seen a bar, dated any more creeps, or been 5150′ed in a decade so you’d think that’d count for something,  right?  

where to begin?  i guess we can work backwards, & start with telling you about my last marriage.  and i DO mean, LAST.  

i met kyle in october, ‘01, and like so many, i really thought i’d found my knight in shining armor.  a co-worker introduced us,  telling me, ‘he owns an OIL company, just built a new house, and is SOOO nice!  you really HAVE to meet him!’  a week later we were inseparable, picking out a ring that shocked even his mother who said, ‘he must REALLY love you, because he’s TIGHT!” (meaning he was cheap. i had no clue... truly).   i knew he drank every day, and truthfully, i liked to drink too, so it sorta seemed to be a match made in heaven (or hell).  but i soon came to realize he generally started drinking before noon (running a company provided him that option), and nothing i could say could convince him to wait til later in the day.  i could never drink every day, & seeing him passed out every night before the sun went down got old fast.  when i met his folks i quickly realized it was a learned habit.  his mom & dad, who’d handed the company over to kyle & his brother so they could retire, did the same, to the point of being insulted if you didn’t choose to drink with them at family get-togethers, no matter how early in the day.  so who was i to go against family tradition?  

we hadn’t been married more than a few months the first time he threw what would become his grown-ass-man, 2 yr old tantrum.  he jumped up & down, spat and frothed at the mouth through bared teeth, and called me the name i came to be known by almost daily:  worthless, piece of sh!t, C-U-Next-Tuesday.  my transgression?  an ANA autoimmune tests for lupus/sjogrens/scleroderma, (one, or the other or any combination) had come back positive causing my insurance premium to more than triple, which in turn affected the small business’s employees’ premiums.  

now any ‘normal’ person would’ve run like hell at that point.  keyword being ‘normal,’  of course.  it’s funny how you can think a previous husband has been ‘abusive,’  until you actually marry someone who makes the one before seem like Winnie the Pooh.   i don’t know the exact moment i started believing i could ‘fix’ him  --- that i could do this, that or the other thing well enough that he wouldn’t beat the hell outta me, but in less than a year i’d begun begging ambulance drivers to take me to different ER’s because so many of the doctors were all-too-familiar with me.  i know this was after one repeat ER doctor refused to treat me again, storming out of the area voicing loudly, ‘the women who go back to these men DESERVE what they get.’   that time i called a cab, tucked my tail between my legs, & yes, went back home to him feeling like surely i HAD done something to deserve it or that doctor really wouldn’t have said so.  

after EMG tests were positive for nerve damage in my arms & legs, & i was put in arm splints and prescribed a ton of neurontin, i moved into the 2nd bedroom.  we had gone through a brief separation, both filing for divorce, but a combination of not really having anywhere to go & being so sick (both physically AND emotionally) i found myself back with him (1st of many times).  now here’s a word of warning for anybody who might be in similar circumstances at some point.  if you reunite with a spouse and drop divorce proceedings, LISTEN when your attorney tells you to make certain he ALSO drops the divorce WITH PREJUDICE; i did not.  never in my wildest dreams did i consider that someone who ‘loved’ me so much could possibly put the screws to me, until, a couple months later he called me from the master bedroom to say, ‘SURPRISE! i DIVORCED YOUR ASS on tuesday!  how’s it feel?’  

during a time when i was almost bedfast he’d gone back to court, had his friends testify against me claiming that i chose not to show up, and yes, the divorce was final.  since i had been served months before when we both had filed for divorce and his attorney had dismissed the proceedings WITH PREJUDICE, he was able to completely finalize it without my knowledge whatsover.   and it didn’t hurt that his company had an attorney on the payroll.  

there were times when i believed he wanted me around as long as he wasn’t responsible for my bills & i didn’t cost him very much.  i cooked, cleaned, & took excellent care of endless cats he & a friend continued to bring in.  i’ll never understand why he did this.  i learned at one point that he had kicked his 1st wife’s small dog to death years before when she went out with girlfriends he hadn’t approved of, so why he was so good with all these cats i’ll never know.  at one point we were up to 11 of them, 100% indoors, with white carpet, and in able to do all that needed done i was being prescribed almost every controlled substance there was.  i bathed several each month, while he’d toss an old towel on top of any hacked hairballs indicating that i had a mess to clean up.    

after our divorce was done without my knowledge i did get an attorney who was going to re-file & make the judge aware of what he’d done, but he agreed at that time to pay for everything until my disability went through, which he did. we hadn’t been legally married long enough that he might’ve been required to do even that much, so i accepted that.  he paid for a halfway decent apartment on the southwest side, but even then, he continued to come over when he felt the need to ‘vent.’   i had barely had the utilities turned on when it all went sideways & to this day i don’t know how he didn’t kill me.   i knew from past experience he was going to get my phone when he headed towards the bedroom so i tried to get past him before he could.   my next thought was, ‘he’s really killed me this time,’  when i found myself sliding upside down on the wall, coming down hard on my head.  it’s the only time in my life when i really had that slow motion experience so many speak of.  surprisingly i was able to shake my head and found myself alive, slowly able to get up with him screaming, ‘get the F up!  i never F-ing touched you!’  his perfect handprint was left in purple on my upper arm by the next day, along with a purple ridge along my back ribs from a ridge between the kitchen and pantry where i’d been thrown.  i was able to get him out of the apartment that night, thanking all the powers that be that i was ‘ok,’  only to go down like a ton of bricks the next day in the parking lot.  i heard and felt a loud POP in my neck....  like a rubber band popping...   and after some maneuvering showed i wasn’t gonna be able to even get on my hands & knees to crawl neighbors carried me back inside and called 9-1-1.  

tests showed a bone fragment in the sub-arachnoid space at the base of my skull, & i was in & out of a wheelchair for quite a while.  doctors knew my situation, and just sorta avoided the expected questions probably figuring i’d lie anyway.  the truth was my disability had yet to come through at that time, and if i’d put him in jail for that i’d have been homeless.  HOMELESS, with very limited use of my arms & legs even after all the cervical epidurals allowable and tons of physical therapy.   my mother had visited once long enough to assure me that i’d have to go into a nursing home if i stayed in the wheelchair because she wasn’t able (or willing) to take care of me.  so i taped a cell to myself at times to keep it within arm’s reach, and crawled to clean the litter box & feed myself for a while, but somehow, i regained the use of everything in time.  

except my brain.  if i hadn’t proven to be a total idiot already i’d claim landing on my head caused brain damage.  

not too long after my disability was approved while in the same apartment i found myself in a different kind of fight.  i took trash out to the dumpster around the corner - and i thought i locked the door behind me.  i generally did, but honestly, i still don’t know for sure.  i came back into the apartment & down the hallway into my bedroom where somebody grabbed the back of my head ramming me headfirst into a full-length mirror shattering it.   the next thing i remembered was waking up in the hallway in a mess of goo and yuck, disoriented, trying to figure out what had happened.  every movement hurt like hell, and once in the bathroom i saw my face was cut & bruised, & could feel other injuries starting to sting.   i cleaned up blood & the broken mirror pieces, took a bath & when i started to realize what had happened, called my son.  “It was KYLE, Mom.  KYLE did this!’  he said when i told him i thought i’d been raped.  i promised him i’d call 911, which i did, and a complete rape kit was done along with over 200 pictures taken.   afterwards i called Kyle & told him i’d been raped, and he simply hung up the phone.  did he HEAR me? it wasn’t unusual for him to be so drunk by that time of night i couldn’t even understand him, and sometimes he had just hung up on me or passed out on the phone.   one thing i DID know is that he was impotent.  i had been torn vaginally AND rectally, and he had pretty much zero interest in sex, so i couldn’t fathom how he might’ve been responsible for this.   so without another phone call to him, i made arrangements to move out of state nearer my kids into a secure apartment bldg.  as we were leaving town my son called him to say we’d left cats in the apartment and i was gone.  

you’d think that would’ve been the end of Kyle & me, wouldn’t you? but no.  if i’d been smart, you bet, but nobody ever accused me of having good sense.  

long before he & i were really over a warrant was issued for his arrest for sexual assault, i had to plead his case & his innocence fearing for my life.  i’d shoot up his house and be 5150′ed when i couldn’t quite bring myself to blow my brains out with a 9mm.  i’d called my sons that horrific night begging them to tell me they loved me at which time 1 said, ‘you’ve got a wrong number’,  and the other said, ‘go for it, Mom.’   it was several more years before i finally did leave with bruising severe enough to require a CT scan of my face.   PTSD has been added to my list of maladies & i wake up screaming on a fairly regular basis, the nightmares i can remember too gruesome for words.   kyle drank himself to death a couple years ago, and oddly enough, even though i hadn’t had any contact with him in 5 yrs i knew when he died.  i woke up middle of the night with something telling me to google his full name, & when i did i found a classified with his sister handling his estate, the company attorney listed as well.   when i emailed his longtime drinking buddy i was told kyle had ‘gone off the deep end,’  and that house he’d demanded i keep the white carpet pristine in had been 3 feet deep in beer cans when he was found 5-6 days after his apparent demise.  i’m guessing the cats feasted on his meaty parts.  

my doctor asked me recently how i felt when i learned of his death, & i told him that i’d cried.  the man had never owned a ‘used’ car,  or lived in anything except new homes.  he’d been handed an oil & gas company right out of college that was barely getting by, most likely because both he & his brother were drunk daily before noon.   it was just a total waste of a life that could’ve been used to do so much good.  a complete & total waste.  

the day i had someone helping me get my things to leave kyle had come into the house from the back alley with his buddy way earlier than usual, and taken off in his buddy’s truck like lightning seeing me packing.  i’d already gotten an emergency protective order but with the garage on the alley he’d had no way of knowing i hadn’t just eaten a few extra oxy’s and passed back out (typical) after i kneed him in the groin to get him off me, his hands from around my throat.    it wasn’t unusual for kyle & his buddy to drink in the garage daily, after about 3 or so, but it was noon when they’d come in.  i remembered sending kyle & his buddy pics of my swelling face the night before, telling them,  ‘never again.  he’s never gonna touch me or anybody else again.’  my knees went a little weak recalling the usual threats.  he’d told me over & over again how easy it’d be for my body to disappear, that it would make something called ‘condensate’ and nobody would ever find me when i was disposed of at a well site.  i couldn’t help but wonder if this was that time.  

there are probably still people surprised that i finally left and stayed gone, but that was 7 1/2 years ago & somehow the thought of what might have been kept me away.   he’d sent me a friend request the summer before his death, which i promptly deleted.  DELETE, DELETE, DELETE.  no, thank, you.