Well, I am thankful for the information I received last night.
I am realizing what is going on.
I am in pain.
I'll try to verbalize it, somehow.
Last night, somewhere around midnight and after 48 hours of trying to come to an agreement with my ex to determine when he will move out, I was informed that he was not taking his blood pressure medication in the hopes of dying.
It's the suicide thing all over again. That is what kept me here between 2010 and 2012.
Oh, and it is my fault that he has high blood pressure. It is my fault because I talk about the stalking. If I'd shut up about it and ignore it, he'd be healthy.
He told me that his sister is running around complaining that I don't just forget about the stalking. I am supposed to forget about it and go back to the way things were. I need to go back to being my in-law's slave.
When she gives me a year of peace and when her brother stops playing games with me, I'll put it behind me. I will never do free housework or babysitting for them again.
His end game is to keep me with him. Keeping and spending all of the money I was awarded in the divorce is how he is going to do it. I don't have the means to leave.
*****
Steve confronted me on Facebook for not spending Friday night with him. It does not matter that I was trying to get Michael to sign a document forcing him to leave. It does not matter that I was trying to take care of things so that I can move on in life and love. To Steve, there was nothing more important for me to do that night but to be with him.
I don't know.
I cannot talk to Steve about what is happening. He'll tell me to move into the fear. He'll tell me to ignore it. He'll tell me just to get a restraining order the next time I see Shannon try to break into my house.
The experts tell me otherwise. They tell me to listen to my intuition. If I am afraid, there is probably a damn good reason. Restraining orders incite stalkers. Moving out of the state is my best line of defense because the stalking becomes an interstate issue. It is no longer under the jurisdictions of the various police departments representing the areas of this state she has harassed me in, it will be under the jurisdiction of the FBI.
Michael told me why I was afraid. He said that I am usually grabbed, threatened, harassed, or have my property vandalized within two weeks of him contacting his sister. He had contact with his sister nearly two weeks ago.
Michael feeds my fear.
Steve denies my reality and wants me to ignore it, just like my stalker does.
I feel crazy.
I just want to get away.
*****
The stalking has always been a component of my relationship with Michael and his family. I am trying to take stock of what has happened in the past in order to predict what will happen in the future. I don't know if that is an effective strategy. A few of the players are dead. Things seem to have escalated over the years. I'll try.
I am not sure if I can consider the harassment I endured in high school as stalking. His cousin was nasty towards me. She even tried to steal my boyfriend. Nothing she did back then was really any worse than any other high school bully.
It was what she did in adulthood that hurts.
I would later learn that she would take my journal entries, poetry, and artwork out of my locker and share them with her cousin (the man I would later marry). My therapist thinks that this is what fed the obsession. Michael got insight into my deepest, darkest, personal thoughts years before we met.
A few years later we would meet. I was in the process of ending an incredibly short marriage that I entered into as a teenager. I did not want a relationship. Michael wrote of his sexual desire in the dust of my car.
It was weird.
Then the phone calls started. In them, Michael's cousin, aunt, sister, and mother would tell me to stop "fucking" Michael. I would return home from work to find my answering machine full of these messages. The problem was that we were NOT seeing each other.
His cousin would call me incessantly at work. I was fired. I found it hard to look for work when my answering machine was full of filthy messages from Michael's family.
After awhile, Michael would show up to my apartment unannounced. I wanted to be polite. I let him in to talk. For over six months, he never tried to make a move on me. I let him vent about his life. I thought he wasn't interested in me. I told him about the phone calls and he'd ignore me.
The phone calls persisted. After awhile, mutual friends started to call and detail where I was the night before, who I was with, and what we were doing. When I asked who put them up to calling, they gave me the name Rhonda. Rhonda is Michael's cousin. She is the high school bully who took my art and gave it to Michael.
Then there were plastic roses from the local convenience store left in my car. They were signed with the name "Ekim." Ekim is Mike spelled backwards.
I still have several of those roses in a box inside my walk-in closet.
There were times when I would find Mike's cousin (Rhonda) and sister (Shannon) sitting in the back seat of my car. They would refuse to leave unless I did something for them. This was in the days before cell phones, so I had to usually wait for someone to see my distress and ask if I was okay before these two women would get out of my car.
After about six months, Michael and I started dating. I did not want him living with me. He once needed a large sum of money, which I did give to him. Around this time, a woman started calling my landlord telling her that I was acting erratically, claiming that I was yelling all the time, having sex in the parking lot, and had a man living with me. Mike was not living with me.
At first, I laughed off the calls. The landlord said that she would evict me if the calls did not stop. They did not. One day, I woke up to find my front door lock broken. My landlord gave me three days to move out.
Michael and I moved in together.
This was the beginning of many other problems. I tried to tie this all together to Michael.
In the months and years that followed, Michael would promise to do things for his family. They, in turn, would harass me while he was at work claiming that I had to do those chores if Michael didn't do them. It was usually quicker to mow their lawn, trim their hedges, paint their home, wash their floors, and shovel their walks than it was to continually answer the phone or send them packing from the front door.
Over the years, his family became physically abusive. They would come into my home and corner me. It was usually Mike's sister, father, aunt and uncle who would threaten me. Sometimes they would block my car, so I couldn't leave the property. At first, they did this when Michael was not at home. Then, they started escorting Michael outside while I was being harassed. After a couple of years, they started to harass me in front of Michael. He never said a word. He said that I handled it well. Yeah....I am a hypnotist. My tongue is a deadly weapon.
When I asked Michael to talk to them, he would scream at me. I was not allowed to talk about it in front of him. There were days when I had my car packed and was determined to move. The problem was money. I was paying all of the bills, so I didn't have the money to leave. My family couldn't take me in, so I'd wind up going back to the home I rented with Mike.
My in-laws moved their harassment from our home and into other spheres of my life. They often tracked me down at work and at school to make demands on me.
They used to send me emails telling me that I had to do what they said because my parents were dead. I was supposed to drop out of school and promise to take care of my mother-in-law in her retirement. I asked Michael to talk to them, he refused.
I blocked their email addresses in 2002 after sending them a cease and desist letter. They had left a phone message claiming that I had an abortion at the Ob-Gyn on 2-14-02. My mother-in-law demanded that I call her and do what she told me to do or she would beat up Rhonda. I was at the Ob-Gyn's office when they called. I had a miscarriage that day. I was only ten weeks along, so it wasn't too horrid but it was bad enough. I do not know how they knew where I was. I had not spoken to his parents or sister for over two years at that point.
I told Michael to call his mother. It was not my place to deal with his family's dysfunction. I was far too much emotional and physical pain to deal with his mother.
After 2002, the demands came via telephone call. The last one was in 2008. My mother-in-law wanted me to clean her home. There was a call in 2011 but I didn't talk to them. I was told my father-in-law demanded to see our children.
Interspersed with the phone harassment is actual physical stalking. Typically, Shannon or Rhonda will call to brag about it. The telephone bragging stopped in January 2012.
There were drive bys, bizarre letters, and strange religious things left on the porch. There were nails in our driveway. There were bloody underwear on the back porch. We've had numerous broken locks. We had many of Mike's relatives call to complain that I was a bad influence on him and that Iwas mistreating his mother. Rhonda's mother actually visited once and pretended to have a heart attack in my kitchen because I would not clean or cook for my mother-in-law. She left when I called for an ambulance. She died in 2010. I was told that this was the trigger for the latest round of stalking. Michael had attended the funeral for Rhonda's mother. His parents demanded to know where we both worked and went to church. He refused to tell them so the story goes, this is why they had to harass my work colleagues to demand information about me in 2011. One of my colleagues was a 65 year old frail lady, she was terrified. Shannon's boyfriend and pushed her and rifled through her client's paperwork. He thrust a picture of me in her face and demanded to know where I went to church. I called the police the moment I learned what had happened. The police officer refused to take a report. This was allegedly the same day that Doug and Shannon watched me have lunch with an old friend before grabbing me on the street. I'll never forget the date. It was 1-11-2011.
There were numerous times over the years, I would arrive home to find my front door wide open. Sometimes the locks would be broken. The funny thing is that we always exited from our garage. The last broken lock was in the spring of 2013. It was the lock to the back door. It was brand new. We had all the locks changed after I caught Shannon breaking in the first Friday of October 2012. It had to be Shannon, she looks like a morbidly obese middle aged version of our eldest daughter. I learned later that the truck she drove to the property belonged to her boyfriend, Doug.
I am beginning to think that whatever happened in my first apartment has been going on for years.
There have been times when someone has been in our home while we were home. I know that because I used to babysit dogs for my aunt. There were days when I would hear footsteps and the dogs would go nuts barking. I was usually in my home office in the basement. The dogs would run up the stairs and I'd find the front or back doors wide open.
I never knew what to think. Nothing was ever stolen, so there was no point in calling the police.
I have sat with friends for coffee or lunch and had them point out people watching and following me. I have been driving around with relatives and told that I was being followed. I have had colleagues and teachers tell me that people were looking for me or asking questions about my whereabouts. Other people notice these things. They never call the police. This has been going on for years. I think I am desensitized to it.
I had actually had my Catholic brother-in-law confront me a witchcraft fair of all places. He claimed that I wouldn't let his brother talk to him. A fellow witch saw what was going on and we cast a banishing spell in front of him. That was surreal. Since that day, he cannot speak to me without my hearing a ringing in my ears. I can never understand what he says. The last time I heard that ringing was eight weeks ago when I ate a sandwich at a pizza shop with Steve. I came home and learned that my in-laws built a house a few blocks away.
I wish the ringing would cancel out the crap third parties say when they call me to intervene on my in-laws behalf.
I have had people call to say that my mother-in-law claims to have bought my house and paid my college tuition (nope). I have had people tell me that I owe them because they co-signed for my cars (nope.....paid cash for each and every one). I even used my inheritance to pay off the debt Mike brought into the marriage. I don't owe his family a dime.
And, to this day, I get calls from my brother-in-law's bill collectors. They claim that I am married to him and that some lady at my mother-in-law's house says I am responsible for the debt. This started in 1997. It is now 2014. I am NO longer married into that family. I want to know what these people are smoking. I can't sue the bill collectors but William can. Telling me about the debt is a violation of the Fair Debt Collection practices act.
There was a day when I was at a wedding and my mother-in-law sat behind me demanding (quite loudly) that I divorce her son. We are divorced now. I'm surprised she hasn't helped get him out of the house.
I wish I knew exactly what they wanted. It obviously wasn't a divorce or they would be happier now.
*****
The house of cards fell when my father in law died in 2013. My brother-in-law was quick to talk about what was going on. Pictures of the funeral featured my stalkers. It confirmed everything I knew.
My brother-in-law knew that Shannon and her boyfriend were stalking me at work in 2011. He knew they had harassed a colleague. He also knew that Shannon put a GPS box on my van and was breaking into our home in late 2012.
Apparently, Shannon still brags about it.
I am creeped out. The reason is that there are times when my ex-husband will fall into a trance and tell me that he sent his sister a key to our home, knows that she had stolen a garage door opener, and thinks she stole a set of keys from him when he was spotted on a shopping trip.
So, what I am trying to do is figure out how they are getting access to me. I have not spoken to them since 2001 (outside of the occasional 'hello' when they call me or see me on the street or at public events). If it is through Michael, he needs to leave the marital home. Michael isn't telling me too much. He said he swept the living room for bugs and so he knows our home isn't under surveillance. He claims that he isn't talking to them.
They are not psychic! How do they know where I am going? How do they know who I am with? How do they know what I am doing?
What do they want? What can I do to stay safe?
Those are the million dollar questions.
I need more information before deciding how to proceed. I do not want to get another job where I and my co-workers will be harassed. I want to know what the hell they want.
If it is money, they'd better let me work so Michael won't have to pay alimony.
Michael has the answers.
I am still thinking Michael is putting them up to harassing me and using that as an excuse to stay in my daily life.
The relationship was founded on stalking. It was maintained and moved forward with stalking and harassment. The stalking got worse when Mike lost his job with the city. The financial games got bad once I filed for a divorce.
The only thing going for me is that he allegedly told the people he worked with at the city that he had been abusive towards me and that he left work to stalk me. If I wind up dead, I know the cops know more about what is going on than I do. But then, they have said things that have not happened. They claimed Michael threw me into a wall as I slept one night in 2008. That didn't happen. We haven't slept together since 2002.
It's not over yet.
I need to figure out how this is going down so that I can put a stop to it. They can't stalk without information. I need to put a stop to the flow. I may have to move the children and myself to another state in order to do that.
I want my life back. The stalkers have GOT to go.
I have inadvertently rewarded Michael by responding to the harassment. The worst thing I did was let him move in with me. I think it will stop if I give him what he wants until I get an exit plan. Right now, I think that means not having other men in my life.
I say that for two reasons. First, most of the people who notice the stalking are men. Some of them are political and professional colleagues who have been involved in the military and are on heightened alert for these kinds of things. One was a professor. Another was an academic advisor. Two of them were men I knew since high school. Only twice have women noticed the stalking (and they were family members). I assume that I am stalked when I am with males.
Secondly, I told Steve to find another love interest last night. Steve is upset that I did not spend Friday with him. I wanted Michael out of the house. I wanted to feel free enough to engage in another relationship in a manner that makes me feel comfortable. Friday was my chance to talk to Michael. I took it. I thought I was investing in our relationship. Steve told me that Michael would not cooperate. I thought I was making progress. He's probably right. I feel stuck now.
Michael says that he knows Steve is coming back, so I don't expect the craziness to ease up anytime soon. Why would Michael care if he knew we were over? This doesn't add up.
He doesn't think we are over, does he? I don't want to mess with this right now.
I want my life back. In the past, the harassment occurred over the phone (so I need to ditch the phone numbers), in my car, at home and at work. To this day, they have never harassed the children. It feels like this will only be a matter of time, especially if they have called to demand access or tried to break in the house at times when the kids were home (I caught Shannon breaking in at 4:45 in the afternoon). This is why I am thinking about moving. This is escalating. I want the kids away from the craziness.
Michael is still in contact with them. He cites his contact as the reason for the escalation and harassment. I am NOT safe. I don't think the children are either.
Love ya,
S.