Meditative Memories: A Lesson in Self-Trust

Today I am thankful for meditation: It can help the mind put together pieces of a puzzle.  

Every time I have an interaction with my former spouse, I want to try to understand the stalking.  I'd like to know his role in it and if it is over.

He acts like he's the victim of the stalking.  There are times when he acts like he's the one being stalked by his family.  Other times he insinuates that I'm stalking him or that I made it all up.

If he were being stalked, why wouldn't he move out of my house?

He blames me for the state of his life.  He wants money.  He wants my time and energy.  

If I can trust him, I may help him. 

If I can't trust him, he needs to stay away from me. 

In every interaction with him, he tells me that he hates his family and has absolutely nothing to do with them -until- he starts talking about his conversations with them or plans to meet with them. 

In our most recent interaction, he accused me of making everything up to get him fired from his auditing job. 

This nonsense started in the summer of 1992.  I met him in January of that year when he followed his cousin to dinner.  His cousin and I knew each other from high school.  

His cousin would drop by my apartment unannounced with him in tow.  Eventually, he started showing up without her.  He'd, somehow, get into my car and leave roses for me. 

Then, there was the suicide note written in the dust.  He didn't sign it.  I knew it had to be him. 

When confronted, he said it was joke. 

This was about June of 1992.

I was a single mother.  I worked a lot! 

In August of that year, my contract with Hewlett Packard ended so I was home and looking for work.  I rarely checked my phone messages.  I was busy with work.  I was usually at work.  Few people called me.  Those that did, knew when I was home. 

Now that I was looking for a job, I needed to utilize the answering machine.  That was when I discovered that numerous women were calling and leaving vulgar messages for me on the answering machine.  

They were all connected to Michael.  These women would accuse me of "f*cking" Michael and stealing money from him. I was told that I needed to stop seeing him now because I'd ruin his life. 

Well, there was a problem.....we weren't dating. If he were at my place, I'd feed him.  If it was late and I ate out, I typically bought his dinner.  I made more money than he did. 

At the time, I was seeing someone else.  It wasn't serious.  It had potential. 

I never really had the energy to date too many men at one time. 

The guy I was seeing was trying to teach me Spanish.  He'd come over and we'd practice.  He and I went to school together.  I was a music major.  He was studying social work. 

One day....I received a telephone call from another friend from high school.  She told me that Mike's cousin called her and told her that there was a Latino in my apartment.  She wanted to speak to him. 

My friend was all for the game.  I think he was a natural hypnotist.  He spoke to her.  She never called me on behalf of Mike's family again. 

It bothered me that Mike's cousin knew where I was and who I was with.  

The calls kept coming.  It got to the point, I wanted to change my phone number. 

*****

A year later, Michael and I were dating.  I was young and I was stupid.  His aunt apologized for her role in the phone harassment.  His mother and sister denied any part in it. 

I thought it was over.  

Michael wanted to move in with me.  I wasn't ready.  He never really paid his fair share of anything.  He was messy and prone to yelling. 

One day, in January 1994, my landlord called me at work and said that she was afraid to call me at home due to a series of strange, anonymous phone calls her receptionist had been receiving; the caller claimed that I was living with a man who wasn't on the lease.  She went on to say that the caller was a woman who was accusing me of having sex in the parking lot.

My landlord had been around the block for a bit.  She thought I was being beaten and abused.  She asked if a man were living with me.  I said no.  She told me that if the calls continued, she'd have to evict me because they were wasting the time of her staff. 

Things were okay until October of that year.  Unbeknownst to me, the calls continued.   One day I woke up to find my lock mangled and a small hole in my dinning room wall.  I have no idea what happened.  I only noticed the hole because there was water beginning to collect on the carpet underneath that wall. 

I began to feel afraid.  My landlord wanted to know if I were living with a man who was beating me.  

I wasn't. 

She told me about the continuing phone calls.  We decided that I would be safer if I moved. 

In the next two weeks, I began looking for an apartment.  I have known my ex-husband's family since  1984.  I used members of his family as references. 

I had good credit and a good job.  No one would rent to me.  I asked one landlord why and he started to claim that I was a harlot who had sex in public. 

Yeah....that should have been a tip off that the harasser was one of my references. 

It didn't dawn on me for many years. 

On the day I was slated to move out, Michael's uncle offered me to the chance to rent a house at the very same rate I paid for rent.  The only contingency was that Michael had to live with me. 

I was not only desperate, I was very naïve. 

I moved in only to find that the games had only just begun.  

The weirdest thing about his is that all of Michael's maternal cousins lived in the apartments adjacent the house!  

It was as if we were being watched. 

It turns out that we were. 

I'm not joking when I say all of his maternal cousins lived there.  They all did at some point in time.  Those that had the luck of moving out were hated by the family.  

This is where the fun began. 

I'll spare you all of the stories.  The first one was interesting. 

I grew up with alcoholic nut-balls in a dangerous part of town.  I think I had undiagnosed PTSD back then. 

On my first night at this location, I was with my young old daughter.  As I pulled up into the dark driveway and the child and I exited from the vehicle, we were approached by three, tall burly men. 

They wanted to know my name.

I wasn't going to tell them a darn thing about me! 

They kept approaching. 

I told them to back off. 

They refused. 

 I wound up running in to the back yard, with the trio of thugs following me, all the while I was fumbling for the keys. 

I managed to open the door, usher the kiddo in and grab a huge steak knife out of the kitchen. 

I must have looked like a crazy lady wielding that at them.  

They probably would have been slashed if they hadn't turned away.  

This wouldn't be the last time I'd see these guys following me.  

Living in this house was quite unnerving.  I paid all of the bills accept the heat and the land line.  

I couldn't fight back against Michael or my child and I would be homeless. 

It wasn't uncommon to find people hanging out in the shadows, smelling cigarette smoke outside of my windows, coming home to find objects missing and the doors open and unlocked. 

It was hell.  I was doing whatever I could to save up for a house so I could the heck out of there.  That wasn't easy because I was the one paying most of the bills. 

Being dumb, it didn't even dawn on me that Michael was behind it. When I asked what was going on, he blamed his sister. 

She was a teenager.  There was no way it was her. 

*****

Still believing Michael didn't have anything to do with the craziness his family meted out, we got married.  He isn't Christian, yet he wanted a Christian ceremony to please his mother. 

We married in the back yard in July of 1997.  Things only got worse from there. 

There really wasn't any holiday or family event that wasn't ruined by his family.  They'd find ways of embarrassing me; once they brought along Michael's gay uncle who arrived, walked right up to me and started to scream at me because Michael's mother told him that I was a homophobe. 

I looked up at him and told him that I lost my former roommate, Brian, to AIDS.  It tore my heart out to see him struggle with thrush.  

When I said those words and the tears ran down my cheeks, this man looked at me stunned.  He turned around and walked away.  I never saw this uncle again.   

Michael told me that this man lost his long-time lover to AIDS ten years previously.   

******

In my mediation today, the event that stuck out was Michael's 29th birthday.  It was October of 1997 and his family were at the little house we rented.  That night, after the sun went down and every one had eaten, Michael's mother grabbed him by the hand and led him outside.  He, his mother, his sister and his uncle stood outside of the kitchen window.  Inside the house, Michael's father, brother and aunt pushed me into a corner.  My father-in-law stood within a few inches of my face yelling at me because I was in college and studying Spanish. 

He called me a "wet-back lover."  He demanded that I to quit school.  I only had one class to go to graduate and I'd already paid the tuition.  After all of the money I spent on school, I wasn't going to quit.  

Spanish would only help me make money.  I'd taken it for three years.   Why quit now? 

As they had me pushed into the window, I remember knocking my head into it.  I didn't understand my Michael wouldn't come into the house to confront his father. 

I finally did my hypnotist thingy.  His dad was also Irish.  I reminded him that our ancestors were heavily discriminated against earlier in the century.  They immigrated here due to a potato famine and decided to make our country their home. 

How is that different from Mexican immigrants? 

He backed down while telling me that there was never a potato famine in Ireland. 

Yeah....after that any factoid this guy gave me was met with skepticism. 

The weirdest thing was....well....Michael denied hearing the yelling.  He denied hearing my head bang against the window.  He didn't know anything about what was going on until I told him. 

That's strange.  The windows were old and thin.  I am sure he heard me.  He was right behind the glass.  I could see his head as I glanced behind me during the incident. 

That was the first of many times I'd be harassed over going to school.  Eventually that harassment would follow me to the graduate school campus.  If only he'd have let me finish, I'd be paying him alimony now. 

Doctoral degrees are marital assets.  Oh well.....his loss.  

Fifteen years later I would find out that he told his family I wouldn't allow him to go to school.  

At the time, we had secured funding for him to go to school debt-free -but- he never enrolled.  

Years later, he told me that his mother was pressuring him to go to college but he didn't want to succumb to her pressure so he lied to her to "shut her up." 

He started school two years later.  He never told his mother.  The harassment continued for many years. 

I really wish I had kept all the threatening letters and emails from his sister and father. 

That would have been decent evidence for a restraining order. 

The first instinct one has when receiving such a letter is to throw it away.  I only started saving them after 2002.  That was the year I started to save tapes from my old answering machine; in some of the messages Michael's mother identifies herself.  I still have them.

I keep them in the garage.  Due to the strange things happening in the garage, I should probably find a newer hiding spot.  

I finally started calling the police when Michael's sister and her boyfriend (Doug) went to my office and hassled the billing clerk on 1-11-2011; Doug roughed her up, tried to go through the client files and wanted to know where I went to church.  He was holding a picture of me and waving it in her face.  She was in her sixties.  How dare he?

The police couldn't do anything because the clerk was too afraid to press charges.  I should have taken those letters and the answering machine tapes to the police when these people started hassling my colleagues.  I didn't even think of that.  

That event scared the staff so much, I decided to close my office.  I only advertised once after that, in 2015, it brought Doug back to my door within a week.  All my clients are at a different office.  They are all word of mouth.

I miss my work.

********

Things have escalated from there.  In 2013, Michael threated to kill his mother.  He'd done that before.  Each and every time he did that, he'd leave with my car.  I'd wind up calling the Adams County Sheriff's department to ask that they check up on her.  Typically, they'd take the call and advise me to warn her or her next of kin.  I'd call an uncle who stays away from the drama and he'd send his kids to check on her.

He'd always tell me he loved me.  He died in 2007.  I visit his grave in Golden once every few years.  He was blind.  You wouldn't know it.  That man could fix anything!

The last time Michael threatened his mother, it was different.  A Sheriff's deputy took the call and called me back about an hour or so later.  He told me that Michael and his mother were working together to harass me and advised me to get rid of my gun and get a restraining order against both of them.

Now, after typing this, I realize I could have gotten a restraining order against her.  I have those letters and answering machine tapes.  I bet if I had let the police arrest him that Christmas day they caught him blocking me from leaving the house, I could have had a restraining order against him, too.

I just didn't want the kids to see their dad arrested on Christmas.

******

To this day,  Michael denies any involvement.  I think that event in October of 1997 is the clincher.  He had to have heard the ruckus.  He had to have heard me bonk my head on the window as I was being pushed into it.

He knew what was going on.

He witnessed his gay uncle screaming at me and immediately backing down.

He witnessed, numerous times, other relatives yelling at me because I "wouldn't let [him] go to college."

He never said a word to them about his studies.

He let his family harass me.  He never said a word even when it happened in front of him. He NEVER tried to put a stop to it in front of me.  He NEVER stopped them when he witnessed them yelling at me.

He never confronted them in my presence.  That should have been a clue.

The sad truth of it is that I cannot trust him.

I need to stop letting the crazy making and the lies cause me to doubt myself.  That is what the gas lighting does, it creates a sense of mental instability.  I shudder to think of all the money wasted on therapists trying to bounce the events off of them in session.

They told me it was obviously Michael, too.

I guess I just needed time away from the games.

Truth is, this family is dangerous because they act at Michael's beck and call.  I need to stay as far away from the drama as I can.

Love ya,

S.