Punching Bag No More

Had Enough

It has been two or more years, I forget if it is three or just the two that some family members have ignored me.  Yes, IGNORED me.  Last year I asked one of my daughters if we were doing anything with them for the holidays.  I never got an answer back, so I told her that I would just mail the kids’ stuff to them.  This year I asked again and got no response. 

I asked specifically why she and her sister were ignoring me.  Wow the answer that I got back kind of shocked me and sent me reeling into anger and disbelief.  I got sick after that and it has taken me a week to recover.  I have Ulcerative Colitis and stress aggravates it.  My thoughts aggravate it.  I go to lie down and get some sleep but the thoughts keep on and on and on.  The stress just does not stop no matter how I try to stop my thoughts.  I guess you can call that being sensitive, but Hey Wait a minute…….we are talking about me now and how I got this way and what affects me and all that.

My daughter told me that I said some pretty nasty things to my mom and to my sister and that she thought that they had had enough and are now ignoring me.  She has no idea and she will never see what my mother does to me.  My mother always treated her very well. EXCUSE ME!!!  What about me and when do I get to say that, “I have had enough?” 

Ever since my dad passed away two years ago, I have bared my soul and my abuse.  Someone mentioned that it was good to get our childhood out to heal.  Well I can tell you this is not in my childhood but from my adulthood.  I only added the adulthood chapters in this chapter and I guess that I will have to make another list of my childhood stories.  Those are called “Whispers From Oz” I named it that way before the “Tinman” series came out.  Funny how some of that series was like part of my life too only my parents were the same and they were mine, not like in the series. Things were given to me in dreams and visions back them.  They were just tiny snippets of things that would eventually come true. 

For some reason I was made a tiny child.  I weighed only 4’ 4 ¼ ounces at birth.  I didn’t grow much for a long time.  I can’t figure that one out but my sister towered over me….in more ways than one.  Every time my sister did something bad, I was punished for it.  She had more friends than I and was constantly telling me what to do….so she would not get into trouble.  Oh I did some doozies too, but it continued after we grew up.  So far I have been told to take down my stories by her and another relative told me that I was not telling the truth.  I tell you if they don’t like it then they can write their own story.  I also have a cousin who thinks that I am Satan, for what I believe.

I do not get appreciated for all that I have done and the sacrifices that I have made.  No, since their dad and I divorced it is as if nothing and I never happened before then.  Their dad has done everything for them….That was very apparent at my daughter’s wedding.  Everyone but me was recognized for raising my daughter.  That hurt so bad, you cannot believe.  I didn’t get the first dance with my new son-in-law either.  It was almost like I was invisible.  I was also sat behind a pole and could barely see the cutting of the cake.  So much for choosing to raise my children myself without sending them to a babysitter or childcare center.  So much for choosing raising them above getting a job and having a career.  They were my career!  No where am I appreciated for those sacrifices. Their father was not home all that much.  He decided to stay at his parent’s while he was going to college, which he was flunking out of.  When we moved to Florida he had a job that used him for all the hours that they could get him.  What I mean by that was he was salaried and they could have him work all kinds of long hours and they wouldn’t have to pay him for any overtime.  Then he got a job that sent him to Georgia and he was allowed to come home once every third weekend……..and who do you think was raising the girls then………………..Oh they forget.

I loved living in Florida and when we divorce it was my intention to move back there.  Well my youngest daughter was hoping for that too, but then I met my second husband and that was pushed out.  I also didn’t win the lottery either that would have helped in that situation.  It wasn’t meant to be though now that I look back on it.  All the people that we knew while living in Florida moved away from that state…for some reason.  There was nothing to go back too.  That was apparent to me when we went down there for a visit and I got another DVT and ended up in the hospital there.  Nobody could afford or was too busy with their own lives to put the girls up for the week or so.  My ex wanted my daughter to just take my car and leave me there.  My daughter bolted at that and rightly so.  You see I know things about him that he doesn’t think that I know.  He punished me harshly that I was having some affair.  Yes, I told him that I was way before we moved to Florida.  I was also blackmailed into telling my husband that as the guy that I was seeing knew about me being raped.  He told me that if I didn’t tell my husband about it that he was.  So I had to come completely clean with my husband.  He didn’t believe me after several attempts telling him.  I wrote it up in a poem and here is that poem.  Oh and I went to a couple of counseling session after moving to Florida and he went with me for one of them.  He still said that he didn’t believe me because he thought it was too bizarre.  Well let me tell you about what or how I thought of it all……

I SAID NO

Mom, he is bad news said my daughter

But that was putting the train behind the caboose

As my life and love and trust were already being slaughtered

Because he had already started his abuse

You said take your clothes off thrice

You must have been hard of hearing

Because I said no thrice

But to you that had no bearing

I couldn’t look into your eyes

For all the times that I said “No”

You just kept looking at me with hungry eyes

It was all becoming so surreal you know

It’s hard to remember my clothes coming off

But I remember you laying me down softly

You wanting to pop off

And I wanting you to leave me

For my very life I was afraid

If I had yelled or screamed you know

So the choices were made

That I would not be thrown through my bedroom window

Wishing I could scream and someone hear me

And then I don’t remember no more

For it was Jesus who came and took me

So I would not feel the pain no more

I watched you from the top of my room

Everything was in a haze of yellow

I did not hear what was going on in the room

I had no feelings and everything was mellow

Jesus had his arms around me

He said that everything will be OK

I understood that this was meant to be

And there on the bed I was to lay

I don’t remember you leaving

My thoughts were spinning as I lay there

Something surely left my heart bleeding

What had happened was not quite clear

I remember feeling dirty

Not one call did I make to you

Showers and baths they must have been thirty

Confusing thoughts was what I had of you

For you this was not the only time

Once you threw me over my furniture

It would not be the last time

But this time was your overture

My husband I did tell

Bizarre he thought it was

Leaving me to live in hell

He said it was a story I made up just because

I thought that no one would believe me

You were an ex- police officer

And so your story would have more credibility

This was certainly not the justice that I deserve

Two young girls I was to raise

And for them I was to be silent

The rest of my life was a maze

Preachers and Pastors and clergy I begged for my repent

They told me that it was my fault

For it was how I was dressed or what I was wearing

One told me that I got a job outside the home and that was my fault

Because of that I deserved what I was bearing

No one understood me when I said No

Through a glass I felt that I was shouting

How many times should I have said “NO?”

I did not dress the way they were recounting

It was the end of fall

I was wearing corduroy’s and a thick heavy sweater

Nothing revealing that is all

I was simply dressed for the weather.

I was not dressed to share my goods

Three times I said NO

Yet no one has really understood

No one would believe me you know

Everything was not OK

My life was changed by force

You didn’t have a high price to pay

With you there was no remorse

You took my innocence and my trust

You shot through my heart with your bow and arrow

So telling my story is a must

Girls all over the world are abused like this take a hard blow

Many girls have their own stories that began when they said “No”

Some are untold and in silent they live their lives

No doesn’t mean yes, it means NO

You better listen because most of us are not telling lies

Trust is broken and she cannot reveal

Can’t you hear me when I say “No”

So her whole life there is something missing that she cannot feel

And her words were disbelieved the moment that she said, “No”

This happened a many a year

This woman that I am still can’t believe

That there is still the victim’s fear

In today’s society, that has supposedly grown so, how can this still be?

It is common knowledge that men and society will chastise their wife for having an affair …. But at the same time they are the ones having the affair and in some circles are thought to be a good thing. HA! Yep my parent’s caught him in it.  I knew her name, still do.  He is all good a great, but he has lied to the girls because, even not knowing what the lie was, I could tell by the changes in the girl’s attitudes towards me. I never said a word because I did not want to put them in the middle…..oh but my youngest daughter did that and so I called her out on some of them and that is when she blocked me.  I wanted to keep it peaceful, strange that…and it was not peaceful because he got more and more bossy.  I did learn, but it took years to see what I was allowing. Oh and he pulled a stunt one day that confused all of us.  my new husband and I were at my parents and he pulls into the driveway.  At first I didn’t know who it was.  He comes up the stairs. He brought his new wife there and introduced her to my parents, while my husband and I were sitting there in the living room.  We all were like, What was that all about and why would he even do this?

Since everyone already knows that my daughter had a child and gave her up for adoption, I might as well release that stress.  She made me promise that I would not tell anyone about that, so I kept her secret.  I found out while at my parent’s when my dad passed away that everyone knew about that.  I am livid!  Meanwhile, she has the gall to tell people that I called her a slut and I have not.  For God’s sake she is my daughter and I would not have even thought of that, yet she tells everyone that.  Everyone believes her, of course. She goes and tells people that I never helped her.  OMG! We spent all of our tax returns ($600) fixing her outside water pipes one year.  She said that her father wouldn’t do it for her….I don’t think that I will believe that story just by her track record of telling lies. HA! And she told me that her dad is a Pathological Liar.  She lied to me when she came and told me that she was pregnant.  First story was the she didn’t know who the father was.  A couple of months go by and she tells me that the father didn’t want to have anything to do with her or the baby.  I had not heard from her in a while and call her sister to see what was going on with her or if she was OK.  I get told that she is having the baby right now…..and I am called the Manipulator and that I say bad things to people and that they have had enough…….I beg your pardon…..I HAVE HAD ENOUGH. I am tired of being lied to and lied about and I have just had enough of it all.

What does it mean by “keep the peace?”  Is keeping the peace really good for all?  At what expense does it mean to the person who tries to “keep the peace?”  In my case keeping the peace means let others stomp all over you and make it that you are the one that is doing the manipulating and the lying.  It means to lie down and take it all because you are a woman and that you don’t have a job working for someone else so you don’t matter.  That has what it all has come to in this world today.  Mothers who stay home to raise their own children don’t matter.  Hell my kids think that I don’t matter and I chose to be a stay at home mother for them.  What the hell!  I was little and so that makes it OK to be someone’s punching bag.  I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THAT.

Effects of being suppressed:  A perfect example is in this article and at the end it does use the same description as I have about being a “Punching Bag for others.”

http://www.psychmechanics.com/2014/08/effects-of-suppressing-your-emotions.html

When I married my 2^nd husband he abused me too but it was through him that I learned about what I was doing.  Yes, I was doing some things and through counseling I learned how to look in the mirror.  You see there aren’t always all bad things in that mirror, but it does take a strong person to do so and to see and accept the things that one has learned for many years.  It is hard to UN-learn some things as well.  That will be in the next chapter.