Sitting here listening to people go over their Financial portfolio after I went to the gym and finally was able to at least run a mile. I had been training for a 5k before all this started, but became so weak, I was having trouble walking, but now things are getting better. I’m feeling stronger and more centered after finally knowing the truth after so long being in the dark.
I remember all discussions I had with my ex when we first married. I was so frugal and he told me like clock-work, “we need to be careful,” always implying there was never enough money. By the middle of our marriage we were both making the same, around 40 grand and we had a sizable “Portfolio!”
IRA’s, CD’s, mortgages, insurances, stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Investments, Stock-Market; earnings, dividends—it all looked so good, a life! a good middle-class life. I was so proud of our finances after growing up so poor, determined to pull myself out of the horrible poverty of my childhood. I had learned to keep a pantry, making so much by hand, grow vegetables, and cook pretty regularly; running the house and Lakehouse on very little, but I had no idea all this money would be given to him—not mine they would tell me! Judges would sneer, snicker, and berate me. It became surreal as each one I went in front of told me that I didn’t understand what was going on and I was “mentally ill!”—I had no idea I was regarded as just a “whore,” a servant!—nothing but property. I had no idea the extremist ideology these men and women harbored after I was sexually assaulted, then slammed down, arrested and pepper-sprayed—dragged out of all the properties we had together being told, none of them were mine and that I had “done nothing!”
It seems so normal, a normal lunch at Panera Bread, and yet here is a couple on the brink of retirement just like we were and yet they sit making all these plans with what sounds like an even larger Portfolio than ours and yet can talk so openly, easily—normal!
I on the other hand, woke up today in an abandoned house wondering how these people can keep denying me a place to live; heat in the winter, and power. Asking myself how I was going to yet again stay warm! This has been going on over 10yrs now as cops have continually dragged me out of every apartment I tried to rent! I sit overhearing these people and the jarring of our alternate realities makes it seem not just a normal, regular day out for lunch.
“I hate to have credit card debt,” the man said. I try not to listen, but they are laughing, happy, a little too loud. My ex used to say the same. We never had debt except for our mortgages and then when finally got a new car after commuting over 20 years with junkers! He always had vehicles given to him by his family. His Harley Davidson motorcycle from the profit we were getting from our successful rentals, but there was no profit for me! This was around the time I was questioning once again our finances as my SIL was also. She was demanding her name on their house around the same time I was. Things didn’t add up and I wasn’t spending any money really, doing DIY with just about everything, and yet I was constantly told, we had no money—were just breaking even! The fights were becoming more constant and I couldn’t understand why we had so little with what we were both making and contributing.
Their laughing and joking about how much they have, how much they have traveled, and how well they have done start to unnerve me, especially the bragging about how much they “made off of garage sales!” I always gave stuff away, remembering how horrible it was to have so little, and started to think how awful these wealthy people never gave anything away anymore. I remember all the garage sales my in-laws had. All the “American Girl,” dolls we spent months trying to get for them and then they would sell them!
I hear these people talking, and I remember those last few times I saw my SIL before she passed away. I say passed away, but it was far more brutal than that—it was horrible! I wonder if we live in the same place as this couple laughing at the next table. I glance at the woman and wonder how she can be so sure, so confident, and I wonder if she knows how women like me and my SIL are being treated—would she even care? They are talking too loud, why are they having a Financial meeting here? I wish I didn’t have to hear and try not to listen.
“Women like me?” I think, what is a woman like me? How different am I from her? or my SIL? or from any of the other women I know, some divorced now, that were not continually arrested, assaulted, harassed, and stalked around the city being denied a place to live. Women that were not dragged down to the Police station late at night and viciously called a “Prostitute,”—a whore, a drunk, “mentally ill!” Women stripped of all their personal belongings, their careers and businesses destroyed, their home! Why were we such different women? Why had my SIL been?
My SIL was stalked in the same way, after complaining about not being able to have her name put on their home. I was struggling at the same time with the same abuse. My 1/2 brother had always been abusive and had gotten brutal as the years went by. “He didn’t kill you!” my mother remarked after I was put on the street and made deliberately homeless in spite of all our properties and went to ask her if she knew anything!
I was the one to do all the chores—my 1/2 brothers excused from doing much of anything. They were boys! “Boys will be boys,” my mother would always say. They were suppose to take out the garbage, but never did. I cleaned the whole house and took the bullying and abuse from all of them when a simple thing like mid-matched socks happened. “The boys,” were always the victims of some kind of mistreatment, my mother would rage, but it was me that was mistreated by them! My mother would rage for hours how we were all the same, but I was shunned and told I wasn’t “blood,” by their family.
Bud would often watch me when my mother waitressed at the Country club the next town over. He made elaborate Wedding cakes, often working late into the night. I was allowed to stay up with him, watching movies, he would tell me how beautiful I was, and often sit and just watch me. One time giving me a beautiful gold heart bracelet and matching ring—I thought he loved me. His cakes matching the wonder of a love that transcended the fact I wasn’t blood. The spiral staircases and rows of beautiful roses. The cascading steps that spiraled around endless steps that flowed around six or more tiers. It was like the wooden moon and star staircases he made. They spoke of heaven, stars, and spiritual enlightenment, but that’s not what eventually would be revealed by his attentive care.
I wasn’t similar to “daddy’s little girl,” I was nothing of the sort, only now realizing I was just a toy, an object he used, played with, and when the time came, Bud had no problem selling me to a violent coke-dealer. It sounds disgusting and yet we didn’t live in some 3rd world country; I wasn’t chained to a bed, we lived in a nice neighborhood, Bud never touched me, but I know today he was what I would consider a Pedophile—I was never his daughter.
He didn’t love me the way a father would and when the time came he had no problem telling me he would not attend my wedding, but he went to the stag with my 1/2 brothers, all involved in setting up the marriage. My ex husbands stag was legendary I was told, not because of the strippers they had, but because my ex was marrying a whore! I was never daddy’s little girl as Bud had pretended. I had always been for sale and when after he grew tired of me—sold me. I was no longer a child—a little girl.
I believed for years that Bud did care for me, even loved me. He had been involved in preventing me from seeing my family; my father, my grandparents, and my “bohemian,” aunt and uncle! but I believed him and my mother when they told me my father and family were no good!
I had no one except my grandmother, they hated her too, after we went to live with him after my mother left my father; a year after they married. “She hated my father,” she would rage between visits to her Doctor for her “nerve pills,” the Valium she abused to deal with the fact I had ruined her life, and the constant court appearances about me, to see Judge Sise!
She was destined for bigger things after destroying my fathers music career and telling me all the time the door swings both ways and I could leave at any time. She had bigger things to do! I was not part of those bigger things. Her and Judge Sise knowing these things, I thought as a little girl, talking all the time about how horrible me and my family were.
Her and Bud went to parties all the time, but mostly I remember being alone with him all the time. He would take baths, he had a bad back, or he would want to lie by me. I was 5yrs old, thinking I was too big for that, but it was just what it was. The same when he would call me into the bathroom when he had to go—just to watch me watch him. “You were such a little girl,” they would all say.
He liked to talk to me; stories of his “Purple heart,”—he was a hero. He liked to show-off, often in his underwear, well-endowed; I was afraid, but he would tell me he had a “bad back.” I would sit between the toilet and the tub as he told me to—“just wait,” he would say; the same when he was in the tub for his bad back. I would often be told to “just wait.” Being made to wait is what a servant often does. “Your beautiful,” he would often say. Bud drank a lot, often slurring his words, things hazy, but my mother said, “he just falls asleep, so it didn’t matter.”
He didn’t care I was molested by his nephew after they left him to babysit for me. I was sexualized young—we watched movies together. My beautiful new Mary-Poppins doll they had just bought me was left without her clothes after it happened—just her pretty panties, stockings, and her carpet bag. I got her the night my cousin tried to have sex with me after telling me he loved me. He was so mature and I thought he was cool too, but I knew it was wrong. He had gotten naked and wanted to put me to bed. I was 5yrs old, asking why males wanted me in the bedroom all the time. I could put myself to bed. He got angry and left when I refused to be still.
“Incest,” is best my 1/2 brother would come to say all the time. By that time these cousins of my 1/2 family were having ongoing sex and stalking me, but I had no idea at the time.
I considered him a “Father figure,” and trusted that definition for years, that he thought of me as a daughter or like one, but that’s the thing with “Blended families,” everything is kind of hazy and often as off as the people that can’t have healthy relationships for one reason or another forcing others into unnatural ones. When we don’t have the words, the language, we can’t describe what these things are; they remain hazy, until we have the words—the language. One day for lunch in the corner booth of a Panera Bread, as we write it all out finally making it clearer.
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