I have internet connection RIGHT NOW, so I thought I might swing by. I just finished watching MAID on Netflix, which I thought was going to be about a cleaning lady for the Mafia or something, but it was NOT that at all. It was all about domestic violence (DV), especially emotional violence. Wow.
What a surprise. It was instead my own life story! It's funny, I'm being led back through my own life, fleeing emotional abuse to my friend's house to spend the night for fear Stupid S (SS), DS's dad, would do what he'd promised and give my DS (yes, the very same one) to his mother for her to send to Mexico ("and I'd NEVER see him again!!"), unsheathing his Buck knife and telling me in a rage that he'd cut my nipples off so I could not breast feed DS anymore IF I DARED to "cause trouble" at his mother's house for Xmas. I used to (kind of jokingly) cower down and say to him, "Si, jefe!" (yes, boss! - in Spanish) as I allowed him to torture me mentally and then my own daughter to get to me, to get that elusive control for him by making her squat for long periods of time in the kitchen or lay in her bed for days. (And I wonder why she hates me!) She was 11 at the time. 
He also withdrew permission for me at literally the LAST MINUTE to use his van to drive to work (my bus driver job!) on my crucial first day of training! I remember stopping him from scaring me to death by facing up to him, then he simply turned to my daughter until I got enough backbone to stand up to him for her sake, too, but the corker was when my nearly 3 yr. old DS "wanted Mommy" to dress him, "not Daddy". SS's response? OMG, he BEAT HIM, putting SS's folded hands on top of DS's head while DS was sitting on the table and pushing down HARD!!! I thought he might break his neck. Then he grabbed DS by the leg, leaving his hand print as a bruise from grabbing him so hard, and beat him one-handed while holding him upside down like a punching bag! I tried to dial 911 and just lay the phone down, but accidentally hit "speaker" and the dial tone came on. SS spun around on me and said, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!?" I mumbled something about checking my messages and pushed the wrong button. He suddenly stopped, handed DS to me, I handed DS to DD, by then she was 12, and whispered, "Take him to our neighbors!!", which she did. He never physically hurt me, but he scared me to death MANY times, he DID hurt DD who told me later that she had figured out how to ease the pain of squatting for so long (it's a torture that he had learned in Vietnam), but the laying in her top bunk for days on end were horrible for her. Before SS stopped beating DS, he reminded me as he was doing it that he could do nothing PHYSICAL to DD or me, but that DS was HIS, and he could do whatever he wanted to do with him. He was right. Neither of us had LEGAL custody and both of us were DS's biological parents. He had all the rights that I did. TERRIFYING!!
After it was all over, SS had parked out in the front of the 168 unit complex (the Projects) in the street, a good walk of about 2-3 blocks, so I walked him out there and I forced a weak smile, and I even kissed him goodbye - but I knew that this was IT!! I was with this jackass for 5 long years, taking his abuse. I was in one of those "DV shelters" over Xmas when DS was only a few weeks old, same old story that time, and I was back there again many times. That's not counting when I was fleeing from him due to his mistreatment of me by going over to my friend's house. I recognized myself in the MAID story on so many levels! After the beating and getting SS out of there, I attempted to take DS to the nearby hospital emergency room. They said that they'd seen worse ("Where's his cigarette burns?")
and refused to do anything! I was shocked! So I took him the 20 miles to our old Dr.'s office and he was appalled! He said he'd have to report this to the authorities and I said, "YES, PLEASE DO SO!" To this day, DS has serious problems with "moderate scoliosis" - caused by this day and the terrible beating he took?I WAS going to donate all these really nice toys (from our day care)...Barbie dolls with tons of accessories, hand held playthings, tubs full of Legos, play mats for babies to lay and play on, a 5'x7' rug with roads embossed on it with lots of Matchbox sized cars, and a big "puppet theater" complete with a whole lot of puppets, all name brand stuff, like Mickey and Minnie, Pinocchio, and so on. I didn't want to give them away to be sold as some sort of "packaged up garage sale items", not even through the DAV. I DO need to let them go, though. Plus I have all these clothes of mine, mostly in 3x, taking up closet space. I would LOVE to share these clothes and toys with others who could really use them, and especially the kids and the puppet theater and all the puppets. But I'd like it if that could stay in the facility. Working out some of the fury and/or confusion the kids must be feeling, or even the mothers playing, too, or using the friendly puppets to reassure the kids or have them "act out" what they've seen or been through to help the counselors with how to understand and make their plans. Do it with play instead of confrontation. Let the puppets tell.
More "me" history: I was at a battered women shelter once where they were SO CORRUPT! It is why I plan to INSIST that these nice "toys" stay at the Shelter and that the clothing is given out only to the women. At this former Shelter, huge, big trucks full of donations would come in and pull up to the garage next to the dining room. But when those trucks came in, we residents all had to move to the front room and NOT LOOK at what they were doing out in the garage. Me being me, I had to take a peek...and what I saw made me gasp! As the truckloads of donated clothing was delivered, the STAFF at the Shelter was picking through it to give to THEIR OWN families!!! No wonder they didn't want us looking!! And I could HEAR them: "Oh look! Don't you think this coat would be perfect for my daughter/niece/mother/ME?" or "Oh, look at these toys! I'll put them away for next Xmas!" and on and on it went. When they had had their fill of new and used items, the cream of the crop, they would allow us to pick over SOME of the remaining items in a couple of cardboard boxes. I don't want that to happen with my donations. I don't think it will in this place I'm going. It more reminds me of the other place I went, the honest place. But I'm still going to check and ask at least.
I've also got a nice student desk out in the garage. It's ancient (1974) and has no chair, but it's totally functional. Plus those two chest of drawers (someone could use them, I'm sure), taking up room in the storage room. And there's SO MUCH BEDDING AND PILLOWS AND TOWELS that I'm sure that they would welcome. But just do help the poor, fleeing women and their kids, and not just your greedy selves and I'm GOLDEN!
==================(Tuesday evening)
It was predictable. DS is home and now I have NO INTERNET CONNECTION AGAIN. It's really getting to me. Yesterday he was working and I had internet. So I paid ALMOST ALL of my bills while I still had my connection. I PAY for my connection (AND HIS!), but I only have it for a few minutes at a time. I can't check my money, can't pay my bills, can't study anything like recipes and how-to videos re: the freeze dryer, can't order anything online. AARRGGHH!
And I can only write on here, but cannot send it off. I'm getting depressed. I have barely been out of my room for days. I have no water in my room ATM and haven't eaten much in days, either. Having eye-popping pains in my abdomen and slight nausea, too. I'm not even hungry. I see my Dr. on Monday, but I cancelled my mammography/hand-and-foot x-rays today due to the pains in my abdomen.I just found (by using my cell phone) an extender online because it's what I think I need to "extend" that internet connection into my bedroom thru two walls from DS's bedroom where the router is. So I texted a pic of the extender to my ODS to see if that is what I need. I am SO DUMB and unsure of myself about all of this! I got a tiny bit of relief tonight when the internet popped on for a sec. ODS says that DS is using up so much of the broadband (d/l movies, playing massive games, and so on, which sucks up the broadband. DS oftentimes takes the flash drives to work to entertain himself while he guards) that with my already weak connection I'm getting only "intermittent" internet signals. It's why it's so "off and on". SO FRUSTRATING!!! ODS should probably let me know by morning. I even know where I'm about to plug it in - and it's good for a boost of 2500 Sq. ft. That's my entire house! So it should be ok. When N was here and trying to get a job online, he complained of this exact thing. I had an extender (circa 2014) in my room ever since because when N got a job, he left it here. Not much trouble with an internet connection then, but DS and I unhooked it for some reason. Now I'm having the same trouble again. I've never felt so isolated! I can't even reach you guys when something triggers me like that Netflix series MAID. Wow, it really took me back!
================(Wednesday midnight)
I am so thrilled!! I probably have a "home" for EVERYTHING! All my old clothes, the puppet theater, puppets, and other toys, maybe the old desk in the garage, maybe even the rolltop cluttering up the storage room plus the two old chest of drawers from my welfare days!! The lady called me "generous"!
No, they are helping ME to heal by allowing me to clean out my house of my old things to help other women who have suffered from DV and their children. They even have a secret location where the women are placed temporarily - EXACTLY what I went through!! Tears are in my eyes as I write this because it makes me so HAPPY to do this. The sense of loss is GONE. And the offices are right here in downtown! I CAN DELIVER IT in my pickup. Cost of gas for that old gas-guzzler be damned!! I have never felt so blessed. I am safe from all of those in my past who wanted to hurt me. I am safe. I am safe.I will call the DV shelter in the morning to set things up. Pain in my gut be damned! Maybe I'm just hungry. Maybe I just shouldn't be eating too many carbs (like I have been lately). Finding this place, finding it so close to me, having my truck running, tags and all...it makes this just feel right. I guess MD began this journey for me, but others have completed the job. I have to face it that I married my first husband within two months of when he drugged me and raped me (I was a virgin) so "he would know that I was his". My God, I should have RUN AWAY from even marrying him!! Cruel bastard!! In fact, I've been raped three times by 3 different men. And I know from DV, too. One of my rapists, a Marine just back from Vietnam, a former boyfriend and a coworker, held me in my apt. all night, waking if I even moved, even walking me to bathroom and guarding the door to the windowless bathroom. When he said to me at first, "I'm going to rape you.", I scoffed. I said, "Yeah!? You and what army?" and he hauled off and hit me so hard that I flipped over backwards clear down the small hallway. When he raped me, I SCREAMED my head off, fighting him, until he grabbed my throat and choked me HARD...and I heard something go snap in my neck. I quit fighting and he let go of my neck and continued to rape me. I didn't know that the security guard was dealing with some disturbance up in the front of those apts. and could not hear me. He held me there until we went to work TOGETHER the next morning. I called MD from the offices there in a panic, told her what had happened, and that I was about to call the police...and she said, "Don't bother. They won't believe you anyway." and she convinced me not to call the police. So I did not call them.
Looking back on all of this, from infancy to childhood to adulthood, to have come this far after all of this, it's a darned MIRACLE!! I am SOOOO BLESSED!!!! I SURVIVED!! ALL OF IT!! I SURVIVED!!!!!!! I believe that what I'll do is call the Shelter People first thing in the morning and make my offer to the manager to donate my things, but then FINISH the front yard weeding (it's only like 1/3 of the front yard), put the license plate tags on the truck, and then get into the storage room and move out all those toys. Same with the stuff marked DAV in my foyer. I KNOW that everything will be going to help these moms and kids. Maybe finish cleaning off the desk in the garage so someone can use it as a school desk. Maybe get DS to help me move the rolltop desk out, too, and just donate it. They have him working like crazy starting on Thursday, so I'd better grab him now. Every thing I do, I am doing it for those women (and children) who are being victimized by some jerk. These are some really insecure men (usually men) who need to control instead of giving love and kindness to keep their women happy. No one flees their home for no reason. It's heartbreaking to flee, it really is. Scary, too. I vividly remember driving the bus night after night and thinking about SS, thinking, "OMG. What if he LEAVES? What will I do without him??", and I'd begin to cry...yes, while driving the bus! **DING!** "NEXT STOP, DRIVER!"
It seems funny now, but it wasn't then! Talk about looking for love in all the wrong places!The creepiest part of the entire SS debacle was when he called me maybe a week after I got the courage to come back to my apt. from the DV shelter where I'd been staying. I'd left him a note to tell him I'd left: "You always said that all I needed to do was tell you to leave and you would. Please do." He'd gone back to his mother's house some 300 miles away, but then he called me. When I confronted him with the beating of our son, he said, "No, that never happened. It NEVER HAPPENED." He didn't yell this, but nearly whispered it, like trying to hypnotize me. What an idiot!!
I then found out that HE was the one that BEAT my son severely on Father's Day a mere 3 months before the beating that I observed. He brought DS back from SS's mother's bruised from his shoulders to his butt, big, round bruises, and DS was terrified to strip down for his bath, something that he usually enjoyed. I did call the police that time, but SS thoroughly denied it, and even I believed him. It seems that DS, then 2, had wet his pants. SS, feeling ashamed that HIS SON had wet himself, didn't want to appear to be a bad parent in front of his mother and older brother, so he beat his child HARD. Oh yeah, good idea...IDIOT!!==================(Thursday midnight)
Now it's 2am. The computer is working ATM. I pulled up the place online that I want to give the puppet theater and all the puppets to. To put it into their hands, especially when doing counseling with their clients, takes all the burden of loss right off my back. That feeling of terrible sacrifice is gone and is replaced with a sense of happy duty and plain JOY to be able to help. They were duly impressed last night by my generosity. However, just getting nearer to going to that place and all those frightened, depressed, and dependent women - my God, what a TRIGGER for me!!! I'm sure that each has her own story. I don't know them, but I was them. Does that make sense? I don't like facing that. I really don't. Did I make myself a target for MD's Flying Monkeys that MD didn't know and wasn't aware of? And if she did know, did that matter to her? It did make me 'less than", and after all, wasn't that the ultimate goal? "I just can't break your spirit!!"
Well, maybe 3 rapes and 2 failed marriages and 20 yrs. in abject poverty living in the Projects that racially despised me would do the trick for her. All were her Flying Monkeys and all gave her intense pleasure. She called me "used goods" and "damaged goods" and had me put out my cigarette and step off the porch so "the neighbors wouldn't see me and think that I was her daughter". She called me "deformed" and yanked my towel off me, leaving me standing there naked. No, I had plenty of training on how to be the Queen of Low Self Esteem at her hands. But the trick was on HER!!
WITHOUT a MAN around, I managed to turn my whole entire life around - slowly, to be sure, over decades of time, but I DID IT! You know, they have peer counseling there at the Shelter. Maybe I should just write a book about my own experiences. Really tell on MD good!! 
"BREAK MY SPIRIT!!" BE DAMNED!!!! Maybe if I wrote it all down, I could let it go. It doesn't mean that I approve of what she did or her reaction to what other did TO me as time went on (her gloating satisfaction must have been positively observable as she learned of each time it happened!), but I never wanted her to get away with it unscathed. She tried to ruin my connection with my DB, my only sibling, but with his wife's passing from COVID, we are now becoming close again. I never really hated him. But now we are getting closer. Write a book. Hmm. It's a thought.
Let me try to send this off.
Same with Mittens, although both have their own distinct personalities and need different training focuses. They are also VERY jealous of any attention given by me to the other, so I separate them sometimes to give them individual and more focused attention and training. It works out better that way.
Now granted, that's only really scorching from about 1pm-6pm. After that, it's a mere 88º at 6pm and 83º at 7pm. Walk in the park time! 
THERE IS SO MUCH TO LEARN! Difficult to do the first time, but I'm SURE it will get easier and much quicker as time goes on. And between this learning and learning Spanish and playing my word games on my phone, I double dog dare Alzheimer's to show its ugly face around here! 
It reminds me that she's really gone. No wonder I've been avoiding it. 
) before Oct. when it will restart again. I still pay (up front) the standard bill, but I am refusing to pay the EXTRA thousands more due to that ticket he got. So I hate to say, "Don't work so much." He's trying to do what's right, and I hate to stand in his way when he is.
), tubs of Legos (she took training when dealing with interviewing with Legos!! Who knew?), a 5' x 7' rug with "roads" on it and tons of little toys (yes, like some matchbox cars) and dinosaurs and big ugly bugs (the boys should love them) and teddy bears and "farms" with small animals where everything folds up in a little suitcase (I'm donating several of those), and beads on a string and beads on a platform on wires and a little round rug with attached items for very small babies to play with, and so on. Everything is dusty, but I can tidy those things up. I already did the theater and it turned out great! I'd forgotten that it actually folds out, is made of 
I need to get in there to see if anything has changed significantly. But instead I first called my health care plan and signed up for a paid for CBT (?) therapy (mental health). I speak with my T tomorrow evening at 5pm. And then I made another appointment to get the mammogram and x-rays for Wed. And then I transplanted one of my purple tree collards. ♥♥♥
I'm taking it from there. 