Half the Sky

I just finished an amazing book called "Half the Sky" written by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. It talked about all the abuse proffered to all the women all over the world. It omitted to mention the unspeakable, that some of this abuse is happening right here in North America under our noses. What really inspired me was that many of these women that they wrote about suffered terrible abuses, rapes and things that we don't even want to think of, but rose above their suffering and have even prospered. The subtitle of the book is "Turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide". It has inspired me.

I need to make money. I need to see my kids. I have no money, no job, no skills and cancer. I don't know where to start. I have been abused for twenty years and I am insecure. Cancer treatment has left me exhausted and often confused. My memory has suffered. My only skills are management, bead-making, sewing, cleaning, bread-making and extreme fatigue. I have two years of college where I studied chemistry, calculus, business math, biology, psychology and accounting. But that was 24 years ago. I don't know where to start. My kids need me though even if for only a weekend a month. I need to find a way to make some money to pay for that one weekend a month and for a birthday present for each of them a year.

The women in this amazing book managed to do it somehow. I must be able to too.

Another day in paradise

Well, another day. I am happy to be alive sometimes. But most of the time I am worried about my children. What kind of man takes a bath with his kids and holds his hard penis back with his hand? And why didn't I know that it wasn't normal? I honestly thought (until a few days ago) that a man could have just an elbow brush his dick and he would get a hard on. I just discovered that my ex is pretty messed up to be getting a hard on with his little girls in the bath. Why does he still take baths with my three year old and five year old with the door shut and locked and won't let his girlfriend in? Why is child protection finding this normal? Why is it abnormal that I be worried? Why am I the evil one here? Why can he pick up his ex-girlfriends dog in front of the police and our young children by the neck and throw him in her car and everyone finds that normal? Why can he throw down her air conditioner on the cement in front of the police and everyone thinks that its normal? Why do I call the child protection services for answers and I get no answers, no call backs, no responses? Are they not my children too? What the hell is going on?

Why can he call me a piece of garbage on two feet with pieces missing and get away with it? (esti de dechet a deux pattes avec des morceaux qui manquent en plus) and still be mister nice guy with the social workers? (I'm missing a breast from the mastectomy. Kind man isn't he.) I have never called him a name, I have only said to the social workers that he is a narcissist. I have never ever called him a name or been cruel to him. I have asked him to remove my childrens' photos from his dating site. That allowed me that lovely compliment written above.

And now he won't even allow me to speak to the children. He has somehow convinced the social workers that I am to blame for whatever psychosis he is putting us all through. Insanity.

Cancer again!!!

Well I haven't posted for awhile. Not long after my last post I went for a routine gynecology checkup and realized that I had a lump in my breast again. Cancer had once again reared its ugly head. This time I had no choice but to get a port in my arm (with a tube all the way to my heart) to get poison pumped into my body. The hope being that the cancer would not come back. Meanwhile my ex continued to pump poison into my little ones minds. Reminding them constantly that I didn't care about the kids, that I was just pretending to have cancer so I wouldn't have to take care of them etc. He started drinking extensively and neglecting the children even more than before. If that could be possible. My 21 year old raped my 17 year old and got my eight year old drunk. All under their dad's supervision. He started taking drugs with the kids. Finally after my botched mastectomy surgery and at the start of my first chemo session, my eighteen year old showed up at my door with blood streaming down his head. His dad had attacked him. Two weeks later, after threatening to "break his face in a million pieces" and "send him to the morgue" several times a day, he held a knife to his throat and threatened him. My son got up the courage to phone the police and my ex went to jail. I found a family to take my kids just for the time that I was doing chemo therapy. But now social services was involved. My ex is a perverse narcissist. He can sell a freezer to an Eskimo. The young lady believed every word he said. He was out of jail in a flash and had the kids back within four months.

Anyways, I will write more later, I can't do anymore, it is too painful. The saga continues. My chemo is almost done, only three treatments left, then tamoxifen. I tried it once already and had a really bad reaction. I am on effexor now though so it might be doable. Effexor makes the hot flashes much reduced and allows me to sleep. So good night and I will write more tomorrow.

What do I hold on to?

There doesn't seem anything to be any way out of this terrible situation. My ex is not normal. He is making sure that I pay for leaving him. He is making no effort to make sure that I can see the kids. And it's funny, my subconscious still makes up excuse for him like I always did. He always made sure that I knew everything was my fault. He is doing it still and I still fall for it.

Abuse doesn't stop after separation

Oh my god, I am so discouraged. I feel like my life is over. My fingers are numb, I'm nauseous. My head hurts so bad I can barely think. I can't stop crying. I can't think straight. I can't sleep. I can barely make my own meals. I skip a meal everyday because it is too complicated.

My ex is not giving me any money from the separation. He has taken my house, my share of the things in it and has also taken the things that I bought after the separation. He has sullied my reputation and turned my kids against me. He has taken all of my kids and because I stayed at home for twenty years taking care of him I have no skills and no schooling to get a job. I have cancer and when I was doing chemo and had all ten kids with me he was taking me to court every single month and giving the older kids drinking parties. He worked very hard at getting them to love him and turn against me. He is very manipulative and is good at making them hate me, all the while making it seem like they thought of all those terrible things about me by themselves. I gave everything to him and my kids and now... I have a huge lump in the breast where the cancer was taken out. I am bleeding all the time. I have no legal aide because I have a house. That I have no right to live in. I have no money. I have no job. I have cancer from the stress of twenty years of abuse. I have no skills and absolutely no energy to get a job even if I did have the skills.

I do have a wonderful partner now. He is supportive, kind and quiet. The problem is, he was transferred overseas. His house, in which I have been staying when I visit my kids, is for sale and being renovated for its sale. I can no longer visit the kids in it. My van, that my boyfriend has been paying for, is for sale. I will have no transportation and no way to see my kids. No place to visit them in.

I love being around people. I am alone in this big house. I have things to do, painting, plaster, grass, etc, but I am going crazy never talking to anybody. I want to go overseas with my boyfriend but I have a court case on the 19th of September so I can't leave. I also have to get a mammography, echography and biopsy on the new lump. Then if it is cancer again, what do I do? I have no health care overseas. I have a home here for now but no car. As soon as the house sells I have no home. I am trying to hope for the best but it is really hard.

My ex is still talking against me to the kids. The older ones think that my partner should just buy me a house here. They think, because of what my ex is feeding them, that my partner is a millionaire and should support me and my kids here. He just doesn't have that kind of money! He is willing to support me living with him overseas, but he cannot support me living here. I was supposed to get my money from the house and be able to buy a little place here, rent it out one month out of two and have the other month available to visit the kids. The divorce was supposed to be through already so we could marry and I could have healthcare overseas.

My ex is smoking two packs and day and drinking at least four beers per day (all worth about 700$ a month) but he doesn't have any money to pay me my half of the house. He could get a mortgage for my half with that money. And what if I die before the ten year statue of limitations is up? He keeps everything? He had twenty great years, being served hand and foot, getting sex when he wanted with a women that made all his sexual fantasies come true and kept herself in super shape, and now, he will get the kids, the house, and all the money after I'm dead. And what do I get? Cancer, tears, agony, and death. Wow. There definitely is no justice.

Making Bread

It wasn't all depressing. I loved my kids. They were my joy, what kept me alive, what kept me from completely shrivelling up inside. I tried and did many amazing and fun things because we could do them together. Like making bread. What an adventure.

I started when I had only four kids. White bread was on the menu at first. So began what I thought was easy, you just follow the recipe right? NOT. My first four or five times were a mess. The counter covered in flour, the kids covered in flour, the floor covered in flour. And the damn bread didn’t even rise. It was so frustrating. I had put the yeast in warm water to rise, I had kneaded one hundred times. I had used the beast bread flour. The rising was done properly, to the minute. What was wrong? No internet at the time, so instead of stopping and asking for advice or trying to get a book about it, I tried again and again. Any sane person would have stopped at that point. But not me, I tried again. Finally I gave in as the pressures of family life were wearing me down, I just didn’t have energy to keep up with scraping the huge crust of flour and water off of the counter, flour, cupboards and kids for the four white bricks that I seemed to be becoming quite an expert at producing. Several years passed by and I decided to risk it again. We were living in an apartment at the time. This time it worked!!!! I put everything together, kneaded it, my hair plastered to my forehead, flour up to my elbows and four little lumps of dough all around me with four little people covered in flour too. Their enthusiasm was rivalled only by the mess they made. I don’t know what on earth made me think that I could manage to stay sane and make bread with four little ones. But we did it! Four beautiful white loaves. I realized that my yeast had not been working when I was making it before. So I learned to always test the yeast before mixing it in with the huge bowl of flour. Mommy can I eat some? Mommy how much can I eat? Mommy can I knead more? Mommy, Jordan* is touching me? AAAAHHHHHH, Lisa* is throwing bread at me! The mess was phenomenal. But I faithfully made bread after that, knowing that at least there were no additives and preservatives in it. It was white but so good and so “healthy”. After that we moved to our house in the woods. It was beautiful, a house after apartments for two years. So the bread making began again in earnest. I was a homemaker and making bread is a sign of a good homeschooling mother.

But now, I was becoming a REAL homeschooling mother. I needed a wheat grinder. No good bread can be made with just white flour; I needed organic wheat berries and a wheat grinder. So in the very conservative church that we were attending, there was a lady grinding her flour. She helped me purchase one from the States and another learning process started. We were real bread makers now! Grinding the flour, kneading the breading, washing up the kids’ faces, hands, and hair, pulling chunks of half chewed, sloppy lumps of dough out of their mouths and scraping off a dried up messy counter became one of the normal occurrences of my life. Honestly, it was fun for a while. I loved the feel of the dough under my hand. I loved the smell of the yeast wafting up from the bowl.  I loved the feel of the hot, hollow sounding loaves that I pulled out of the oven. And most of all I loved the feeling that I was doing something good for my family and kids. We were eating homemade, brown, organic, fresh-ground flour bread. I was a GREAT mom. 

*names have been changed to protect my children and me.

I don't deserve anything good in my life.

At least that is what I feel like. I realized this in the last few months. It has come gradually. I couldn't understand that I felt like I had no value until I was treated like I had value. My husband to be treats me with value. He tells me all the time that he doesn't love me because I do the wash, iron or make meals. He's happy I do it. Or said he was. But his love was also dependant on my ability to perform. I got sickened in again. It was just a bit more subtle. I wasn't accepting half that he was offering me because I felt that I didn't deserve it. I have felt like I didn't deserve anything for years. I think that it has its' roots in christianity. That "I'm a worm, god only loves me because he can see me through his son. I deserve nothing but death but christ gave me life because he is so good to me." This has tarnished my view of myself since I was little. Of course, if I would have had a less intense, less performance-related personality, none of it would have meant anything. Unfortunately, my personality meant that I took all the god-shit very seriously. God loved me while I was yet a sinner and worthless. Note the "worthless". Meaning without god I am nothing. Meaning that with god I am something but still only a poor, sad, worthless being who has value only because god came to save me. Some would protest (as I once did myself) that that was the point! It showed that I had value because christ was willing to die for me. Unfortunately, deep down under that dogma is the fact that even though you are "saved", you are still worth nothing because it is only christ that covers all your worthlessness so you can somehow squeak into heaven. Anything good that I do is because christ enables me and anything bad that I do is because I, deep down, have a sinful fallen nature.

So how does that relate to the here and now? It means that I accepted to be treated like a less than nothing and worse than a slave for twenty years because I didn't deserve any better. It means that when my new boyfriend tells me he doesn't care if I go out and have coffee, I feel that I don't deserve it. I feel I have to somehow pay for that coffee. In reality, I had attracted another man who felt I was not worth the cup of coffee HE paid for. I was once again being taught that I did not deserve anything but disdain. So am I somehow worth less? Worthless? Am I somehow undeserving? It means that I have a hard time synthesizing the fact that I am allowed to be in a good place.  Why me? Like somehow I should still be in an abusive relationship where I am badly treated. That's horrible. My abusive ex knew and felt that. Abusers zero in on the victims, the ones that feel they should be mistreated. Christianity is the perfect front for abusive men. The bible gives them all the ammunition they need to make sure their wives tow the line. I'm glad I am seeing it now before it is too late.

What am I doing to change my thinking? Well, first, I dumped christianity and the bible. That was a good start. Next, I am trying to take the time to meditate. Meditate on the future I want to create for myself. When my thoughts go around and around I try to turn them around to the life I want. I imagine myself living the good things that I want. Travelling, having a nice car, being able to pay for my own coffees at Starbucks. Making more money than my fiancé (ah, those also were empty promises) Being able to see my kids and family when I want because I have the money to do it. Being free from the cancer that almost took me. Being at peace and accepting that I have worth, that I deserve better than what I have accepted up until not long ago. I have also started doing tapping (EFT). It sounds weird, but it is in a tapping session that I finally realized that I myself could sabotage any chance I had at happiness if I believed I had no worth.

Now is when I choose to live. I choose to be treated well. I choose the people who surround me and I won't accept people who trod on my self-worth and make me into their slaves. I have lost everything in this process. First I had to lose my health because of the mistreatment. Now, in my refusal to be treated like a dog, I have lost my kids, my house, my life savings and my reputation.  Abusers make sure that happens when they are clutching, struggling and screaming to get back the slave, the victim into their house. But you know what? I'm free. And I do deserve good things in my life.