CONFESSIONS -- Don't Know What I'm Doing
It's been a weird, helluva day. I have felt mostly numb, not as on-the-brink depressed as I was yesterday, but sometimes numbness is even worse. Several things are converging to put me in a bad place. I was gobsmacked to discover that my wife was "following" me on Facebook through the account she made for her daughter with Down's syndrome. Not that I care if she sees what I post and share. Part of the reason that going no contact was working was because there's this huge puddle of water between us. But also, it was because I believed that she had completely lost interest in me, so any grasping would be both damaging to me, but it would also be fruitless. The fact that she was following me seemed to convey that she was still thinking about me. And then my thoughts / feelings started going in circles, haywire...
I had decided that I was going to make a comprehensive list of all the lies, wrongs, and hurts that she perpetrated on me. But they are so long, intertwined, and convoluted, that a bullet list was not working. The "Big Lie" about owning her home in and of itself would make anybody dizzy because it included those drawn-out buttressing lies. For almost 2 years, I was operating under an illusion that made no difference to me personally -- I could not have cared less if she lived in a pup tent, a cardboard box, or a gilded mansion. For my safety, I was only attempting to ensure that I would not in the position of her having total control over our housing circumstances. I didn't want to be thrown out onto the street in a foreign country if things went south. That was why it was important to ME. But it was also important to "us" and to the UK government, because I had to show proof of where I would be living to get a spousal visa. She married me with the lie "in effect." And it dragged on for another 9 months after our marriage, me trying desperately to get a simple document so that I could submit my visa application.
Although I was putting together the documentation for the visa just before we were married, I could never seem to get her to give me the d@mn document. Too much word salad, excuses, and "more urgent" drama. When it got down to brass tacks after we were married, first she said the deed to her property was in her father's safe at his place. Then she said he'd put it in the safety deposit box at his bank. Then she said her father had accidentally taken it to Canada when her parents visited her sister. There was a pause as I / we were waiting on the "evil sister" (her characterization) to courier the deed back to my wife who would send it on to me. Since it never came, my wife went to the Land Registry Office to get a copy of the deed, telling me afterward that Evil Sister had had the deed transferred to sister's name. (What? On the other side of the ocean, without a solicitor or any formal process, just like that, the Land Registry Office gave my wife's home to Evil Sister, poof???) Then, my wife returned to the LRO and explained the situation to them. With a snap of the fingers, Evil Sister has supposedly been arrested in Canada and was awaiting extradition to the UK for fraud. And the LRO had re-issued the deed back into my wife's name -- she just had to go back to the LRO to get it. My wife waived an envelope in front of her videocam and showed me via Skype, "See, here it is, the deed." But of course, not close enough that I could read anything -- just saw her flapping an envelope.
Now it was February 2011 -- seven months after our marriage -- and my wife decided she wanted to hand-deliver the deed to me in the US, and celebrate her birthday and Valentine's Day with mes. But of course, with a very familiar plan of me wiring her money for airfare, which she promised to repay immediate -- but I knew she wouldn't because she'd already broken similar promises several times. She arrives, and I am eager to get my visa application submitted while she was with me in the US, along with the sponsor letter she needed to write and sign. "Let's just have a couple of days to relax and enjoy ourselves first," says P. I am sitting on pins and needles. Midway through her short stay, I insist that we get the sponsor letter written and submit my visa application. She rummages around in her suitcase, rearranging clothes, pulling things out and putting them back again, and I hear, "Oh! It's not here! My luggage fell open in the front garden when my friend picked me up to take me to Heathrow. It must be on the floor outside." (Floor = ground in Britspeak.)
P grabs her mobile phone and calls her oldest daughter. "Go outside and see if there is an envelope in the front garden." I'm silently crying. February in the UK? An envelope not blown away or disintegrated by the rain and snow? "Oh, you found it! Put it to the side for me." So with no deed in hand, I can't submit my visa application to the UK Border Agency. But we can write the sponsor letter. We work on that, and my wife puts pen to paper, signing and declaring that we are married, she will sponsor me as her husband, and I will be living in the house that she OWNS, with a mortgage held by Regency mortgage lenders. I still have that stupid letter she signed!!!
P wants me to go ahead and submit the spousal visa application right away, without the deed. She thinks they will process it based on her sponsor letter. Her thinking is a bit slippery on details like that, you know? But the PROOF of where I would be living was a requirement, and *I* knew the the application would be denied. It cost $1,300 to process the application, and if the application was rejected for lack of documentation, it would have to be resubmitted and the fee paid AGAIN. So I refused to put forward the spousal visa application without the deed to her house included.
P said that when she went home, she would go straight to the Land Registry Office in Luton to get another copy of the deed, and FedEx it to me. I gave her $200 to have it over-nighted and insured. I asked her to text or phone me right away with the tracking number. Yet, as she had done so many times before, she went missing. No text or telephone call when the time of her touching down at Heathrow came round. No response to my frantic attempts to reach her for a couple of days. When she resurfaced, she said that her friend that picked her up at the airport was too tired to drive to Luton. Not to worry though, she had the deed, and she would FedEx it to me.
This stretched on for two more months, with additional excuses. FedEx was supposed to pick up the package at 9:00am, but they'd come early and missed her. She was going to take it to the FedEx office in Brighton, but she got there and realized she'd neglected to bring the packing slip! She returned home for the packing slip, but had parked in an illegal spot in Brighton (parking there is a nightmare, as it is just about everywhere in the UK) and her car was impounded. She'd had to walk all the way home in the pouring rain. Yada yada yada. Two months, the excuses droned on, with the disappearing acts stretching out the time.
In April of 2011, a full 9 months after our marriage, I happened to catch P's cousin on Facebook. Cousin asked me when I was going to be moving over? I think I had reached the point of certifiable insanity by then. I typed back at Cousin, "I'd be there NOW if I could just get P to send me the deed to her house!!" Cousin types back, "Well, that would be hard for her to do, as she doesn't own her house. It's a council house." Finally, what I had feared was verified. Concrete proof of the Big Lie. I confronted P, and screamed and cried and cried and ... was just utterly confused, crushed, and devastated. How long was she going to have us live on opposite sides of the ocean in a feigned marriage without telling me the truth? How many more lies was I going to be asked to endure?
I got, "Oh, I felt so horrible. I told you the first lie because I was ashamed. I thought you wouldn't want me if I admitted I owned nothing. I feel like a big nothing. Once I told you that lie, I was afraid I'd lose you if I told you the truth. But I was about to tell you. I just talked to my social worker [the one overseeing the welfare of her children], and she was going to sit with me on Skype while I told you. I'm sorry. I love you. You are the best thing that ever happened to me. I love you. I can't live without you...."
Now that I knew the difficulty, it was so simple. I just needed a letter from the local council stating that she had indefinite occupancy of her house, and that I had permission to live there as her husband. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker, knowing I was a fool. I'd invested too much in the relationship to just turn away. I planned an immediate trip to the UK to get the approval letter from the council, and re-written sponsor letter signed by my wife, and to see if, face to face, the broken trust was survivable. I told her that if she ever lied to me again, that would be IT. I demanded that if she had lied to me about anything else, now was the time to come clean. If I found out later that something she'd told me was untrue, I'd be gone.
She revised some of her life history. On my trip in early May, I DID find out she had told me a "smaller" lie about something relatively minor and unrelated to her life history or her house. I was frightened and dumb-struck. The sub-plot is staggering in it's own right, too long to share. When I had irrefutable proof of this lesser lie, I was afraid to confront her. It came cloaked in a warning from a hypnotherapist I'd seen, who told me my wife was a "dark heart," and that I should go home right away. I was supposed to stay a month. I laid awake all night beside her in the bed, first wondering what to do, and then planning my escape. I would have a brief time first thing the next morning to pack my suitcase and get a taxi to Heathrow while she completed the school run for her four kids. I created a mental list of all my belongings, and where they had been strewn through the house. She knew that something was wrong that morning. I was crying. Crying, crying, crying. She left for the school run, and I jumped into action while the house was empty. Ran around frantically collecting my belongings and shoving them into my suitcase. To avoid the possibility of being caught in the middle of my escape, I asked the taxi to pick me up at the nearby Tesco. I tugged the heavy suitcase to the taxi bay at Tesco and waited nervously. It arrived, I made it to Heathrow, and then planted my feet on US soil. Now P was frantic. At first I ignored her as she had done me so many, countless times. But again I caved...
I confronted her with the safety of the ocean between us. It was her turn to be gobsmacked. It was such a "little" lie, she'd forgotten it! She'd so forgotten it, that it was P herself who had unwittingly put me in the position of bumping into the truth. P said, "If I'd even remembered I'd told the lie, I would never have suggested you do X [the thing that led to me finding out the "little" truth]." Since it was only a "little" lie, and of minor importance, which was accurate in the grand scheme of things, and since she'd forgotten she'd told the lie, that made it okay in her world. Not in mine. But I started to feel guilty that I'd ducked out with no explanation, became convinced that I'd made too big a deal out of something trivial, and got suckered back in again... Had the tables been turned, I would have been mortified to come home from a school run to find my spouse vanished. So guilty...
See? All this deserves more than one bullet point on a list of P transgression. My plan to write out a list I could refer back to faltered. As I was making my effort to handle her "following" me on Facebook, my brilliant idea of creating a list went up in smoke. It nearly became a BOOK about the P experience, because I seemed compelled to explain why I was duped. What was it about her that had led to me enduring this emotional mayhem? And so I had to include the "good" things about her. And there were / are many.
Even so, I can add a few bullet points:
1) On Skype one day, P thought she'd turned off the sound and the video. She had bungled. Video was off, but sound was active. I overhead her screech at her oldest daughter, "You f%cking lazy b%tch!!"
2) Many times, I've described what happened to my poor dog. :-(
3) Two neighbors, and P's own brother, vehemently maintained that P was or had been a prostitute. Just as vehemently, P denied being a prostitute. I would not have judged her. I would not cared. But someone was lying, and the broken trust is a deal-breaker. Many clues strongly hinted that it was P who was lying.
4) P said one of her ex-husbands had bashed her face with a baseball bat, crushing her jaw and breaking all her teeth. Her sister told me that P had let her teeth rot from lack of care. Again, someone is lying. I had had no verifiable proof that Evil Sister ever lied to me, but I do admit I believe she was capable of it. However, P's face was without scar and unblemished. Evidence pointed to P being the liar.
5) P, in the end, took thousands of dollars from me which she had always promised to repay but never did. I include the loss of my home and all my furniture in the outlay, as well as money for her airfare, for a total of 4 junked cars, as well as stuff like the money for her to FedEx me the nonexistent deed to house. Also, she kept some of my most sentimental and priceless mementos, as well as some expensive items like my saxophone and my netbook.
6) I do not know the full extent to which P lied to me about her personal history. I do know that she lied about how she met her second husband, and several other not-so-minor things, including the number of previous partners. There are vague doubts about many of the things she told me, such as whether her second husband had actually been sent to prison, and if so, was it on the charge of sexually abusing her children or raping her, or both?
7) So of the unknowns are striking, as when she explained one of her absences by saying that she had not been informed that her second ex-husband had been released from prison without her being notified, and that he had "kidnapped" her son from school premises -- only to never had it mentioned again.
8) Toward the very end, after I had already fled back to the US, but was still hoping we could find a way to reconcile, P explained one of the disappearances by claiming that she had been in the hospital and an MRI had shown she had a benign brain tumor -- but it was never mentioned again.
9) P hit me twice. And I strongly believe she was capable of much more. After my deep despair and overdose, while I was on life support, she was checking with my friends and with solicitors to find out if I had a will and if she could inherit my estate even though the will I did have was still made out to Former Partner.
10) One of the biggies... P broke Evil Sister's confidence in telling me that their brother had, in some manner, has incestuous relations with Evil Sister. When I talked to Evil Sister, who was appalled that her confidence had been broken, Evil Sister said that it wasn't just the brother that had violated her; P had sexually violated her as well. P denied the accusation, and then said Evil Sister was lying about their brother as well.
11) I was an emotional captive while living with P, not able to move about the house without being questioned, "Are you okay? Where are you going?" In a recent post, I described how I was so debased and controlled, that I had to keep a bucket in our bedroom to relieve myself. Disgusting.
12) Lots, lots, lots more stuff that could be included. This should suffice, as going to #13 would be unlucky, right?
The Good Stuff
First off, there was the predictable (in hindsight, and with understanding gained here at PF) love-bombing. She accepted me as I am, with all my flaws, and the damage I'd had from being raised by an N mother. It mattered not one whit to her that I had a vision impairment. It did not phase her that I am short and she is tall. My previous partner had been what I call a "dead fish." She was an emotional monotone. So much so that on my first birthday together with Former Partner, she'd handed me the envelope containing my birthday card. The envelope was blank and unsealed. I tugged out the card, read the curly-fonted message, but it was unsigned! No "I love you" or "happy birthday" -- NO handwritten message or signature at all!! In every way, Former Partner was a "dead fish." But P was the exact opposite. She was a Geyser of Love. When we walked in public, she held my hand. She nearly wrapped herself around me. She glowed as if she had Prince Charles at her side. She posted the sweetest, most romantic songs to my Facebook page, declaring her undying love for me for all and sundry to see. Our intimate connection was so intense, it's a wonder we didn't melt straight through the core of the earth.
But she also did a lot of things that don't seem to fit under love-bombing. Or if they do fit, it breaks my heart. On one of her visits to the US, we were in my little nearby grocery store, where we saw a mother with two young daughters. They wanted some candy, but the mother didn't have the money to buy them candy. My wife reached into her pocket and pulled out a $5 bill, or maybe it was even a $10 bill. She walked up to one of the little girls and ever-so-gently said, "Here's you some money for candy, but you have to promise me to share it with you sister." I am surprised that store maintenance wasn't beckoned with a mop to wipe the grateful mother's heart off the floor.
Another time, we were taking the necessary path to the store which caused us to walk past a step club where AA meetings and other 12-step groups were held. I always cringed when I walked past the step club. There was usually a crowd of rather unsavory-looking people congregated outside the club. That didn't bother me at all, per se. It was just that one of the usual fellows who hovered there had taken notice of me. He was loud and crude and clearly suffering from a mental illness. Again, per se ... the kind of thing for which one would have compassion. But he always focused on me as I hurried past, and shouted unpleasant, disturbing things. His fixation on me was a bit frightening. As we were making a bee-line for the store that day, he was in the crowd huddled outside the step club. He shouted one of his usual taunts, I remarked to P how uncomfortable I felt. With no hint of judgement toward me, my wife said, "Don't worry about it, babe. He's just trying to live his life as best he can, like the rest of us are." Her easy insight into both my discomfort and man's simple humanity made me want to forgive every wrong she'd ever done. It felt like true compassion.
My wife was making all sorts of preparations for my move to the UK. She had painted what was to be our bedroom. She had bought two standalone closets of sorts for my clothes -- there were no real closets as it had been the dining room. On one telephone conversation, I could feel her pride beaming across the miles as she told me she'd bought a computer for me. She knew I couldn't bring my own desktop because of the electrical power difference. And I was so unkind. Computers had long been an essential ingredient in my life, since I can't get around easily due to my vision limitations and transportation. Without us discussing the matter, I had intended to buy myself a new desktop with all the bell and whistles I thought I needed. The one she'd gotten was an ancient, used clunker off of E-Bay. I was so dismissive of the love behind her effort.
My wife had also pre-arranged through a charity for me to get mobility training when I arrived in the UK. She well knew the Obstacles that haunt me. It was a gesture of great depth -- or at least that is how it felt at the time. With the training, I was able to learn how to walk to the Tesco, to the beach, to take the bus into Brighton -- things I couldn't even do in the US. And oh the glory of walking to the beach! Toward the end, I was attending weekly meditation meetings in Brighton on my own. I had such a sense of empowerment.
Also, I'd arrived in the UK with all my remaining earthly possessions stuffed in eight pieces of luggage, all else given away -- on July 12, 2011, one year after we were married. But the stress of the Big Lie, and all else had taken its toll on my health. On the 19, we had gone out on an errand and had grabbed something to eat for lunch in the car while we were out. I was sitting in the car eating my sandwich while she ran into a shop. Something was wrong with me. I was biting my tongue, trying to eat, and blood was starting to run down my chin. When P got back in the car, she knew something was going wrong with me. She wanted to call an ambulance, but I didn't want to make a scene, and so refused. So, P got me right to the doctor's office. She had rightly deduced that I might be having a stroke. An ambulance was called to get me at the doctor's office, and I was taken to the hospital. I had only been on UK soil for a week. At A & E (i.e., the emergency room), doctors examined me, and admitted me to the stroke ward of the hospital. My speech was slurred. I had no sensation on the left side of my face, and yet it hurt at the same time. I could not blink or open and close my left eye. The whole left side of my face drooped. I could not smile, and when I was asked to stick out my tongue, it veered to the right and would not curl. I could not raise my left eyebrow. The doctors were not sure if I'd had a stroke or if it was just Bell's palsy. As my wife had helped me from the car into the doctor's office, there was very mild weakness in my left leg as well. I needed an MRI.
The MRI showed a tiny spot in my brain, but they were unable to tell if it was an old or a new TIA. At the least, I had Bell's palsy. The next day, the 20th, was our first anniversary. My wife brought balloons to the stroke ward, and a huge 5 foot Beatles canvas. (On my first trip to the UK, P had taken me to London, and had gifted me with a visit to Abbey Road.) There were other gifts as well. And food. My wife ignored the grumpy nurses, telling them emphatically that it was our first anniversary.
I think I was in the hospital for two weeks, waiting for the MRI and to get strong enough to go home. While I was in the hospital, my wife made arrangements for child care, footing the bill for that as well as the petrol to get back and forth every day. She sat with me, held me, soothed me, brought me food. She gave the nurses a lashing for failing to bathe me, and she took me into the shower to bathe me herself. When I was well enough, she took me home. She bought a lounge for me to sit out in the back garden in the sun. I could not drink from a glass because my mouth was not functioning properly. I had to drink through a straw on the functioning right side of my mouth. She made sure there were lots of straws at the house. And when I was strong enough for us to go out to eat, she made certain that the waitperson gave me straws for my drinks. Since my left eye could not blink or open and close, every night, she put ointment in the eye and taped it shut so my cornea would not dry out. I had a veritable Kilimanjaro of medication for nerve pain. Each night, she counted out my tablets and offered them to me with a drink. She cared for me in every possible way. When I cried about the loss of function, or when the pain was bad, she held me and encouraged me. Now granted, if it was a recent stroke, and even the Bell's palsy, I'm sure it was the stress of the Big Lie that weakened me, along with the stress of moving. But still, I could not have asked for better care or a more devoted wife. If the same thing had happened to me here in the US, I would have been in dire trouble because I would have had NO ONE to help me or look after me. And the symptoms lasted for a long time. In the majority of cases of Bell's palsy, the symptoms resolve on their own in a couple of weeks. I was not so lucky. After MANY months, I regained some of the lost function of my face. But even now, full function has not returned, and I still suffer from nerve pain.
Before moving to the UK to be with my wife, I'd had a peace lily named Gertrude for going on 15 years. Silly as it may seem, that plant was part of my family. Over the years, I'd brought it back to life many times. Gertrude was actually a relic from my years with Former Partner who cared nothing for plants. One day, P and I were talking on Skype, and I was fretting aloud Gertrude's welfare. I didn't (and still don't) know the expected longevity for a peace lily, but she looked like she was edging toward her demise. She needed to be re-potted. But I did not have the means to get to a store for potting soil. I would have had to arrange for help from someone. I had very few people helping me, and I hated to be a burden. As I was droning on about my Gertrude worries, I could hear my wife banging on her keyboard. At first, I was hurt. I thought she wasn't paying attention to me -- God forbid!! Don'tcha know, my every word and worry is pure gold. Finally, P stopped typing and looked up at the videocam. She said, "I've gone to the US Amazon website and ordered potting soil and plant food to be delivered in two days." Well, heck, I could have done that myself if I'd thought of it. Not only was she listening to my tedium, she was DOING something to help me. These are the gestures that melted my heart. It's so very hard to toss these gestures into the bucket of love-bombing. At least in the moment, these little but BIG things MEANT something to me.
But there was one thing my wife did that shot straight to the softest places of my soul. I know I go on and on about my dad dying when I was 5 years old. My dad was my hero and my shining example of Pure Compassion. By day, though his vision impairment was worse than mine, he managed a convenience stand in the federal building. But on his off hours, he was a musician. He could not see sheet music well enough to read it when perched on the piano. So when he went to learn a new song, he would hold the sheet music up to his nose and memorize it. In just a few short minutes, he'd set the sheet music aside, and the most amazing melodies would make his piano dance. I especially loved the boogie woogie tunes he hammered out.
My dad was in a band before he died. I loved it when the band practiced at our house. The shimmering metal of the saxophone and the trombone mesmerized me. I liked the drums, too. Before he passed away suddenly from a heart attack, my dad's band recorded a song on the Nashville label. It was never destined to be great or famous. It was a novelty song pegging itself to the Cuban missile crisis. The title of the song was "Satan's Call to Khrushchev." In those days, songs became hits from getting airplay by local DJ's. Unfortunate, the leader of my dad's band, a man named Ersle Standridge, had had a falling out with the local DJ, so the song got very little airplay, and as far as I knew, it had not really branched out to other markets. (You would have thought that Satan would have intervened to do something about that.)
Back in those dinosaur days, my dad had a big reel-to-reel tape recorder, and much of his music was stored on those big reels of magnetic tape. After he died, my N mother shoved the reels of his precious recorded music in a drawer where the tape got tangled and just decayed beyond salvation. The song that was released by his band, however, was on a 45rpm vinyl. I'd had a copy of it, but I'd moved so many times, that I'd lost that 45rpm. It was so tragic, so sad, to lose a tangible piece of my father.
I told P all about my dad. All my wonderful memories. She listened endlessly. I guess I was talking to her about him one day on Skype, bemoaning the loss of the 45rpm. Again, I hear her bang-bang-banging on the keyboard. Again, I wince, wondering if she is listening to me. (Oftentimes, I was right -- she WAS guilty of partaking of her chosen Facebook games while we talked.) Suddenly, though, Skype beeps and a YouTube link pops up. I click the link to discover that P has FOUND my dad's song!!! And I do swear, life is stranger than fiction. The person who had posted it to YouTube was a guy in Germany who apparently collected arcane novelty songs. When my wife found that song, she was giving me back a piece of myself that had been lost. There is no greater gift...
How do you explain this to someone who has not had the P experience? I can't sum it up in bullet points. She rocked my world. It is Cognitive Dissonance writ large. She breathed life back into me. Having not seen P in the flesh for almost a year, having not heard from her in all these months, and having staunchly maintained no contact since June, discovering that she was "following" me on Facebook under the guise of her disabled daughter's account hit me like a lightning bolt. I was well and truly ready to give up two days ago. She was my oxygen, and now I'm turning blue.
I tried to summarize it all in tidy bullet points, but it could not be done. Now, I am numb. I do not know what to feel or what to think. I watched myself sit at my computer all day, doing things I ought not be doing. And so my confession ... I unblocked her on Skype. I did not message her or text her (she's probably changed her telephone number) or email her. But I sat looking at Skype, wondering if she would notice that I'd unblocked her and that I was online. I went onto my "spare" Facebook account and stared at what I could see of her own two Facebook accounts. I looked at the accounts of her children and her friends and her relatives. Some of it was ūber-triggering. Her friends were among the ones that had played along with some of her deception. They came and went like revolving doors, sometimes in her good graces, sometimes not. But it pained me to see that they had survived while I had been cast aside. I tried unsuccessfully to ferret out who her new partner is, if she really has one. I even searched for her ex-husbands, with plots twirling in my mind. Wouldn't it be nice, I pondered, to find out the real Truth behind her prior marriages? Would those men confirm that they had been victimized as well, or would I discover that they were the demons she painted them to be? What if I contacted one of her more trustworthy friends to find out how she really felt about me, if she was hurting, or if she had blithely moved on? Would they know how damaged I'd been? Could I play her game and create a Facebook facade, and somehow uncover directly from her what she was feeling about me? Do I have any place left in her heart at all? Was it REALLY all an illusion? Then I shuddered at the mere hint of taking on her tactics to satisfy my deep need to be convinced that somewhere in that hell and chaos, and all those lies, that she truly loved me. Worse still, I felt (and feel?) I'd walk on hot coals to have just one more day of chaos with her. Just one more...