I was at the dentist’s office last week having my teeth cleaned. During that time, when you are held hostage, and the only thing you can do is sit there with your mouth wide open and think while the hygienist digs at your teeth. Rather than lamenting not flossing more often, I started thinking about the state of the world and other deep thoughts. I seem to funnel into these deep thoughts quite often. This is not to say that I don’t stay on the surface and think about trivial issues too, but I consider the deep, dark issues very often.
It struck me then that I need to share these thoughts. I need a blog. So here it is.
All my life, I haven’t fit the mold. I rejected the white picket fence life. I purposely chose not to have children. I’ve heard all kinds of off-handed, mostly snide comments over the years about how you can’t know fulfillment or you don’t know what it’s like to be a “real woman” and so forth until you have a child. Some of the comments were hurtful. Most of the time, I wanted to tell the thoughtless bitch to just “shut up”. I have rarely offered the reasons for my choice, and I never asked them for their opinion. But I will tell you. I decided that after my terrible childhood of living with an angry alcoholic, I didn’t want to perpetuate the cycle. Also, I wanted to live my life without being responsible for a child. Don’t push your life’s expectations on me. I think more people should be honest with themselves rather than having children they truly don’t want just because it is expected of them. It’s not that I dislike children; I just don’t want any of my own.
My parents divorced when I was seven, and I’ve never really had much of a relationship with my father. Even at that age, I understood what it meant when he picked me up a few weeks after he moved out, took me to his new place, and introduced me to his new “friend.” Last I heard, he’s still married to that same woman, someone I learned to loathe almost immediately. She was petty, spiteful, and seemed pulled straight out of every fairytale’s evil stepmother mold. I saw my father on and off for a while, until I was old enough to refuse the visits altogether. Meanwhile, back home, my mom was “dating,” and a drunken decade took over our household.
I got married the month after I graduated from high school because it felt like the only way I could escape the angry, abusive, drunken mess I had grown up with. I thought I loved my high school boyfriend, but the truth is, I didn’t really know what love was at that point. I just knew I needed to get out. He had joined the Army the year before and was stationed in Germany. He was tired of living in the barracks and saw our marriage as a way to get off-base housing. It was convenient for both of us, even though it wasn’t built on real love. I didn’t realize then that I was running from one bad situation straight into another. In my home state, I wasn’t even old enough to get married; my mom had to sign a permission slip. Like I was going on a field trip. I was off to an amazing start in my “adult” life. What could possibly go wrong?
I know you will be shocked to know that the marriage did go well. He was an ass. He was always an ass (I would bet money he is still an ass), but I chose that over the mean drunk. I put up with him being an ass. Even though he never treated me like I mattered, I put up with it. He was deployed to Desert Storm and came back an even larger ass than when he left. Soon after returning, he took advantage of one of the troop reduction offers, and we headed back to the U.S. Back in our home state, he used his G.I. bill to go to college while I worked two crappy jobs to try to support us. I worked at a fast food place all day long in their “management training program”, and at night, I did the books at a hotel. My life was complete drudgery. He made college friends and met back up with his high school football buddies, and basically forgot that he was married. He didn’t need me anymore, so the party continued for him while I was left to figure out the rest of my life. I thought that I had found the way to make myself whole and to do what I was “supposed” to do. When I got married, I thought I was doing what was “normal” and right, although I had no idea what that meant. I went from my terribly abusive childhood household to one that was emotionally abusive in a way that was perhaps even more damaging in the long run. Either way, I was an old lost soul for such a young person.
I moved back to my hometown and settled into a mobile home near my mom. I couldn’t afford much, and the place was pretty dumpy, but I fixed it up the best I could. I decided to enroll in the local community college and, in the process, reconnected with a few people from high school and made some new acquaintances. None of them became close friends, but we were close enough to hang out and spend time together.
For a short period, I did some heavy drinking, but I quickly realized I felt out of control, and the last thing I wanted was less control over my life. I am simply not good alcoholic material. Most of my friendships during that time were casual, convenience-based connections. My closest friend lived in another state. She had moved away when we were freshmen in high school. She was my only true friend, but being a state apart made it hard to have deep conversations, and I hardly ever got to see her in person.
During this period, I learned a lot about myself. For most of my life, I had let other people decide my worth, and they were wrong. I was getting to know myself. I realized I was smart and capable, and that I could take care of myself. I also began to understand just how deeply I had been hurt. I trusted no one. I tried therapy, but instead of feeling stronger, I felt weak and broken. But, over time, I grew stronger.
Sometime later, my friends and I were all attending the local community college for our general education classes because the regular college was very expensive. Some of us then planned to transfer over to the college. It was during this time that I had my first and only stalker. Yes, seriously.
I often met friends for lunch at school. It wasn’t unusual to see the same people at lunch several times a week, but I started to notice this same guy over and over. After a while, he was hanging around some of my friends. One of them mentioned that he was asking what classes I was in.
I don’t remember now what order everything happened in, but at one point, someone invited him to a party at a mutual friend’s house. At the end of the evening, several of us were still sitting around talking, and he was still there, too. He asked me out, and I said yes. It seemed normal at the time. We talked on the phone a few times, and everything was fine.
He invited me to his family’s lake house. It was located near where my grandparents’ farm was in a small farm town outside of the larger town I lived in. To be clear, this was a country person’s lake house, not a rich person’s lake house, but I was impressed, nonetheless. I stopped to see my grandparents and then went to the lake near their house to meet up with “Steve”. I didn’t tell my grandparents where I was going because I didn’t want them to tease me. Later, I wish I had because they could have warned me. I met up with Steve, and he took me on a tour of the lake roads. We saw wild turkeys everywhere, and he showed me the house and the view. It was all very nice. I met his parents at the house. His dad looked familiar, but I wasn’t surprised because, as I said, it was a small community. It was a good day. All perfectly normal.
Back at school the next week, things started to change.
First, I found a note on my car that said something like “Who were you talking to this morning?” I ignored it, but it was creepy. It began to seem like wherever I went, he was there. The buildings on campus were very spread out, because they had a lot of agricultural classes, and there was farm machinery between buildings, so we would sometimes drive to our last class of the day if it was a long way away and leave directly from there. It was not unusual that he would be standing there waiting for me when I drove up and parked. It was getting overwhelming and weird.
He started to call me all the time. This was before cell phones, but I had a caller ID, and I knew how many times he called during the day. He called all day long. There were days that I had dozens upon dozens of calls. I had to unplug the phone. I told him to stop calling and to leave me alone. I went to the phone company, and all they could do was change my number. When I did that, he started to come over! I was getting scared. He would sit in his car outside my house and follow me when I left the house. I couldn’t go anywhere by myself.
One day, I pulled a sweater out of my closet, and when I reached into the pocket, there was a note from him in the pocket. I discovered after that that there were notes in all my jackets and sweaters – he had been in my house. At this point, one of my friends called the police, and we talked to them together. We thought that since they had witnessed some of his behavior, it would help. The police said they couldn’t do anything until he “did” something to me. He would have to hurt me before they could arrest him. At that time, there were no state laws in Nebraska for stalking. They were very sympathetic, and they were upset that they couldn’t help me.
I ended up moving after I woke up at night and found him standing in my bedroom. It was terrifying. He was just standing there looking at me in the little bit of light in the room. I screamed at him, and he ran away. I moved one day when he wasn’t sitting in front of the house. About a year later, he somehow got my phone number. He called me demanding to know what the sign on my door was for. It took me a minute to realize he was at my old house. I hung up, changed my number again, and have only heard from him one other time, and that is a great story (although creepy) for another time.
In the middle of my stalking incident, which went on for several months before I finally had to move and sneak away, my grandparents found out that I had gone out on that one date with Steve. That is when I found out why his dad looked so familiar. Steve’s dad was the town mortician! He had buried all of my great-grandparents. As if the whole thing wasn’t creepy enough. Then my grandma said to my grandpa, Wasn’t Steve the one who had that bad accident? My grandpa said he thought so. Then I learned that Steve was in an ATV accident as a kid and sustained a severe head injury – coma-level bad. I wonder if it affected his judgment? Good grief. Do I know how to pick them or what? (spoiler alert, I get way better at it later).
Anyway, this is a small slice of my life.
I’m not a liberal. I’m not conservative. I value truth, science, loyalty, and love. I would prefer to stay at home and watch an old TV show from the 1960s or 70s or play backgammon, rather than go out for the evening. The old shows made before I was born are simple; they wrap up in an hour, and everything is OK by the end. Life was good then. If I want drama, fear, and pain, I will just turn on the news. I think that people should follow the rules unless the rules are hurting people. If the rules are unfair or are hurting people, then the rules should be changed for the betterment of everyone involved. It is not ok to ignore the truth because we are embarrassed about the bad things we have done; we must own our mistakes and learn from them. When we fail, we learn more than when we succeed.
That is it for today. If you made it this far, I thank you for your time. I hope to see you again next time when I talk about whatever I want. Bye.