Nourish

 The 29th Anniversary of My Mother’s passing was more difficult at times this year than recent years. Maybe it was because this was the second year in a row of not traveling to see my family for Christmas. Still, we headed out to the Village Inn for an early morning Christmas breakfast. They sat us on the near empty side of the diner where the rising sun was blazing through the windows despite some lightweight shades. I almost wanted to move. But I just squinted a bit and noticed a couple of single diners in the booths by the kitchen. A middle-aged man wearing a Santa hat smiled at me in the distance. We settled in, and I started taking selfies with my coffee cup. ☕️

The sun kept bothering my eyes, so I put on my sunglasses for a bit. Then it dawned at me that the bright sun was a sign from Mama. The sun’s rays were fiercely bright when she left us that sunny Christmas Day. Remembering that memory, I took a picture of the sun blazing through the window at the diner.

We ordered off the senior menu to save a few bucks and get lighter portions. But the portions turned out to be very generous! 🥞My pancakes were big and fluffy, so I only ate half of one pancake plus my scrambled egg. All the while, the man with Santa hat kept catching my eye and smiling. I smiled back. 🎅🏼

I started telling Steve Christmas stories when he complimented me on my vintage Christmas pins on my coat and top. One lapel pin was a beautifully lit candle with holly at the base. I began telling Steve how Randy and I had a pact that the first one to wake up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve or the wee hours of Christmas morning would wake the other one up to head downstairs to peek at the presents. We would pretend to be just like the father in the “The Night Before Christmas” book and each carry one of Mama’s vintage candlestick holders with cream-colored candles down the stairs. The site of the Christmas tree with all the presents filled us with such excitement and happiness and Pure Magic! A Warm & Fuzzy feeling only felt at Christmas! 🎄🎁🎄🎁🎄 We would carefully move all the packages around, jiggle the contents, and try to guess what was inside then delicately put everything back the way we thought it originally looked.

Suddenly, I burst into tears sharing this story with Steve, rapidly glanced around, and hoped no one else noticed. It took me a bit to regain my composure, but dabbing my eyes, I finished my breakfast then inspected the bill. Not too bad ordering off the Senior Menu! 😛 When the server brought me my To Go box for my heaping portions, she told us the bill had been paid by the man by the back booth next to the kitchen. The same man with the Santa Hat who kept smiling at me knowingly. Once again, I burst into tears! 🙏💜🙏💜🎅🏼

But the mysterious man was no where in sight! 🎅🏼

“He has a YouTube channel,” she said. We asked the name of the channel, and she did not know.

We asked other servers if he was a regular, and no one recognized him.

My tears continued. I wanted to blurt out to them about how much this meant to me since my mother had passed on Christmas Day, but I did not want to make any of the staff sad. So instead I added that the year was tough, and his generosity was so appreciated. We took some pictures by the tree then headed outside.

A homeless man draped in a blanket immediately approached me in the parking lot ~ I handed him the box, gently adding, “Merry Christmas ~ God Bless You!” 🙏💜🙏🥞

“God Bless You, Ma’am ~ Merry Christmas,” he whispered.

#ASignfromMama #ChristmasMiracles #ChristmasBlessings #IRememberMama #RandomActsofKindness #PayitForward #Nourish #Feed

🙏💜🙏🎄🎁🎅🏼🧑🏻‍🎄🥞🍳☕️☃️❄️

“We are the music makers,

and we are the dreamers of dreams."

-Willy Wonka

I Remember Mama

I Always Wondered How I Would Feel

 I always wondered how I would feel.

To receive the news.

That he was gone.

She said she thought I should know.

He was sick, and he was dying.

The Bad Man is dying.

My life flashed before me in that moment in time.  My four years of terror, my four years of fear, my four years of pain ~ A Sad Existence ~ The Atrocity that was once my life.

I felt void of feeling in that moment in time.  Then a twinge of pre-tears.  And then nothing all over again.

Eventually relief of some sort.  He will never be able to find me now.

For eight months, I googled the obituaries of the Sierra Foothills.

For eight months, I wondered if she would tell me he was gone.

I did not want to ask.

I travelled very far to clear out the storage over and over again these past two months.  The process was slow, and I am still not finished.  For I found journal after journal with such horrifying, raw incidents of abuse.  I found microcassette tape after microcassette tape documenting the abuse from harassing voicemails to my own live audio journal.  This time I could not listen.   

The rusted edge of my gray spiral notebook reminded me of how long ago I endured this terror ~ this travesty ~ the crisp pages from 21 years ago documenting the stalking, the abuse, the reconcilation, the break-up ~ over and over again.  I tried so hard in those early days to get free.  I prepared privately with the advocates for three more years after that first year together ~ as the abuse escalated each year like clockwork ~ an annual upgrade to all the pain ~ all the humiliation ~ all the degradation endured by me.

The horrific examples of cheating followed by the first physical violence actually being inflicted by her ~ the other woman who suddenly wanted him back after he had his hold on me.  The terrifying memories of those pages built the foundation of my blog, and the stories typed up in a frenzy were practically an exact duplicate of those words unseen in 21 years.  I was horrified to read that he told me his male friends wanted to drag me down the driveway by my pony tail after that violent incident with the other woman.  For I was to blame for being kicked so hard on my leg ~ blow after blow after blow ~ that the bruises were there for weeks ~ from ripe purple to banana yellow ~ all documented by the Walnut Ave Women’s Center with an old polaroid camera  ~ faded images in a dusty file in an attic somewhere now.

The purging, the packing ~ reliving the horror of those days ~ led to vivid nightmares at night.  The Bad Man came calling in my dreams.  I sensed the time was near.

I googled the obituaries today.  And there it was.  Born October 4, 1948.  Died March 14, 2022.

He was finally gone.  Out of my life forever.  The terror is over.  He can never find me now.

 

                                                               Uncensored                                                                          

Age Progression

There was one other time I saw him again.

It did not dawn on me at first that it could be him.

All I remember was driving up to a taqueria on Mission Street and jumping out of the car only to see an old man flipping me off.  There a haggard old man sat next to a rusty metal table flipping me off.  I dashed over to Steve on the other side of the car to warn him about what had just happened.

“We have to go,” I whispered.  I then blurted out what I had witnessed.

Steve took immediate action and confronted the man instead.  He questioned him over and over as to why he did this to me.  Threw in an assortment of swear words that were only met with a bowed head.  Then a mere nod.  A very smug nod at that.

I just wanted to get out of there.  But we went inside and told the staff what had happened. And again we were met with silence.  At this point, I think the staff was more scared of us than of him.  They thought we were the ones becoming unhinged.

Yet it still did not dawn on me that it could be him.  The man I coined The Bad Man.  I never did like to say his name.

We abruptly left and skirted quickly back to the safety of our car.  And then it hit me.  I looked back through the smudged windshield and figured it all out.

The startling images flashed before me like a scene out of CSI.

I zeroed in on the hands I suddenly remembered so vividly.  These huge hands.  Those huge fists.  These huge hands he use to bash my head into a wall.  Those huge fists he use to bash into my head.

There he was all cloaked in leather from head to toe.  Just like he used to wear as he swaggered around town both on and off his motorcycle.  

And there were his Vacant Eyes.  Devoid of any feeling. Any kindness. Any compassion.  

No amount of Age Progression could hide these truths.

There he was in all of His Abusive Glory.  

Flipping me off twelve years later.

In front of a taqueria.

He always wanted to have the last word.

Uncensored

Vicious: The End of An Abusive Relationship is Never Clean

It began and ended exactly the same way.  Triggers.  Flashbacks.  High Anxiety.

The Post Traumatic Stress of Donald J. Trump.

We never thought he would win.

I remember dancing around the office on Election Night just imagining the first woman president.  Even though a lot of us were rooting for Bernie in the Primaries, we still were ecstatic.  This was history-making.

Some ladies wore colorful pantsuits In Solidarity.  I wrote giddily on Facebook that if Hillary won, Steve was going to buy me a purple pantsuit and a Rachel Maddow haircut the next day.  

When Steve turned to me half way through Election Night, and said, “Robin, he’s winning,” I knew it was over.  There would be no First Female President.  No Historical Moment.  No Purple Pantsuits.  No Rachel Maddow Haircuit.  No dancing at work the next day.

Instead there would be A Wave of Fear for the next four years.

A Sleepless Night full of flashbacks and nightmares of the man who reminded me of Donald Trump.

We all knew it would end this way in absolute total chaos.  The End of An Abusive Relationship is Never Clean.

I absolutely lost it when I saw live footage of a police officer being chased and cornered in a hallway by twenty rioters.  I flashed back to my abuser chasing me down hallways, cornering me in rooms, banging my head on walls.

I ran out of the room, screaming and sobbing hysterically.  I thought they were going to kill him on live T.V.   I have been shaking ever since.

I am not going to watch the Inauguration tomorrow.  Instead, I am going to meditate and pray that our new president and vice president will not be assassinated; that there will not be mass violence; that the Trump supporters will back off, surrender, and finally accept the results of the election.

The last four years had taken its toll on me.  From the flashbacks and nightmares of my abuser on Election Night to my sheer terror watching the Insurrection unfold, I am Tired. Weary.  Anxious.  And Achingly Sad.

Four Years of Lies.

Four Years of Hate.

Four Years of Crazy-Making.

Four Years of Gaslighting.

Distorting reality, denying reality, an alternative reality they both wanted me to believe.

My abuser was a lot like Trump ~ from A Smooth-Talking Salesman to A Man Full of Rage, the similarities were endless.  I stopped using Twitter during the Trump Era.  His angry Tweets reminded me of my abusers’s vicious emails and voicemails ~ all saved and documented in case I ever needed them for the police.

But I could never really get away from Donald Trump’s viciousness.  Twitter would send me emails highlighting his Tweets, and the nightly news posted screenshots every night.  It seemed like I always knew what he was doing no matter what time of day.  I always knew how he was lashing out. The World was talking about Donald Trump.

It took four years to get away from my abuser, and it took four years of my nightmare of Donald Trump to finally end.

The mocking, the finger-pointing, the blaming, the shaming.

The degradation of women, the physically-challenged, the immigrants and asylum seekers, the people of color and different faiths. 

These are my last four years.

Today, I saw a glimmer of hope.  A man shedding a tear over leaving his homestate.  Our New President.  He reminded me of my father in that moment. A man not afraid to shed a tear.

Hope and Faith got me through my four years of domestic violence. 

Hope and Faith got me through my four years of the Trump Presidency. 

The flashbacks will lessen, and the nightmares will turn to dreams.

  

               

Shutting Me Down

It all started with mutual admiration.

Sharing.

Trust.

Compassion.

Then it quickly turned to the telling of the humiliating kind.

Revealing to him all that I had written.  

I remembered those days when I realized tonight how much my writing had drifted off ~ faded away ~ to a place of almost nonexistence.

I kept at for for one more year. Then just gave up.

I only write in December now.

To prove they really didn’t win.

In completely shutting me down.

Uncensored

The Distance Between Us

The Distance Between Us is So Vast.

I had no idea how hard it would be.

To miss you so much at night.

My family were my friends.

And now they are so far away.

I miss the spontaneity of seeing you.

My Family, My Friends, My World for So Long ~ 

Just Grateful

Just grateful to be surrounded by kind people in our lives.

No more hateful emails.  Spiteful messages.   

The People of New Mexico are much kinder than any other region I have known.

No matter how kind, how helpful I was, I usually got treated terribly in the end.

We left the toxicity of California behind.