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Thanks, Anita! And thank you to Mia too, for her input. I appreciate all the help and the friendly and constructive comments from you both. 🙂 I will let you know how this goes and how I am feeling in a week’s time. I’m going away for part of next week, with my sister.
MY sis lost her eldest son late last year, he was only 36. 🙁 So for a while I’ve also been helping her getting over that, if such a thing is possible. I’m feeling pretty drained of energy, what with these happenings last year and caring for my parents, both in their late 80’s. We are only going away for part of a week, as we both are carers for my parents and can’t leave them for long or go very far away… but we both really need a break right now. 🙂 We have another carer in place whilest we go away, and do nothing but walk the beach, and paint paintings – and eat and sleep! Heaven!LOL.
“”It leads me to think that she used this strategy with J and succeeded in only a week or so! I am thinking she is likely to continue to be successful with him, based on her past success with you.””
I agree. It’s possible that he will never know that he is simply being used. The weekend before she moved in with him was when we were at the small folk festival. J. had asked if he could tag along, and I didn’t have a problem with that – he was in his own RV. My sister and one of her sons was also there, so there was a small group of us. J’s first ex-wife came with him!
The only thing I worried about was that L. might feel a bit left out. It was me who felt like that, only at the time, I didn’t know why. The strategy she used was to act like a little girl. She even plaited her gray hair to appear even more child-like! She contrived to sit next to him, between J. and myself, at all the concerts and was lingering behind chatting to him after the concerts. Looking back, I can see now that she was flirting with him and was going all out to get him. I didn’t see it at the time, only looking back. You don’t think your best friend will do anything other than be friendly to your intended boyfriends, do you? I don’t think J. had any idea that L. was after him. She knew an awful lot about him through me. At some point she must have told him about the ‘situation’ with her ex, and exaggerated it. They must have exchanged phone numbers.
So we come back from the Festival, and he sends me a text… thanking me and all for the lovely time. The next week she is moving into his house, having told him (this comes out later in an email from J.) that she is in physical danger, actually in fear of her life from her ex. So J. goes over there, waits until the coast is clear, and takes her and all her belongings over to his house. She must have been packing her things all week before she made the call for ‘help’.
I know for a fact that her ex. would not have hurt her. They had been together for 20 years. I knew him for all that time too, and he was not a violent man. Moody and depressed at times, and a compulsive hoarder as well, but not violent. I know she hadn’t been happy with him for a few years. He was surprised when I reminded him that he was once the man sitting outside, waiting to rescue the fair maiden, while her husband’s back was turned. He didn’t know that had been the case – he simply thought they had agreed to break up. That was a lie from L. as well.
The only opportunity she got to get a break from her ex. was when she came away with me for holidays. She had been ‘scouting around’ for a possible replacement at a rally we had attended together earlier in the year. This came out later when a couple of the single men there had said she had been sounding them out, asking what they did for a living, whether they had their own house, stuff like that.
It’s awful to think that she has deceived so many people. Has broken so many hearts, and all for her own selfish ends.
..sorry about this post being in blue, cant seem to fix it! 🙂
It’s not good seeing one parent “over loving” and the other “not wanting to love at all”.
…But is that simply the way you ‘perceived’ things to be with your parents, or they way they actually were, Mia? when we are children, we make up our own minds about how people are and why they behave like they do. And that is not necessarily the reality of the situation, but simply how we saw it as a child, through our child’s eyes.
I often wished my parents would separate, as, through my eyes, they didn’t seem to get on at all. The conclusion that I came to was that my mother was ‘trapped’ into a marriage with a useless, hopeless man, who used her as a servant. that was around the age of seven, I think. I used to think to myself later, in my teens, ‘for goodness sake, why don’t you stand up for yourself!’ in regards to my mother. Both of my parents are essentially selfish people though, so there were bound to be arguments over who was right or wrong, and who was going to win the arguments. And by waiting on my father hand and foot, she actually made him dependent on her. It could have been a method of control in itself.
My parents are still together, so despite the fact that my mother continually gives out the message that ‘all men are useless’ she is still with her useless one! Both myself and my sister grew up, left home, started our own families… etc. My parents bought an RV and went traveling the continent. They didn’t get divorced the moment there were no children around. So the only conclusion I can come to is, that is the way they ‘get on’ with each other, that they like the constant arguments, and that is their way of getting along. That they both love each other is obvious when one or the other of them is ill.
What I’m trying to say essentially is, that the way we might see it through the eyes of a child, is not necessarily the truth of it, it’s the way a child’s mind tries to make sense of it.
I feel bad about how you had to look after your father when your parents divorced. You had to assume the role of being his mother/carer and take the place of your own mother with him at a very young age, with a father who acted like a child. Like Anita has said, it’s like you were yourself married to your father and even though this experience happened a long time ago, you are still carrying that experience of that man with you into you present life. It’s understandable that you are wary of or don’t trust men much, based on how you were treated by your father.
ETA: I also think, like Anita has said, that you need someone to talk this through with. A competent and qualified counsellor or phsychologist who can work with you on this aspect of your past… It’s a lot to work through all on your own.
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