A Right to be Happy
In one of the last conversations I had with Ob, she told me, "I have a right to be happy, Paul.", as if it were an explanation for all she had done.
Around the House
After the massive DVT, in June 2002, -- It filled my right leg from hip to foot with one of the largest blood clots on record in Australia-- I spent 3 months painfully striving to walk.
For the first few weeks, crossing the lounge room brought tears to my eyes from pain. In time, I could walk around the small house; then a few times. After three months, I could walk around the house 10 times in both directions.
At the time, I felt I this short walk was a major accomplishment.
It had been a painful three months.
The electic bolts of pain from the DVT had put this pain in perspective. For a couple of days, my leg burned and bolted with pain. The blood clot had swollen the large vein to twice its normal size; and it ran right along the nerve. My whole leg was swollen and every vein had clotting.
I forced myself to stand, then walk, a little farther each day.
I used a simple measure to decide when I had gone far enough: my eyes watered. At that point, I made my way back to the couch or bed.
I did this ignoring the pain from my still-deteriorating hip. I just didn't have the energy to think about that pain.
Coming to walk ten times around the house, one way then the other, was something to celebrate, I thought.
One evening when Ob returned from work, I shared my sense of accomplishment and celebration.
She looked at me oddly, and snorted something about going over to her son's place for the evening.
I guess I should have known better.
Evening Coffee
Throughout this time, we continued to go out for coffee every evening. It was a wind down time for Ob. I learned after a while that this was time for her to talk about her work or her family, and not for me to talk about my pain or our issues in the house. If I brought up those topics, the coffee time ended quickly with sarcasm and ugly looks.
Being a man about it, I just accepted it. -- What a foolish thing to do...
Ob would see me struggle to walk to the car, to get in, and she could not miss the pain on my face when I walked to the cafe for coffee, but she never commented on it.
In some ways, I think that was good. I felt I was too engrossed in my own pain. Struggling against it filled my mind for hours each day. I was always glad to see Ob. I loved her. Just having her around made the day brighter for me.
And the time gave me a way to think of other things.
Taken for a Walk
After I found myself able to walk almost normally for short distances, I found as many ways as possible to keep my mind off the pain. My hip was increasingly painful as the final bits of cartilage disappeared.
I spent hours on the Net studying, and chatting. My studies have born fruit. I've learned a great deal about the Internet and computing.
A few times, Ob decided that she would take me for a walk.
We would go to the beach, and walk on the boardwalk. I used my walking stick. (Ob never returned it...) It could never be a friendly conversational walk on the beach. I was in too much pain. I had to stop every few yards to rest, letting the burning pain in my hip subside.
The second or third time, I told Ob to just go walk on the beach while I made my way along the boardwalk.
I was walking like an 80-year old. She didn't have a pace slow enough to just walk along with me.
I did many things to try to walk better. I gritted my teeth and walked up Oliver's Hill once with my walking stick. I shouldn't have. I paid for that bit of bravado for a few days afterward.
I have to admit now that I saw the looks of resentment on Ob's face sometimes. I refused to let myself read the words behind them. Now, those looks sit in my mind like stones. I don't know if it would have been worth the insults and belittling, the cold tones that would have followed for days, to have challenged Ob on those looks.
I'll never know, of course. The memories are not worth much now.
How to be Happy, I suppose
I had the surgery to resurface my hip in July 2004.
During March and April 2004, Ob repeatedly told me she had "found a way" to have me removed from the house, and to take over all the possessions in it.
Finally one evening, she produced a couple of pages from a concocted "Diary of Abuse." -- I still have them on write-only media. The two pages were dated from a year earlier, but included things that had happened only in the last couple of months.
She admitted and threatened that she was concocting these as "evidence".
They were amazing to read. Part of what was there were things that she and I should have talked about, person to person, in private. Maybe in those hundreds of evenings and coffee. Other parts were part truths about things that had happened, such as when I found a psychiatrist to go to for relationship counselling. In her own words, "Paul is desperate to heal the relationship."
What isn't said is that this was at least the 5th time I'd encouraged us to seek counselling. Or that the reason we never did was that she, not I, decided that it would cost too much -- and refused to go for that reason.
My response was that it would cost more to let the relationship disintegrate, in emotional and financial terms.
There is the old saying that a lie of omission is still a lie. For Ob, she had to leave out a lot. But what she left out portrayed her abusive nature very well.
Her final word on her threats were that it didn't matter if there were no grounds.
When she told me she had a right to be happy, her words stopped me cold. I couldn't believe that anything so selfish could come from anyone I had loved, in the light of what she had done. Yes, she had a right to resent my illness. I resented it myself. And to some degree, she had no one else to take out that resentment upon but me. I was willing to endure it. It's a fairly normal human reaction to take out your frustrations on the person closest to you.
But did she have the right to lie to her children and family about me?
And then to take those lies to the courts to force me out of my own home when I was still recuperating from major surgery?
In my opinion, No. In the opinions of Mr Hulls and Mr Ruddock, the courts, Frankston Legal Aid, the police and the local social system: Yes.
In Mr Ruddock's words, pursuing the illegaility such things are "not in the public interest."
Somewhere in here, you begin to wonder if, instead of human and civil rights, Australian law has a charter to define the "rights to be happy" in terms of what can be taken from the disabled and elderly.
Yes, I am frustrated and bitter about it all. It's a normal human reaction.
Around the House
After the massive DVT, in June 2002, -- It filled my right leg from hip to foot with one of the largest blood clots on record in Australia-- I spent 3 months painfully striving to walk.
For the first few weeks, crossing the lounge room brought tears to my eyes from pain. In time, I could walk around the small house; then a few times. After three months, I could walk around the house 10 times in both directions.
At the time, I felt I this short walk was a major accomplishment.
It had been a painful three months.
The electic bolts of pain from the DVT had put this pain in perspective. For a couple of days, my leg burned and bolted with pain. The blood clot had swollen the large vein to twice its normal size; and it ran right along the nerve. My whole leg was swollen and every vein had clotting.
I forced myself to stand, then walk, a little farther each day.
I used a simple measure to decide when I had gone far enough: my eyes watered. At that point, I made my way back to the couch or bed.
I did this ignoring the pain from my still-deteriorating hip. I just didn't have the energy to think about that pain.
Coming to walk ten times around the house, one way then the other, was something to celebrate, I thought.
One evening when Ob returned from work, I shared my sense of accomplishment and celebration.
She looked at me oddly, and snorted something about going over to her son's place for the evening.
I guess I should have known better.
Evening Coffee
Throughout this time, we continued to go out for coffee every evening. It was a wind down time for Ob. I learned after a while that this was time for her to talk about her work or her family, and not for me to talk about my pain or our issues in the house. If I brought up those topics, the coffee time ended quickly with sarcasm and ugly looks.
Being a man about it, I just accepted it. -- What a foolish thing to do...
Ob would see me struggle to walk to the car, to get in, and she could not miss the pain on my face when I walked to the cafe for coffee, but she never commented on it.
In some ways, I think that was good. I felt I was too engrossed in my own pain. Struggling against it filled my mind for hours each day. I was always glad to see Ob. I loved her. Just having her around made the day brighter for me.
And the time gave me a way to think of other things.
Taken for a Walk
After I found myself able to walk almost normally for short distances, I found as many ways as possible to keep my mind off the pain. My hip was increasingly painful as the final bits of cartilage disappeared.
I spent hours on the Net studying, and chatting. My studies have born fruit. I've learned a great deal about the Internet and computing.
A few times, Ob decided that she would take me for a walk.
We would go to the beach, and walk on the boardwalk. I used my walking stick. (Ob never returned it...) It could never be a friendly conversational walk on the beach. I was in too much pain. I had to stop every few yards to rest, letting the burning pain in my hip subside.
The second or third time, I told Ob to just go walk on the beach while I made my way along the boardwalk.
I was walking like an 80-year old. She didn't have a pace slow enough to just walk along with me.
I did many things to try to walk better. I gritted my teeth and walked up Oliver's Hill once with my walking stick. I shouldn't have. I paid for that bit of bravado for a few days afterward.
I have to admit now that I saw the looks of resentment on Ob's face sometimes. I refused to let myself read the words behind them. Now, those looks sit in my mind like stones. I don't know if it would have been worth the insults and belittling, the cold tones that would have followed for days, to have challenged Ob on those looks.
I'll never know, of course. The memories are not worth much now.
How to be Happy, I suppose
I had the surgery to resurface my hip in July 2004.
During March and April 2004, Ob repeatedly told me she had "found a way" to have me removed from the house, and to take over all the possessions in it.
Finally one evening, she produced a couple of pages from a concocted "Diary of Abuse." -- I still have them on write-only media. The two pages were dated from a year earlier, but included things that had happened only in the last couple of months.
She admitted and threatened that she was concocting these as "evidence".
They were amazing to read. Part of what was there were things that she and I should have talked about, person to person, in private. Maybe in those hundreds of evenings and coffee. Other parts were part truths about things that had happened, such as when I found a psychiatrist to go to for relationship counselling. In her own words, "Paul is desperate to heal the relationship."
What isn't said is that this was at least the 5th time I'd encouraged us to seek counselling. Or that the reason we never did was that she, not I, decided that it would cost too much -- and refused to go for that reason.
My response was that it would cost more to let the relationship disintegrate, in emotional and financial terms.
There is the old saying that a lie of omission is still a lie. For Ob, she had to leave out a lot. But what she left out portrayed her abusive nature very well.
Her final word on her threats were that it didn't matter if there were no grounds.
When she told me she had a right to be happy, her words stopped me cold. I couldn't believe that anything so selfish could come from anyone I had loved, in the light of what she had done. Yes, she had a right to resent my illness. I resented it myself. And to some degree, she had no one else to take out that resentment upon but me. I was willing to endure it. It's a fairly normal human reaction to take out your frustrations on the person closest to you.
But did she have the right to lie to her children and family about me?
And then to take those lies to the courts to force me out of my own home when I was still recuperating from major surgery?
In my opinion, No. In the opinions of Mr Hulls and Mr Ruddock, the courts, Frankston Legal Aid, the police and the local social system: Yes.
In Mr Ruddock's words, pursuing the illegaility such things are "not in the public interest."
Somewhere in here, you begin to wonder if, instead of human and civil rights, Australian law has a charter to define the "rights to be happy" in terms of what can be taken from the disabled and elderly.
Yes, I am frustrated and bitter about it all. It's a normal human reaction.
posted by Unknown at
3:15 PM
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2 Comments:
Funny thing was, I was Ob's best friend. I would drag myself up to accompany her on those evening talks, and she would tell me all the secrets about her, her family, her friends, her work.
I still know things about those people that I feel uncomfortable about discussing with anyone -- and probably never will.
Yet she never appreciated that what I was doing. She would see me struggling to stand and walk. She would even see that sometimes just sitting outside for a while was painful, and cut the talks short.
The only thing I didn't have the right to do was answer honestly or thoughtfully. She didn't care for my opinion or thoughts.
I learned to say what she wanted to hear or just keep quiet; more often, just look around and find some innocuous topic nearby.
In all things, it was the Ob Show.
By
Unknown, at 1:04 PM
Like many people, Ob was a control freak. She'd learned how to be less obvious and dramatic about it in public, but she would be crudely cruel about any transgressions in private.
She wanted to control my thoughts, my feelings, my reactions, and what I did. She would enforce her control of the finances and smallest decisions around the house with brutal sarcasm and coldness.
Someone asked me, "Weren't there some good times?", and it made me think a minute, trying to remember some time when I was just relaxed and happy around Ob.
The fact is, there were no such times.
Ob was always watchful, and ready to attack verbally or subtly, in all situations. We never laughed together because she would not laugh with me; and she would not laugh at me if I tried to be funny.
It made life around her tendencious, always.
The funny thing is, she said in her "Diary of Abuse" that she felt the same way around me. What she may never have realized is she created that tension, and maintained it.
Over time, the abuse and tense times got to me, -- more and more as I was exhausted from injury.
By
Unknown, at 1:10 PM
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