Betrayal

Betrayal is one of the most difficult emotions to handle.

There are so few things in this life which prove trustworthy. Young people trust everyone and everything. It's a natural beginning.
Distrust and fear must be learned.
Sad people learn to distrust too many people and things. - This is the disease of middle age which brings so many to an unhappy old age. These people live their lives in fear. Too often they teach their children this fear too young.
When we finally find something we feel we can trust - and love - and that person or thing betrays us, it earns our distrust and teaches us fear.

Literature and the news are full of the stories of those who feel betrayed. Mothers destroying their children (e.g., Media from the Illiad) rather than allowing their father to see them; or filling their children with unreasonable fear.
Pained by a real or imagined betrayal, these parents betray the love and trust their children place in them. It rends the heart to see that the parents do not see that. Their excuse is that they are "protecting" the children from the other parent.
Too often the betrayal is only imagined; or nothing the other person could control (illness or accident) - but the vicious self-righteousness of the scorned or betrayed is never ending.
"The wrath of a woman scorned...", even is she is not.

There are other relationships in our lives which we must trust, such as the trust in law and government. Men who have experienced the prejudice of the courts and legal/social system feel betrayed.
Volumes can be written describing how such betrayal endangers the foundations of freedom in a nation. If the citizens cannot trust the government, then they will change the government sooner or later.

Australia betrayed me. I joined the ranks of tens of thousands of Australians - men, women, children and families - who were betrayed by Australia.
By allowing my ex to use the prejudice in the system to extort my home and possessions, slander me with my own suffering, then condemn me without incident or proof and even an attempt to find the truth, Australia betrays the faith and confidence of its citizens. Mine is just one small example amongst the ever-increasing many...

Despite the friends I made later, I could not forget Australia's betrayal. I will never again trust anything Australian. It speaks volumes to me that the close friends I made after leaving the relationship were with foreigners living in Australia, or Australians who wished to leave the country.
The eyes and feelings of the men I met who were also betrayed by their country show that they will never trust the legal system. Many have committed their lives to seeing the system changed because they still love their country, but cannot abide the sense of betrayal by an arrogated few.

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The Horrible Time

Two years ago, this was a horrible time.
In a few days, on the 12th, my ex would threaten to sue me for $20,000.
About the 14th of January, she had threatened to sue me for $100,000; but apparently even she and her attorney saw that was ludicrous. Realistically, all of that was what we had spent over 4 years together.
It was just her way of saying she resented my becoming ill. I got the message very clearly. I had for a long time. For more than two years, my ex had been increasingly abusive about the fact that I could hardly walk. Her need to abuse had destroyed the love and trust in our relationship.

She had spent weeks hiding in her room totaling every cent she could find a receipt for to come to that $100,000 figure.

She had long since abandoned the house, me, and her daughter in it. I suppose she thought that if she left her daughter alone with me there would be fights. There were none. The mother had tried for months to prove that I hated her daughter; but of course I didn't.
With the house free of her mother's unending insults and abuse, I saw no reason to blame the daughter for her mother's problems.
Despite the tensions, I made a point of being civil and polite to her daughter as she came and went. I went out of my way to make things as pleasant as possible in the household.

I'd even gone so far as to buy the daughter a birthday present. (Her birthday is in a few days.) Nothing overwhelming. Just something she would use and enjoy. Just something to make the point that there was no sense in perpetuating the atmosphere her mother had sewn in the house.
I placed the gifts quietly just inside the daughter's door, on a shelf, and made a point not to disturb anything else in the room. These were very tense and awkward times.

The mother made the point of making her threats just before Valentines Day, on the 12th.
She had only been an occasional visitor to the house for most of the previous two months. She stopped in to make her threats - really repeat the threats of her attorney - try to start an argument, then left usually unsatisfied because I had had enough of the senseless fighting.
Some of what she said was silly, some of it pure fantasy, but always with one purpose: to be as hurtful and insulting as the words and tone could be.

I spent these months in long panic attacks that lasted for days at a time. When I could find a moment or a place to relax, I collapsed into fitful, noisy sleep. I slept for days.

I sought people who could listen and understand, but there was no one. Neighbors became friends, then could only wonder at what sickness could drive one person to do this sort of thing to another. They came to the house with dinners, and invited me out to parties or their homes.
How do you explain what it is like - how exhausting it can be - to put on a relatively normal face, when your heart is at once ripped from your chest and exploding from it? I never found a good way. All I could do was pour out the abuse I had experienced for those long years.
The silliest part of it all is that I never abandoned hope that my ex would come to her senses, that she would appear with others and apologize. That never happened, of course.
She and her conspirators had set themselves on a course to take the house and all the possessions by lying to the courts.

It didn't matter that even she had admitted there were no grounds. It didn't matter that there was no evidence of any abuse on my part. In fact, there were not even complaints until she realized she could abuse the prejudices of the Australian courts.
In these months, between May and the next March, she and her family followed the advice of a lawyer.
No one was protected. No one needed protection. Nothing just, or fair, or decent was done. That was not their goal. Their goal was just to play a game for greed. Their plan was to abuse the Intervention Order process to dispossess me.

There is no place in the consciousness of Australian justice for a disabled man to be abused. The magistrates simply do not understand the words. The courts and all those who work with them do not understand the words.
A man, even an invalid, must always be the abuser in the warped mindset expressed by the idea of "err on the side of caution."

Every man learns that the world is not fair. He learns to accept its inequities. For everyone, I suppose, there is an inequity they cannot accept. For me, being treated like an animal because I was disabled was something I cannot accept. This sick minded treatment has become Australia to me.

Now, two years later, my mind will not let me forget that time. It sits in my head like an open scar. But the pain is improving. There was a time when just thinking about such things would make my eyes flow with tears and my body tremble. Now, there is just a deep abiding sadness within me - like a bad taste that will not go away.
Time heals all wounds, it's said.
I will be glad when the salve of time takes this one.
There are a few more horrible days to go.

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