Something to Think About....

Today's prompt is "Something you know a lot about" .....

.... and I thought...
..........  and thought.......
...................... and thought.......

and seriously, not one thing is coming to me. But this did...

I mean there are a lot of things I know about.....  not I always feel that learning more is always an option...  you can never know it ALL ...

Yes, I get that it says "a lot" and not "all" but I know just enough to know enough to be a sarcastic smart-ass who likes to be right.

And it suddenly came to me tonight that .... the annoying thing about my needing to be right all (most) the time ...  stems from my first marriage.

I am so freaking annoyed with the fact that my first marriage consisted of a lot of gaslighting.  The term hasn't really been "popular" until recently, at least I hadn't heard it.

Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, hoping to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the target and delegitimize the target's belief.

Instances may range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim. The term owes its origin to a 1938 play Gas Light and its 1944 film adaptation. The term has been used in clinical and research literature,^[3][4] as well as in political commentary.

So in my first marriage my ex would do a lot of shit to control me emotionally .... I never saw it.  I thought my marriage was a happy.  I thought we had a good solid relationship....  we rarely argued ...

................. because I was afraid of him and didn't even realize it.  There was a history of him screaming at me (yelling at me) and it was to the point where I would curl up into a ball on the floor.  I distinctly remember ... when Cal was about 3 years old.... he was in preschool, and my ex was yelling at me about him cheating on me.  I curled up in a ball on the floor, crying, sobbing, with him screaming at me, saying the same crap over and over.... I was heartbroken and done.

Of course now, I realize - and believe he never did cheat on me.  But he told me he did.  He knew that I took marriage seriously ...  I would say, back then, that I had become a teenage mom and I wasn't going to be another statistic and get a divorce too.

But it's like, why?  Why would you do that?

We met - through a friend of mine (a REALLY good friend.)  At first she tried to fix us up, but something changed and once I kinda started getting interested in him - she hated him.  She literally started beating him up with a broom one day.

We went on our first date....  movie, food, and I don't even remember what movie it was.  I remember the movie my best friend (at the time), her boyfriend, and his best friend and I went to when my best friend's boyfriend's best friend kissed me.... and we started dating a few months later.  I remember that.  But I don't remember what movie the asshat and I went to....

I always thought I would be the one out of all my friends who never got married and would probably have kids by several different baby daddies if I had kids at all.  I never thought anyone would want to marry me or be with me.  Always seemed that I'd get in these situations with guys where they had a girlfriend that they'd tell me they broke up with and didn't ...  and I was there for the "side piece" ...

So when we ended our first date, I went to kiss his cheek and was thinking that I am not going to go on another date with him.  I was 18 ... 

But he turned his face as I was going to kiss his cheek and the cheek kiss ended up on his lips.  I said goodnight and basically ran away.

Again, not planning on going out with him again.  But he was persistent - and to my 18 year old mind, I thought he just must have liked me a lot.  He kept showing up at my apartment.  Just kept showing up.

I realize now - it wasn't him being persistent, it was him stalking me and he would do this behavior many times while married, even to recently....

Hindsight is 20/20 ... right?

But then I'm put in the situation where the kid I called my son ... the adopted son... he was gaslighting the woman he "loved" ...and I didn't see it  I didn't see it until after I was away from my ex, and my eyes weren't wide open with the kid until he was out from under our roof.

And then, it was like..... I don't know what to do.  I had tried to talk to Shi about some of the red flags I did see, and she'd just go tell him what I said.  So I just stopped.  I would certainly talk to him about what I was seeing anyway - but at the time, all she could see was him. 

I was pretty scared that I would lose my grandbabies if I pushed things. 

I mean, I love them all - including the kid, but he was using his lies to put himself into the the family "hero" and none of it was true.  That became clear when the third place we lived, and they were over - yet again, someone tried to break in - in the middle of the night.  How is it that at the first apartment we were in with them, someone tried to walk into our place in the middle of the night?  And then again at the house, with someone "casing" the place.  And then at Nana's he said that someone he was trying to get out of Shila's life tried breaking in, when he could use it against her in court.

::: shakes head :::

It feels like ... I failed.