A Lost Puppy and a Letter From a Sociopath

I was rather stressed yesterday afternoon due to a letter from my sociopathic mother (I'll talk more about that later in the post), and I guess the stress was making me want to binge on food (maybe getting involved with OA, should be in my future, who knows....), I had stopped by a local pizzeria that I hadn't been been to in a while, but they were closed. So, I changed plans, and decided to go to a fast food place just off of a local highway.

I cut through some nearby neighborhoods to get to that highway quite often, and as I'm driving, I noticed that traffic on my side of the road on this busy street running through the neighborhoods is coming to a stop, and I don't know why.

A white pit bull pup, who looked a lot like the dog pictured at left here, is going up in front of vehicles, getting them to stop, and then eagerly running to their driver's side door, as though he expects them to let him in and take him for a ride. He's about 60 pounds, probably 7-10 months old, and seems like a very happy dog.

This didn't sit well with me, it was after 3 pm, and so I knew Granite City's Animal Control department would be out of their offices, and not running any trucks either, and I knew if I called the police department dispatcher, and this normally happy dog has an aversion to uniforms (like many dogs do), they wouldn't hesitate to shoot him, our police department is notorious for being trigger happy with large dogs, especially pit bulls.

I start driving through the neighborhoods on both sides of this road, looking for him, asking people walking down the streets if they had seen him, some had, and they were directing me as to where they last saw him. I kept searching, driving up and down the blocks, seeing school buses stop and let children out (I especially looked for him when I saw the buses, because a happy dog like him would probably enjoy children).

All my searching come to nothing, though. I thought I had spotted him at one point, but it was an English Boxer (Boxer/British Bulldog hybrid) safely contained in someone's yard.

I had hoped that either he found his way home or that someone with good intentions had picked him up. I was hoping to convince him to come into the car (which probably would have been easy to do), and turn him over to a no kill shelter in the morning, find out if they could help to find his owner.

He seemed well taken care of, even his bright white coat was very clean. I didn't know why I was so concerned about this poor lost dog. I have always understood dogs better than people, and I guess with everything that has been overturned in my life lately, I understand where this lost pup was coming from.

At times, I've been feeling lost, uprooted from everything I've known, I only have one family member, my sister, that I'm still in contact with, I've had to separate myself from my former church, and the people associated with it.

What frustrated me the most about trying to resign my membership Monday, was that they apparently didn't care enough to contact me after I was gone for a month (and I had been there for 12 years, missing Sunday morning services was highly out of character for me), but then they try to use highly emotionally manipulative tactics to get me back into the church, and to bring my parents back into my life.

"Pastor Jones" even had the nerve to trot out the old "honor your father and mother" line. Fundamentalist/evangelical Christians are big fans of that line, but what I have noticed is that they neglect another important line from that passage:

Ephesians 6 (multiple translations):

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Essentially, don't unnecessarily provoke or harass them. Don't be a bully, essentially, be firm, but loving.

The fact that they ignore that line from the very same passage really goes to show you where their focus is, and what they truly think of their children. I had been thinking about this, and how the Bible is interpreted/viewed by fundamentalists when I was talking on the phone to the minister of the Unitarian church I am in about the letter I received my mother that day, and how the old church had treated me Monday.

I had been slowly returning tools that my father had left behind, and there were a few things I forgot I still had around the house and the garage. I checked my mail yesterday, and I saw a large envelope with my father's name and address on it. I didn't want to open it, but I did. There were some documents of mine in there, including copies of my birth certificate, house title, and some mail mistakenly directed to their house.

Included in the package was a harassing note from her, demanding some of the tools back that I hadn't gotten around yet to bringing back (I had been dropping them off early in the morning before work when they wouldn't be awake), and also demanding that I send her more money each month than what I had already been paying her for helping to rebuild the house. She wrote "you agreed to $400 a month!".

First of all, an agreement under threat of force (which so long as she was in my life, I could have faced violence for not agreeing with her, remember, this is the same woman that four years ago, barricaded me in her house, and just nearly a month ago, tried to break into my house, and did nothing as my father nearly punched me in front of a cop (even though he would have listened to her is she told him to stand down)

Any agreement made while I was under her power was more akin to extortion than a voluntary agreement....

Anyway, after the infamous confrontation several weeks ago, I had considered not even paying anything back at all, but somehow, I didn't feel that would be honorable, so I paid $75 every two weeks, between not paying out of pocket for a lot of materials on the house (on top of the $400 a month I was already paying, mind you), and no longer donating 10% of income to the old fundie church, I have been doing OK financially.

I was appalled at her arrogance. She's lucky I'm paying anything back at all, she could try to sue me if she wanted, but it wouldn't hold up in court, there was no formal/legal agreement in place, and she should be grateful that I didn't file a restraining order against her, no less file criminal charges. She could have spent Christmas in a jail cell! I'm really starting to regret not going forward with the criminal charges and the restraining order, and it's made me both angry and exhausted, the events of this past week. I'm not giving her any more than the $75 a paycheck I'm already giving her, and if she wants to try to take retaliation over that, bring it on....