Changed Locks and Violent Parents (Part 1) The Confrontation

I have noticed that in recent weeks, I have been neglecting the blog, and my fans on Google + and Twitter. There have been a lot of reasons for that, this week specifically. I had been spending a lot of time working on my house, including helping my dad install a water heater, which turned out to be an amazing disastrous project, though it was finished in the end (albeit with a lot of hassle and cost overruns due to several pipes breaking or leaking).

In fact, that incident in part, is what leads to this big announcement/disclosure:

I had to disown my parents this week, and get law enforcement involved in the process, because I had many reasons to be concerned for my life and safety. My mother tried to force her way into my home, and my father nearly assaulted me in front of a police officer.

Let me start from the beginning of what led up to this point.

I have discussed at length how abusive my mother has been, both now/in recent years, and when I was a child. If everyone in her life is willing to go along with all of her demands without questioning, without criticism, and act as though she owns them, that they are her property, she is fine, she can seem, at least on the surface, to be an OK mother.

If you don’t, however, she can become hostile, violent, or threaten to become violent, as I talked about in a major post about what happened when I tried to leave her home 4 years ago.

This argument, which led to this incident, had to do with my mom and dad trying to help me rebuild this house. It’s done in reality, a few things, it wouldn’t hurt to change, like that old water heater I had. I may take out a small mortgage on the house to get the air conditioner in working order or replace it if necessary, I don’t think getting extra window units is going to work very well, in recent years it has been getting up to 102 degrees at time in the St. Louis area.

My issue was not with what they were doing, but the how and the why of it. First of all, there was the major issue that since my mom was trying to help me, she felt even more like she owned me as a piece of property than at any point in life. Then, there was her complete lack of respect for my time and my health issues, the fatigue that I still deal with, despite being on medication (though it has helped greatly with the pain and fatigue).

Of course, however, she doesn't even believe that my depression exists, so I couldn’t expect any sense or consideration for her on that front. It had been rather normal for them to spend almost every day that I was off of work at my house, spending long hours there, sometimes from 9 am to 8 pm or later, even when it wasn’t necessary (I could understand why they did that this week, when the water heater was causing all those plumbing problems, that was an urgent situation).

 It was wearing me into the ground, as well as them. It was especially running me into the ground when she would do this on days before I had to start my workweek, or even force me to spend all evening after work going around, helping them, since I have to wake up at 3 am in the morning, and work a 12 hour shift most days.

I’ve talked before about my dad’s mental health issues, and about how obsessive and energetic he is, he will start on something and keep going until it’s finished, no matter how long it takes, or if he completely wears himself out in the process. I knew this was taking a toll on me, and on him, the long hours, so I had been making comments to this effect to him, since I knew she wouldn’t listen to me.

He ends up telling her, as I expected he would, and the response was so horribly out of proportion, it was beyond belief. She became as angry with me as if I had accused her of murder. She was insisting that I didn’t want to help them at all, and was protesting that they were asking me to help. She knew damn well, just as much as I did that this was a lie, and she was cussing me out, calling me an “ungrateful brat”, hoping it would work into guilting me, or scaring me into submission.

She never expected that it wouldn’t work, and that I would tell her that if she was going to act like this, then I want nothing from her from now on, no help on the house, and no financial help at all from her, period (I still owe her over $5,000 for the cost of supplies for rebuilding the house going far beyond what we expected it to go).

I told her I would return the tools that they had over at the house by the end of the week, and that would be it, we are done, you are not welcome at the house anymore. I hung up on her, because there’s no such thing as reasoning with her, I assumed something would happen, knowing her past history, so I had went out immediately after this and bought new locks for the house, since they had keys to the house, both for working on the house, and to help take care of “Happy Horse”, my 85 pound Black Lab/hound mix.

I didn’t expect what would happen next.

While I was in the middle of replacing the locks, she shows up. I knew nothing good would come of this, so I slammed the door shut, even though the lock was only half finished (breaking a screw that in the door in the process), and it turns out that it was a fortunate coincidence that this had happened, because the door would not open, because of this. I later had to take the door handle apart from the inside and start all over again just to finish the job, and to get the door open.

She was actually trying to turn the door knob and slamming herself against the door in a feeble attempt to get it open, and force her way inside the house, when she already knew that she was not allowed on my property at all, for any reason.

She was screaming at the door, demanding that I open it (which as it turned out, I couldn’t have done if I wanted to). I had enough, this was crossing the line of acceptable behavior by anyone’s measure, and was a threat to me and my safety, I wasn’t going to tolerate this, so I called the dispatch line for Granite City’s police department, and told them that a relative that I had banned from my home is trying to force their way into my front door (looking back at it now, I’m kind of baffled as to why I hadn’t called 911 instead).

The dispatcher told me that there would be an officer there immediately. I hung up, wondering if there was a way she could get inside, what I would do, certainly if someone, even a relative, breaks into your home, you have the right to defend yourself.

I kept hearing plenty of noise at the door several minutes after I had stopped talking to the dispatcher, so I called again, the dispatcher told me it was probably the officer knocking on the door, since he was already at the scene. I couldn’t get out the front door, so I went out the back door to the front yard. The officer wanted to know what was going on, and my mom did her best to put on her fake martyr act, repeating the lies she was stating earlier about me not wanting to help them at all on the house to the officer, and trying to act all pathetic, I’m just this poor, longsuffering mother, who can do no wrong.

She is one of the world’s greatest fans of the DARVO routine when cornered, and confronted with consequences of her abuse. When I wouldn’t back down, and tell the officer to leave, she kept harassing me, and keeping up the victim act, and then, apparently at her urging beforehand, or her implied consent my father stepped forward, and charged at me, and it was clear that his intent was to assault me right in front of the police officer. (She did nothing to stop him, or call him off, even though she has that level of control over him).

My Family and Mental Illiness (Part 7): The Garden of Eatin'

Sheldon's note: If you haven't read of this series up to this point yet, you should probably start reading from post 1 on until this post in order to understand the context of this post, and the events occurring in it.

As I have said in previous posts in this series, my dad's mental health was starting to improve, and in the last post, Social Security finally stepped in and helped us in a big way financially. All of this still didn't resolve the issue of his severe depression. He still didn't want to leave his room, no less go outside, nothing interested him at all, he felt like life was pointless. Mostly he was mourning the loss of all things he used to be able to do, work, drive, etc.

The loss of his job was especially hard, he had worked long hours at the company he worked for, and was there 25 years, it was a major part of his life, and no suddenly it's gone, and he had nothing do to take it's place, to give him a sense of having a reason to get up in the morning, which is important for someone with an  obsessive personality.

My mom couldn't figure out what to do, anti-depressants didn't work, they either left him more confused, or would cause drastic mood changes. One day, how she thought of this, I don't know, but she decided she wanted a vegetable garden. So, there we go, mostly by day when I was doing my ACE coursework, he would be out there digging the back yard up to plant a garden. I would join him in the evenings.