Goodbye message

I posted about my plans to not attend church on All Saint's Day as JB passed this year and I have conflicted feelings about it.

I realize now how I can use that time to start the end to the bitterness that I feel.

I have posted on a support board for a long time.

I used to visit the ILs regularly. I did NOT want to. A cutoff was not for me at the time. I thought I had to go with him in order to protect my interests. Both JB (evil MIL) and EJ (evil FIL) used DH. I felt like by going with him whenever he went, I first knew what was going on, and second, prevented some of the worst abuses. (Remember, what they wanted from him was his paycheck and for him to do any work that needed doing.)

That part of the saga ended on Halloween in 2002. The night before Halloween, Hubbie and I had a guest over for supper. But his parents called and he went off to take the call. Not in private, but in secret. I could tell from some of the side of the conversation that I was hearing that it was something serious and that he was going to come through for them. I asked him what was going on. He said "nothing". I knew he was lying. The content and context of the phone conversation was much more serious than his leaving table with a dinner guest.

So I came home from work early the next day and snooped through his office for info. I found that he had fed-ex'd something to them. (I later found out that it was a large check made out to a used car dealer.) But more than that, I found out that the ILs and Hubbie had been going to extraordinary measures to keep secrets from me. The nature of those extraordinary measures upset me so bad that I felt like I was living with a stranger, I was crying at work. I took a sick day to put my ducks in a row in case of a divorce. It was one of only two times I ever thought about divorce.

The power of having been on the support board led me to two things the first was that I realized a cut off is possible. For all of the bad, Halloween 2002 was also the first of my freedom days. I realized that since Hubbie and ILs were going so far undercover, that all of my painful journeys to the ILs were a waste of time, and therefore I was never going to see them again.

I cannot honor EJ for All Saint's Day. But the night before is All Hallow's Eve when we are supposed to chase the evil spirits away. I am going to use that night to chase away an evil spirit. Not that of MIL, but the spirit of my pain and anger and resentment. I am going to use that as a night to start chasing away all the negative emotions that I have bottled up in 20+ years that I knew her.

The other thing that I gained from the support board is I did go into counseling as well. I tried to take Hubbie, but that was another disaster I won't get into. But I found a good individual counselor after that experience who helped me immensely.

I know that there will still be rocky places in the road, such as Christmas, her birthday, and the "one year anniversary" and perhaps some after whenever SIL decides what to do with "the estate". (AKA haunted white elephant farm)