Severe Weather

Earlier, I said that one of the weights off of my shoulder is that I feel that I no longer have to plan for special events six months in advance in order to keep them for my little family. (Hubbie and me only, as we never chose to try to have children)

Another weight off of my shoulders, I don't have to include "what about MIL" in my disaster plan.

I don't mean the disaster of MIL herself, but the weather emergency plan. We live on the East Coast which means Hurricanes. Whenever getting our "kits" together and making plans for "what if", I also had to plan for/against her for my "emergency preparedness" routine. We live about 100 miles inland. JB was about 30 miles inland. The biggest damage is usually closer to the coast than JB unless it's a high category when it hits. (Usually confined to the immediate coastal area.) We were actually hit worse than she was in the time we lived here. One pretty bad one hit the coast South of her but the eye made a straight line from the coast to where we live. She just had a lot of rain, but we had trees down all over town, were on emergency power for a week, etc.

She hasn't had one that bad since before I knew her. Lots of people had trees on houses, we were lucky. Our cul-de-sac was blocked so we couldn't get out until the men cut up and move the tree, and we had water get into our basement, but no trees on the house.

We do have a generator. We had one when it was a geeky thing to have one -- before they were popular. I knew that if anything ever happened at JB's house and not at our house, hubbie would be trying to get that generator to them, even though he says that it's too difficult to get back out of the place where we have it. He'd find a way for them. For a long time, was often looking at generators and wanting to get a second one -- in case ours breaks when we need it he claimed. Yea, right! He was looking at smaller ones. We all know that it was so that if something happened, he'd have one to carry to his parents house to use. I told him no, he didn't need it and he never got a second one. Now, (I think I may test the waters and see if he still wants a second one?)

Whenever a hurricane was approaching Hubbie was worrying about her as much as us! It got much worse after evil FIL passed. When Isabel was approaching the east coast and we did not know where it would hit and thought it would be a bad one, he wanted to go get her and bring her to our house. This happened a few months after JB's evil co-hort, my FIL died. When hubbie said he was thinking about going to go get her and bring her back to our house, I told him that I supposed I could find another place to stay. He said "why can't she come stay here for a few days?" I said "she can, but I won't be here." I don't know if he came up with this idea on his own or if it was prompted by her "poor widow me" game. (It's really 50/50!)

He made the right decision. But it did drive me to drinking the next night. He was out that night at a class or meeting or something. I drink very little -- some champagne on New Years Eve and maybe one or two more drinks during the year, but more than half a drink more during the year is a heavy drinking year for me. If I do have a drink, it's usually wine or a mixed drink, almost never beer. That night, I had TWO BEERS.

When Isabel did hit land, she hit hard, but not in either of our areas. JB just got some rain, if that. It only affected me because I had a business trip to Washington DC (Rockville Maryland, actually) the next week and they were hit almost as hard as we got hit by the one I mentioned getting us earlier earlier.

Any other reasons, do you ask, besides the obvious, did I not want her to come stay for "a few days"? I had the fear that the few days would be the rest of her life.

Two side effects of this. First, whenever it comes time to get our emergency plans together, I am checking out what hotels might be available, (though I have a friend I can probably stay with).

The second side effect of this is that I realized during the approach of the storm how little I really care about my HOUSE. It's an OK house, I'll probably live here the rest of my life, but I'm not so attached to it that I cannot part with it and be happy somewhere else. And unlike hubbie, I at the time, had enough money squirreled away that I could have bought another house. I found myself thinking -- if they want it let them have the damn house, but it will be empty. The two of them can enjoy it together. Most of the furnishings are ones bought from my salary while all of his salary was spent on keeping his family together. Some others were hand-me downs/family pieces. What he had when we got married he left in his single-wide which he gave to his Father to rent out.

I even found myself making an exit plan, thinking about what kind of house I wanted if I had to live by myself, etc. It was the second closest that I ever came to thinking about divorce. All of this was the day after he said something about going to get her.

So, when forced to make a choice, he did choose me. Maybe I should have forced him more often?

As I have said before, Thank God Its Over. All of those agonizing thoughts that I had to go through mostly on my own.

Now, I don't have to include "what about MIL" in my disaster plan. How to get my stuff out of the house and where to go if she comes here. She won't be coming here.

To repeat myself from previous posts, I'm so glad it's over. The weight of the world is gone from my shoulders.

Original Phone Games

It seems that somehow I deleted the original phone game post, so I'll rewrite that story today.


One evening when hubbie and I were arguing over the evil JB and even more evil FIL (who he still does not realize were evil), he accused me of pretending that I didn't hear them when they call. I just accused him of lying. He said, you have answered the phone and said "hello" a few times then hung up. I've called them later the same evening and they would say "Oh, I you got your phone fixed.... we called earlier and your wife couldn't hear us."

Then I started thinking about it. Maybe it wasn't him lying, it was the ILs lying. Sometimes I would get dinner time phone calls where whoever was on the other end didn't say anything. I didn't think too much of it. It did not happen very often. Tape-delayed telemarketer, kid with wrong number? We didn't have caller id so I really didn't know. It was not often enough to get paranoid about it or connect it.

After that whenever the phone would ring and nobody would say anything, I'd treat it as if it was the ILs on the other end doing just that. If hubbie was around, I'd hand him the phone and say "whoever it is won't say anything." If he wasn't around, when he got home, I would say "call your parents." He'd say "why, did they call." I'd say "somebody called, but whoever it was didn't say anything." Funny thing is I think he did start believing me because he did not argue.

Finally a few months later, I got one of those phone calls about 5:30 pm. When hubbie got home, again I told him to call home, that whoever was there didn't say anything. About an hour later, the ILs call (again) to tell hubbie that niece had her baby. I knew that he was talking to them, so I was in the next room yelling at the top of my lunghs "mighty damn funny!!!" over an over again.

After that, he started exclusively communicating with them over the cell phone. The hangup calls at dinner time did slow down a whole lot (a whole lot being from 2 or 3 a month to 2 or 3 a year). There have been hangup calls at other times. I still got paranoid, but kept telling myself that I shouldn't.


The more recent ones were more like they were annoy me rather than tyring to get hold of him. They came at times that he was not going to be home.

But guess what, maybe I should have.
I have not had one hang-up call since before JB died!
And it's coming up on three months.
To quote myself all those years ago, "Mighty Damn Funny!"

Thoughts for Future Posts

I started this because I wanted to get all out. The following are some subjects that I will touch on.

• Going out to eat (in public - gasp!)
  
• Them visiting my home


• Disrespect of plans that we already had
  
• Condition of their kitchen (On Other blog)



• Setups
• Medical Crying Wolf
• Her total envy of me
  
• Seven deadly sins
• Mis-Treatment of niece-in-law (she obviously hates both women who married into the family)
  
• Their blatant and unashamed racism - they are proud to be racist
  
• Them attending a KKK meeting (on other blog)
  
• Using racial slurs against their own biracial great grandchildren (and they got the race wrong on top of it)
  
• "Robbing" my Hubbie to pay my SIL
• Lifestyles after I lost my job in the 1990s - theirs and ours
  
• A couple positives
• Family reunions


• Late night phone calls


• What it was like attending the funeral



• What it was like when she was sick
• JB flipping me the bird (on other blog)
  
• JB making sideways comments about other people which were really comments about me.

The Gifts they have given

These are from JB and her hubbie.

For our wedding:
A cordless iron and 2 folding chairs.
Not nice ones, just ordinary ones.
The cordless iron was the iron itself. You sit it in a base to heat up, then use it then put it back in the base and wait for it to get hot again. (We got both parts, point is, it was AC operated, not battery operated.)

Other times:

A weight watcher's cookbook. At a time when I was about 130 lbs and MIL was about 300 lbs.

Used Tupperware

Items retrieved from her Mother's attic after her Mother died. (This is what she gave everybody, and bragged about it.)

A block of wood that had been painted and had various dollar-store figures superglued to it. There was no scene created, it was pretty random. This is what FIL gave everybody two years in a row (not two years ago, as I posted, he was already underground 2 years ago) (pictures)

A hollowed-out tree stump that had been painted gray with a plant pot in it with some sort of strange vine.

A mail box (really!)

More used Tupperware

Potholders

A photo mug of hubbie's adult niece.

A cookbook from a fundraiser for drug abuse prevention. The strange thing about this cookbook is that the first section was beverages and had quite a few of the alcoholic kind in it.

Flashlights

More About My Feelings About JBs Death -- FREEDOM

I said earlier that I was not sad. But I was not happy either. I was sad for hubbie.

What I feel is a weight off of my shoulders. Relief. Relaxed. The afternoon after having had a nightmare the night before. Like I am breathing fresh air. It's not that I am happy over her death. It's that I now feel free, hence the name of the blog. I am Free of JB, but even more, I am free.

The whole nightmare of the last 23 years seems like just that, a nightmare that I woke up from a little while ago. The whole ordeal of JB seems like something in the distant past.

I feel like my married life is about to start. So many things, that I will discuss in a new post, can be different now. Easier. The gist of it is that I can be more relaxed. I don't have to be sure to make plans ahead of time if I want to get particular dates ahead of MIL getting dates. Before, if I wanted to have July 4, Easter, etc. with hubbie, I had to make plans far ahead of time. Now I am free to take things as they come, free to wait until the last minute to plan, and free to change plans at the last minute.

I feel free to not have to have locks on the closet doors to keep the clan out of what's private when hubbie is hospitalized in case JB and the clan come to my house due to his condition.

75% of the fights hubbie and I have ever had have been over his parents. Now we are free to have our married life on our own -- to succeed and fail at on our own, without the outside inteference.

Haunted House

If you look at pictures of haunted houses, they are generally in disrepair.

I don't think MIL's old house is haunted, but who knows. Really, I would think that MIL's and FIL's spirits would be too lazy to come back and haunt someone.

When I approached MIL's house after she died, I had not been there for 5 years.

Here is what I saw before I entered.

Windows out upstairs -- or maybe you would just call them redneck windows. Formerly clear (but now cloudy) plastic and duct tape upstairs. Many of the existing glass windows are cracked.

Siding in bad shape. Moldy and some of it falling off.

Cinder block steps to one door chipped

Side porch replaced with rickety deck which has a ramp instead of steps. It isn't exactly a handicapped ramp, too steep and not strong enough.

Sliding glass door removed. Replaced with plywood filler with a regular door in it.

Inside:
A shower had been installed in the kitchen. The only privacy for that shower is a shower curtain.

The orange textured carpets had not been cleaned in the 23 years I have been visiting. They were already worn out when I started visiting.

I am told that all of the fixtures were torn out of the upstairs bathroom to fix a plumbing leak and never replaced.

The house was build stupid too. The ceilings are lower than normal. The stairs are bad at the bottom and the top and the steps themselves. At the bottom they deadend to a blank wall with only a couple feet of clearance in front and none to the left. The steps are a little shorter than normal steps so it feels strange going up them. And the top step is even shorter. And of course, the rail is rickety.

The house does not have central heat or AC. There is not any clearance to add duct work -- esp with the low ceilings. An AC window unit was added to one room. To prevent blocking a window, a hole was cut in the side of the house. The hole is bigger than the unit, so the gap was filled in with the plasticy-type spray insulation.

The downstairs is old worn out paneling.

Sister in law is thinking of selling her house and fixing up this house to live in. Hubbie says it's better than his nieces home as well. How bad can their homes be, considering the condition of this one. Frankly, I have a hard time believing that the land that it sits on is worth as much as it would cost to bulldoze the place.

But the point of this blog post is that even though there are not any ghosts hanging around the house, from the outside it can appear to be like a haunted house. Of course, if her broom was still parked in the driveway, it would help the appearance of that!

Emotions, or lack Thereof

JB, the Evil MIL died in early February, which is in my original post. She contributed to the 23 years of my life before that being total hell.

I am normally a very emotional person. I get caught up in the emotion of things, even if I don't share the actual emotion. This includes things like movies and TV shows. I can see a story on TV about someone losing a loved one and I am a mess of tears.

In the months before MIL passed, I experienced the deaths of several people who were not people who were close to me. And I had a hard time not boo-hooing my eyes out.

Then MIL passes. A moment that I had both awaited and dreaded for several years.

I feared my emotional response to it. I feared that if I cried, it would look bad as everyone would find it to be crocodile tears. They would not be tears for the loss of MIL, just tears of being caught up in the moment.

I also feared the opposite response. That I would have to fight to mark the smirk off of my face.

Evil MIL JB has caused me in many ways to not be myself. This was another. When she died, nothing. I did not involuntarily cry or laugh either one. I did experience some emotion when she was sick. Hubbie called me and told me her symptoms before leaving for her bedside. I just knew that this was it. They had to put her on life support after he got there. At that time, I was a bit giddy. But when the time of death, and the festivities afterwards, I was going through the emotions.

It would also not be in my nature to wish somebody dead. But in counseling, I did realize that I knew that the problems would not end until after they were both dead -- for a while.

I did stare at the coffin during the funeral, with the thought in my head, "This is what I have been waiting for. She is actually in there."

Another Phone Game

I just posted about MIL and/or FIL hanging up on me when I answered the phone.

*NOTE: That post disappeared, but I reposted the story on March 30*

I remember one time about 20 years ago having a strange conversation with a secretary at Hubbie's office. This was before voice mail when the secretary answered the phone and gave you a message slip when you did not answer. Hubbie was not in his office very much. He did have a pager that you could call when he was not in his office due to the nature of his work.

I called hubbie's office one day and the secretary picked up. When she asked if she could take a message, I politely declined and said that I would page him. She answered "why didn't you just hang up on me like you usually do?" I don't remember how I responded, but I found it strange.

Now reflecting back on the ILs hanging up when they called the house and hubbie not answering, can we guess why the secretary was hung up on a lot?

Another thing that happened was when hubbie had the pager, he'd get a lot of calls on the pager that were invalid. I don't remember exactly, I believe that they had a bunch of jibberish instead of a valid phone number. Want to guess who made those calls?

No More Telephone Games

This story goes across many years.

Hubbie knows that I don't like the ILs. The thing of that is, he accused me of acting on it when I didn't. He was caught between believing me and believing them.

One of the things that happened was a "telephone game". I did not know this was happening for quite a while.

They always called at dinner time. When, I was closest to the phone so I answered. When he was closest to the phone he answered. As we know, this is a time for many phone calls

Sometimes I would answer the phone and get a hangup call. This only happened every week or two, so I thought very little about it. Just assumed it was a tape that had not yet kicked in or a youngster or other rude person who had the wrong number.

Then during a fight about the IL's, Hubbie accused me of pretending that I didn't hear anybody on the phone whenever they called. At this point I had not added things up yet, I just accused him of lying because I really thought he was making it up. He went on to say, "I have been right in the room with you when you said "hello, hello", acted like you didn't hear anybody. Then my parents would call later in the evening and say "Oh, I see you got your phone fixed." Again, I just accused him of lying.

A few minutes later it occurred to me that the hangup calls must have been them. They hung up when they heard my voice (actually, they stayed on the line -- I did not get dial tones) then they said that I had done that to them.

I knew that telling hubbie what I figured out would do not good, so new stragegy.

Everytime I got a hangup/nobody saying anything call:
if he was home, I'd hand him the phone and say "whoever it is won't say anytying to me."
if he was not home, as soon as he got home I'd say "Call your Mother." He'd ask if she called. I'd say "somebody called and did not say anything." In neither of these cases, did he argue with me. I think maybe he figured it out.

Whenever I did *69, I got a message that they could not trace the call. (They were long distance...)

The next pivitol incident in this chain was the day his niece had a baby -- their great-grandchild. I believe it was their fourth? But this niece was their favorite grandchild. One afternoon, the phone rang at a time that he might have been home but he was working late. I think it rang multiple times that afternoon, I would not testify to being sure to that either way. Anyway, one time or multiple times, the caller said anything, so I told Hubbie when he got home to call his parents. When he asked why, I said because the phone had been ringing with nobody there. A few minutes later the phone rang and he was closest so he answered. I could tell he was talking to his parents. So I started screaming at the top of my lungs "Mighty Damn Funny, Mighty Damn Funny", something he often would say about things that he accused me of doing in relation to them. When he got off the phone, he told me about the baby. He told me what time the baby was born, which was before the first phone call, and he also said that they had been at the hospital at some time and had just gotten home. The "time" he gave of course was before I was called.

But, I do believe that after that he believed me and not them, but he did not tell me that. That was the last time that they called the house to my knowledge. After that (except for one time that I'll blog about later), they only called his Cell.

I also quit getting dinner time hangup calls.

Coincidental?


I have been hung up on the phone since that happened, though. I still suspected that they may be behind it for some stupid immature reason or another. FIL died in 2003. MIL died 2 months ago.

Here is the strange thing. Not one hang-up call, even the less frequent ones I got after the niece giving birth since MIL died?

Coincidence?

The beginning, or The End, Which Is It?

OK, so she is gone. After all these years.

It has been over a month now. I expected to be happy. In truth, I felt no emotion at all.

The biggest emotion that I feel is when people tell me they are sorry. Especially when it's someone from church. I feel so hypocritical. I am fine. Life is going to get better. No reason to feel sorry for me.