Rembering Laurie ~ Your Spirit Walks With Me

Three Sisters in Spirit

I imagined us three, “Spirit Sisters,” as we had once and forever declared ourselves, and our beloved young Rhia too, gathering together on top of Ash’s blue mountain and also, in Georgetown, drinking decadent hot beverages by the river.

I thought about our time together and what we would do.  I wasn’t sure.  We can never be sure of much when fibromyalgia is part of the equation.

A new pair of shoes seemed right for such a special occasion.  I was going to meet Ash and Laurie!

I thought perhaps Ash might not be well enough for traveling away from home, which influenced the shoes I bought.

I chose the shoes with both my spirit sisters in mind.

Strong and sturdy, with a hint of flair.

“I’m a city girl,” Laurie had written to us about where we should have our gathering.

Thinking of our city-loving sister in the midst of wooded and wild nature made me smile.  I suspected the same was true for our mountain-dwelling sister, Ash.

The shoes stayed in the box for at least a year.

Every time I wore the shoes, I thought of the day I would get to meet Ash and Laurie.  I took good care of my new shoes.

I can barely stand the truth, which is that our slumber party will never happen.

Laurie will never visit my blog again, although, there will always be a place here where her spirit lives.  She will never call me again, tenderly reaching out to me.

“Michelle,” she said, in the softest voice.

“This is your sister, Laurie.  I’m here for you sweetie.”

The sound of her voice now whispers in my mind.

A few months back, I started thinking more often of calling Laurie.  I was planning to tell her how much she meant to me, but I was too late.  Laurie became ill and didn’t recover.

Slumber Party Shoes 

 

Laurie was dear to me, and she loved me.  I loved her too.

I didn’t get to say goodbye.  I wanted to call her when she was in the hospital, but I couldn’t because she was sedated.  I wanted so much to communicate with her.

I admired Laurie.  She was smart, a good mother and a great writer.  I was proud to have her visit my blog and give me compliments.

Laurie wrote beautifully at Hibernationnow’s Blog.

Her last post was a Haiku titled, “Play.”  Below is taken from that post.

“Play life’s chances, free

ask questions, be bold, stunning

Roar, grin, like tiger.”

Laurie left us too soon.

Sweet Laurie ~ May You Rest in Peace

The Dogs I’ve Loved ~ Poochie

Poochie

Poochie was my first four-legged friend.  He was a small dog with sandy blonde hair.  I was three years-old when I knew and loved Poochie.

Memories of my third year are short snippets of time sketched in my mind.  Poochie curled up in a little ball, basking under the sun in our front yard is an image that never faded.  My love for him is a feeling I’ve never forgotten.

I was temporarily in a wheelchair from a childhood bone disease when Poochie was my dog.  I’ve always wondered if I was confined to the little chair when Poochie met his last day on earth.

I’ve always thought it rather odd that I remember anything at all about my third year, but it makes sense now that I’m an adult, considering all that happened and the way things were.

We had plenty of love in my family, but from what I understand, my third year was much like the rest of my childhood.  Our lives were chronically hardened with strife.   On occasion and unpredictably, fear from violent emotional explosions that led to all sorts of trouble visited our family, yet we were familiar with unfortunate circumstances and that each time could have ended much worse than it did.

I had a boyfriend when Poochie was my dog.  He was also three years-old.  We spent a fair amount of time sitting on my front porch steps together.  I remember the way I felt being around him.  I know I loved him.

According to my mother, the little boy and I had deep conversations about life.  “Lord, I couldn’t believe the things the two of you talked about.  I used to stand there at the door listening and just shake my head,” she says.

A child in our neighborhood had thrown a rock that hit my head and knocked me unconscious.  Afterward, even as my mother had made it clear to everyone that nobody would ever hit me with a rock again, my boyfriend and I didn’t play on the days when the child who had thrown the rock was outside.  

Upon reflection, the accident may explain memory problems I had for the best of my childhood and maybe to this day, but I was hit in the head again during fifth grade.  I had decided to play baseball, but the boys didn’t want girls on the team. 

“Easy Out!  Easy Out!,” the boys shouted enthusiastically.  The pitcher tried hitting my head with the ball every time I approached the batter’s box.   Finally, he succeeded, and I quit playing baseball.

The brain is amazing and so is the human spirit.  I later found ways to cope with what I thought was normal, like my less than good memory and, “the bad things,” my grandmother said I had seen.  “You were too young to see what you saw,” she would later tell me.

My third year was in the late sixties.  The place was in the heart of the North Carolina Blue Ridge mountains.  We were not poor by the standards of the day and perhaps we were Middle class.  The stories I’ve heard about medical treatments I endured during those years sound like we came from a time I thought was in history books before I entered this world, which reminds me of the way I met my first boyfriend.

He and I were born minutes apart, in the same hospital room, delivered by the same doctor, separated only by a thin hospital curtain, which the doctor had left open for the laboring hours preceding our births. 

“We talked the whole time we were in labor,” my mother tells me.  “The beds were side-by-side.  Nurses came in to prep us and that’s when the doctor pulled the curtain closed, but we still went on talking.”

The boy’s mother and mine were best friends.   I was due several weeks before her child was, but as it happened, we were born on the same night.  The boy came first.  His mother, lying in her hospital bed, told them to open the curtain again, which they did. 

“What’s wrong over there?”  she asked my mother.  “Why haven’t you had that baby yet?” 

Looking over at my mother, still in labor, the woman noticed that Mother was still wearing her teeth.  “Lord God!,” the woman shouted to the doctor.  “She can’t have that baby ’til she takes out her teeth!”

The doctor ordered my mother to take her teeth out.  “You were born just as soon as I took them out,” she tells me. 

“Why did you have your teeth in?” I asked my mother, many years later as she told me the story.

“Well, I can’t remember, but I guess I didn’t want that doctor seeing me without my teeth,” she said.  “He was a good-looking doctor.”

I realized I was born in pure vanity, but I come from a long line of women who expect good-looking doctors when they get to a certain age in life.  I recently noticed that my doctor is pretty cute.  I’ve seen him for years and have never once thought about his physical appearance.  I wonder if this means I’m getting to that certain age.  Alas.   I’ve truly regressed, if that’s possible in this piece of writing.

My sweet boyfriend wasn’t there the day when I was sitting on the porch steps and saw our neighbor back her car out of the driveway, running over Poochie in the process.  I wanted to help Poochie, but I couldn’t.  I don’t know if it was because I couldn’t walk or if the accident simply happened too fast. 

Later, my mother said the woman wanted to apologize and that she had made me cookies.  I wanted nothing to do with her cookies and doubt if I understood what an apology meant.  My dog was gone.  In my three year-old mind, I fully believed it was the woman’s fault for backing out of her driveway at a speed that I was sure had been too fast.  By the time she heard me screaming, it was too late to save Poochie.

Mother said my boyfriend and I sat on the steps and talked about what happened for days afterward.  “The two of y’all came up with the idea that you would go to her house and poke her eyeballs out like she had done to Poochie’s.”  Mother says I pointed two fingers to show her what I had in mind.

My family and I did go to the woman’s house.  Apparently, I behaved well, but I didn’t like her house any more than I liked her car.  From my point of view, both were way too big for one person.

I did not eat her cookies.  I was sad for a long time. 

For years, it hurt to remember what I had seen and I did remember.  I also missed Poochie in a terrible way.  I’m glad the images of the accident finally faded and that today, my memories only include him basking in the sunshine, and how it felt to love a dog.

The next dog that came into my life was a long funny looking Wiener dog.  I’ll tell you about him, and my life when he lived with us, in an upcoming post about, “The Dogs I’ve Loved.”

 

12/30/12 Post updated to allow ‘Likes’ 🙂

 

Our dear friend, Tiny

A man named Happy named Tiny.  I used to get their names confused all the time.  Happy was my son’s first roommate when my son was only a teenager and decided to live on his own.  He wanted to take our dog, Free, with him.  Of course, I said no.  

I lived twenty miles outside of town in the hills of the beautiful Blueridge mountains of North Carolina when my son left home.  I took Free to spend the night with him two, maybe three times.  Each time I had left her with him, I woke up around 2am hearing Free’s footsteps in the house, only to realize she wasn’t there.  I couldn’t stand the feeling, so I drove into town, knocked on my son’s door and demanded that Free come home with me.

My son was quite serious about her living with him, which I couldn’t believe, but the bigger surprise came when he called one night to tell me he had gone out and found himself a dog. 

“I got a Rottweiler,” he said.

My heart sank.  He was not ready for the responsibility and I was especially concerned about the breed.  Images passed through my mind that I never wanted to see realized.  Fortunately, they never came to pass.  I don’t know how much my prayers had to do with the way Tiny turned out, but I prayed every day about it.

“Please God,” I asked.  “Please don’t let Tiny be a really big dog.”  I remember saying this prayer many times, until Tiny was about a year old.  I knew then that he would never be the Rottweiler my son had expected.  Also as fortunate, is that my son loved the dog Tiny became.

You can scroll down to the end of this post to view Tiny’s photo gallery.

It turned out that the Basset Hound in Tiny is the predominate trait.  His little legs are somewhat bowed.  As a youngster, he always slept nearly upside down on the end of a bed or sofa , with all four legs in the air and his giant head falling toward the floor.  He hunts like a Basset Hound.  He plays like one.  And of course, he has those eyes!  He howled like a hound dog when he had a girlfriend, and he had several until he moved to the country.  He met Ruthie when he was five years old and she’s been his only girl ever since. 

Tiny recently had his eleventh birthday, which makes him the elder in our home.  He’s also the cutest member of my family.  His soft floppy hound-dog ears and big brown eyes melt most people’s heart at first sight.

As you can see, Tiny isn’t so tiny. 

My son was going to name him Wilbur, which would have fit his personality.  The vet once suggested “Hoover,” to honor the power of his large and terrific nose.

For most of Tiny’s life, even with his relatively short legs and cute features, his large head and a healthy dose of Rottweiler has caused men to walk backwards down my front porch steps.  They were repair men who worked for the landlord and didn’t know us.  “He won’t bite,” I told them through the open window by the door where Tiny’s big head was visible.  Most of the time the men left and never returned.

Off the top of my head, I can think of only three times that Tiny has jumped on people’s lap (each were men), after they sat down on my sofa.  He went straight for their throats to smell their necks, which caused me tremendous anxiety.  He learned to play like that in the mornings when he was a puppy.  Every morning he would ‘search’ for my son’s neck under the covers.  Boy those were the days.  I had forgotten about so much, until I started writing this blog post.  Tiny’s life is full of interesting stories.

Other than those few times when he jumped on those men, Tiny has been a sweetheart to every person he met.  He has been and is tremendously adored! 

Tiny hasn’t always lived with me.  For the first five and a half years of his life, he lived with my son, who Tiny remains loyal to in his heart, but he has always communicated with me.  In the most amazing ways, he has told me where he was when he needed help and where my son was when he was not well and for the most part, living on the streets.  He and Tiny both were young and resilient, thank God.

Sadly, Tiny was recently diagnosed with intestinal Lymphoma.  I’ve tried writing about it before now, but my heart hurts too much.  There are a few things in my life that I simply can’t write about. 

I’ve nursed him for several weeks.  My sweet seven year-old girl, Ruthie, has been a good nurse too, which is a big part of her nature.  She has always been a good little friend to Tiny and honestly, I fear the sadness she will feel when that day that I don’t want to think about inevitably comes. 

Alas.

I do think about it.  In fact, not many moments have passed since I found out that Tiny has cancer, that I haven’t been aware of this approaching time.

Over the course of several weeks, Tiny went from having foul-smelling gas to explosive vomiting and diarrhea, which meant an emergency veterinary visit.  After x-rays and an ultra sound, the vet and radiologist said his lymph glands were inflamed and the walls of his intestines are, “thickened.”  With this information, along with his symptoms, they concluded his diagnosis of intestinal cancer.

They said the diarrhea would never go away, but it did.  As I write, he is eating well, but he is taking a steroid, which I’m not sure is working out too well.  He is so hungry.  I can’t stand seeing him starve, so I’ve cut the night dosage in half. 

I don’t know how long the steroid will work.  The vet said maybe two months, and possibly three.

Note: A week or so later, after first starting this post, I realize that each time I come back to it, things have changed.  No day has been the same.  The steroid makes him too hungry.

For the most part, at least during the day, Tiny acts like most older dogs, but with less than his usual amount of energy.  He isn’t taking the bone or dog toys from Ruthie when she holds them in front of him, hoping as she always has, that he will chase her, catch her, finally taking whatever it is she teases him with.  He does enjoy chewing what he loves most, which is a tennis ball, but they don’t last long before he rips them apart.

I think I’ll have some Mom.

Tiny is a very loved dog.  He has given us many, many happy times.  He has saved my son’s life several times.  He has telepathically communicated with me when danger was impending and as a result, I was able to intervene just in time.  Tiny is a special dog indeed, and very special to me.  I call him my grand-boy.

In the process of diagnosing Tiny we discovered that he had a Tape worm.  I’m not sure what role this has played in his level of illness.  Part of me wishes (no, all of me wishes) that it was only the worm that made him so sick, and that he would be okay if I stopped the steroids.  I may indeed have to stop the steroid sooner than I had hoped or expected, but I do not think Tiny will be okay.  I can tell.  I’ve known for a while that something was wrong.

Tiny.  Our boy.  Our dear friend.  Ruthie’s mate.  My big guy who protects me.  My son’s loyal companion.  Tiny.  We Love You!

My name is Tiny!

I am Loved!

Tiny likes Yogurt!

Chillin in my chair

What? You want a profile picture?

Tiny, Chillin in his chair. That Boy always has liked sitting high.

Tiny and his friends

Kisses!

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Eight legs walkin’

Eight legs ‘a walkin’

Walkin’ round my home.

All just so,

I don’t walk alone.

Eight legs ‘a walkin’

Walkin’ round my home.

Oh, don’t you know?

I love you so!

My sweet little Ruthie,

You hold your head high,

Your spirit made strong,

Furry tail up,

wagging all the time!

Now that you know,

I love you so!

My sweet little Ruthie,

I remember you then.

Your head was down,

Furry tail drawn in.

Sweet little Ruthie,

I remember you then.

Jumping in my car,

Never looking back.

How did you know?

We would love each other so?

I know you were kissed,

From the angel I missed.

She waited ’til she knew,

I found you.

Every moment since,

You’ve celebrated your life.

Yes!

Hallelujah!!!

Your head is in the air,

high and mighty strong!

You are a big girl now!

So you be certain,

I am very proud!

Tiny…

He puts his large head,

so soft…

gently on my leg.

He knows where it hurts.

His big deep brown eyes,

gazing into mine.

Mine with fears,

loneliness and tears.

Oh, how I love YOU!

This is what Tiny tells.

He always knows when to tell,

Oh yes, he knows!

I’m amazed every time,

He lays his head next to mine.

He hears my heart call,

his little legs start walkin’

lovin’ is a dog’s law.

Tiny knows…

He knows when it’s time to tell.

Right when I was thinking,

It was too late for me,

Tiny comes closer.

Oh, can’t you see?

Oh, don’t you know?

We do love you so?

Yes, I say,

I can see!

I can surely see!

 

My sweet little Ruthie,

My dear boy Tiny,

I have not forgotten.

I hope you know,

I do love you so!

I don’t understand,

why took the two-legged left.

Oh no,

I don’t understand.

I cry and wonder why.

Why does it have to be this way?

Every silent day,

Every silent moment,

I wonder why.

I always end the silence,

Saying Yes,

I remember!

I remember that you’re here.

Yes,

I remember!

Eight legs ‘a walkin’

Walkin’ round my home

All just so,

I don’t have to walk alone.

I don’t know how to make it,

I don’t know what to do.

I only know,

I sure do love you.

I thank Lord Jesus.

I thank Great Spirit.

Praise Jah!

For the Dogs!

Thank You for the Dogs!!!

These dogs You have given me.

Love renews my spirit,

moving through my body,

healing my wounds.

These dogs,

they keep saying,

We are eight legs ‘a walkin’

Walkin’ round this home,

All just so,

You never walk alone.

 

Yes!

Hallelujah!!!

These are my blessings,

These eight legs ‘a walkin’

I always know,

I don’t have to walk this road alone.

In Memory of my sweet Free…

Perched on the wood,

Crow spoke.

You can’t walk this road alone.

Not anymore…

You can’t walk this road alone.

From Free,

Crow spoke.

Thank You Free!

Thank you for visiting Dogkisses’s blog.

Schizophrenia and Courage

If I could stand on a cloud above, and have our Almighty God ask me what I would like to do or be on Earth, I would say I’d like to be me.

I’d say could I please be the mother of that nice little boy who turned into a fine young man!

And if our Almighty God then said to me: if you choose to be that person, you will encounter a great many challenges, some of which you will simply not know how to handle other than to accept them, some of which will make you worry through years worth of sleepless nights, and some will give you pain– I would still want to be me.

I love someone who has the diagnosis and most of the symptoms of schizophrenia.

He is so much more than any diagnosis or symptoms he suffers.

childhood art

I just watched The Soloist. What a great movie.  Hollywood usually does not impress me with movies about schizophrenia but this movie did.  It doesn’t glamorize schizophrenia nor does it promote a treatment.  We get a realistic view of how the illness effects one man’s life.

Sometimes a brain takes in too much information at once — without a filter so that anything and everything are immediately noticed and perceived.

“Try to imagine not being able to filter external stimuli,” a friend of mine who is a psychiatric nurse told me.  “Every single thing; the birds, the leaf blowing in the wind, the cars, the people on that porch next door, the smell of the bagel shop, the ant on the ground, the shadow of a tree — everything coming at you as fast as the speed of light — you don’t have a filter allowing you to choose where you put your attention.”

I imagine this would be extremely difficult and challenging, like being on the front line in a war.

I read somewhere that, we cannot know what it is like to have schizophrenia, we can only know what it is like not to have it.

Many people with schizophrenia, as with the character in The Soloist, do not like taking anti-psychotic drugs.

Most places available to help people with schizophrenia require them to take these medications to receive the help.  We have club houses, residential living facilities and other programs to help people with this type of disease — but if the people who need these services do not take anti-psychotics, then they are considered to be, non-compliant, and lose out on most assistance available that might otherwise make a huge difference in the quality of their lives.

Schizophrenia is a heart breaking disease.  It takes so much away and brings things that nobody would want.  One doctor I talked to said it is, “arguably the worst disease a person can get.”   This is a large statement to make and a complex one.  It is also one I agree with.

These are my favorite lines from The Soloist:

“His mental state and his well being is as precarious now as it was the day we met.”

“Mental Health experts say that the simple act of being someone’s friend can change a person’s brain chemistry and improve his functioning in the world.”

“I can tell you by witnessing Mr. Ayers’ courage, his humility, his faith in the power of his art;   I’ve learned the dignity of being loyal to something you believe in…holding onto it,  and above all else of believing… without question… that it will carry you on.”

Talk about a story of courage!  Carrying on in the face of this condition we label schizophrenia must be one of the most challenging quests a person must face.

This post was originally published on October 25th.

Love or Abuse?

Image via Wikipedia

Ending an abusive relationship can be easier than dealing with the aftermath, which may include forgetting why you had to end it.

Abuse is abuse, but psychological abuse isn’t as easy to recognize as is a bruise or a cut to the flesh.

We’ve all heard the saying love hurts.  How much is it really supposed to hurt?  It shouldn’t hurt all the while you’re in a relationship –that’s for sure.

Love is an elusive subject.  I imagine love can have many meanings and different shapes but abuse is not love.

I loved a wonderful man, I thought.  I also loved the way I believed he loved me.

The man I loved was kind, compassionate, generous, funny, smart and told me every day he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me.

Unfortunately, I loved an illusion, an impostor.  I loved a character that was passionately and intelligently designed, especially for me.  I loved a man who I honestly believe has severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

The man I loved created a character for me, mostly through what I now realize were constant interrogations.  He would sit by my window with me in the mornings where I liked having coffee.  He asked me questions about my life twenty years earlier.  Over and over he asked the same questions.  He disguised his questioning as an interest in getting to know, “everything about me,” which he called love.

How he created the character is a long story.  It was continuously being created in every moment we spent together.

The first day we were sexually intimate he began asking me about fantasies.  Had I ever had this one or that one and if I said no, he would ask had I ever at least considered certain ones he had mentioned.   He also wanted to know about every relationship I’d ever had as if we were in our early twenties or even teenagers.  He was in his early sixties, almost twenty years my senior.

He wanted to know all about my childhood.  Basically, he wanted to know everything I liked, disliked, desired or had ever desired so that he could create my perfect mate. 

There are reasons good and intelligent people fall for abusive and pathological personalities.  We don’t fall in love with a cruel person.  It’s the opposite.  Sometimes cruel people seek kind people.  We fall for the kindness they pretend to have.  We fall for characteristics such as a great sense of humor, what looks like compassion, an acknowledgment, granted an ingenuine one, of our hard work in life and who doesn’t enjoy being charmed?

In my case, the man I loved was wonderful until the first time I expressed my personal feelings about something other than being grateful to have such a terrific man in my life.

He became a cruel, deceiving, lewd, sarcastic and possibly the most destructive, was that he became intensely revengeful.  The man felt rejected by me.  I would learn that this triggered what he called his, “childhood narcissistic injuries.”

He spent six months working harder than I could ever imagine a man trying, to gain my love, admiration and respect.   I finally fell for him, for sure, and this was the hardest part of ending the relationship.

When I finally told him that I trusted his love, I never again saw the man he had pretended to be.  It was as if the man I loved died and that’s exactly how it felt.

Instead of chocolate and roses, poetry books for lovers, and gifts he thought I would like, he began sending me emails clearly calculated in a way to leave me in the dark about what he was doing.  He moved to a new home and didn’t tell me where he lived. 

I don’t know how long he thought I would hang in there, and I can’t believe I was there in that relationship one day, but hindsight is everything.

I guess I was in shock. 

He continued being cruel to me, finally sending me emails offering me, “whatever my price,” to be one of his nude models.  I never knew he had nude models.  He described their bodies.  I was truly sickened.

I would eventually receive an email offering me money to be with him, if I could compartmentalize my feelings.  I blocked his emails after that day.

He’s rich and I’m poor.  He goes to church and I don’t.  And so… He called his financial offers a good deed in the name of charity and love.

This was not love.

There was pure malice in his offers.  He knew it would break my heart to hear him talk about his lust and sex with other women.  It was psychological abuse.  Telling me all about his new home and his wonderful new furniture, while never inviting me there was his way of hurting me.  And, it worked.

I discovered that everything he had told me all along had been lies.  His lies were complex, complicated and detailed.

The entire time he maintained that he knew what love was as if he were a master of the subject.  It was amazing.  He wrote demanding righteous long emails about what love and courtship meant.  I was so shocked that it literally silenced me, for a little while.

He maintained that he had been wronged.  My crime was that I wasn’t willing to be his devotee.

“It is your loyalty that I desire,” he wrote.  “The loyalty you have to your son and mother.”

I thought it was crazy at his age to say those things.  Plus, if he had been the man he had pretended, then he would have had my loyalty.  I concluded he hadn’t really wanted me at all, nor my loyalty because he had it and he trashed it.  The man wanted nothing more than a lifeless doll.

I was tricked, deceived, used, manipulated and conned.

Narcissists are great tricksters.  Anyone can fall prey to a severe malignant and passionate narcissist.

There were many red flags in the beginning that what he was showing was not love.

He couldn’t stop telling me how wonderful I was and how he adored everything about me.

If a man cannot talk about things besides how great you are, then something is probably not right.  Flattery is always nice, but when this is all a man ever does watch out!

When a man puts a woman on a pedal stool, constantly praising her, telling her how awesome and wonderful she is, she should beware.

Take heed when your new guy is all about constantly flattering you, gazing into your eyes– all the time, nearly drooling over whatever it is he is focusing on about you;  your intelligence, your compassion, your empathy, your unique abilities, your physical beauty, your one of a kind sexual ability to turn him on and on and on and on — this type of flattery might be a strong sign that something isn’t quite right.

I’m not talking about real love or the wonderful sensations of falling in love.  I’m not talking about the kind of love that grows out of mutual respect and sincerely getting to know another person. I’m talking about a person who is lying, pretending and putting on a show for you.  One day this will turn and you will hear just the opposite.

Narcissists play games.  Pathological destructive games that hurt and damage people.

He told me after our intimate relationship was destroyed that he had never known love.  He said he didn’t feel anything.  He said he had used me to feel emotions, mainly through having sex.  “You felt something so that’s what I liked about being with you,” he told me.

Gifts are not always an expression of love.  If you’re dealing with a narcissist who has money he will certainly use it to charm you and suck you into his world.  He may very well try to get you dependent or addicted to his money.

Gifts may also tell you a lot about him because when you’re dealing with someone who is like a young child in the sense that the world revolves around him, the gifts will always be what he likes or wants you to have so he can enjoy them with you.

Much of his behavior was a way to mimic being in love.

Narcissists are also control freaks.  The man pretended to be generous, always bringing gifts, always asking if I wanted to go shopping.  I don’t like to shop.  I declined many offers, but one time I needed some socks.  He acted like it tore him apart while I shopped for them.  Later, I needed eye glasses. 

 He was always around at the time.  I barely had time to myself because he was in his cunning manipulative stage.   So, he went with me to get the glasses.  I was surprised how he was always offering me money or things I didn’t want, but didn’t offer to help pay for something I needed. 

He bragged about all he had provided for his son and how sad it was that my son had not had the same.  No socks or glasses, but he offered to pay for me to have a face life.  He’d had several.

He was terribly threatened by my having a few normal friends and a family.  This is not love.

Loving a person means wanting the best for that person.  It means wanting them to thrive.

It may be true that love hurts, but this is different than the hurt that comes from abuse.

I had no reason to think this man was acting and lying, aside from my gut screaming out at me.  Most of us don’t think that way.  Most of us take people for who they say they are.  We can judge them by how they act around us and treat us, along with listening to how they speak of other people.

Malignant narcissists have a damaged character.  They portray a public image that has nothing to do with who they are, but this is for the public and it is not what people close to them see in private.

You may see on the outside a confident and outgoing person, seemingly quite concerned for the well-being of others, a social butterfly, a community leader, a leader in a church, a member of well-respected organizations, a giver to charity — but on the inside is an entirely different story.  There is a person without any substance and sadly, he knows it.

Any person can be a victim of narcissistic abuse.

Sometimes we do not know what is happening to us until we discover that there are actually words to describe exactly what we are experiencing.   Knowledge really is freedom.

If you are in a relationship where you feel confused, like every single thing that goes wrong is your fault and you begin to feel badly about yourself, like you just aren’t good enough, all the while you hear someone say how much he or she loves you, something is definitely wrong.

I hope those of us who have been hurt in a psychologically abusive relationship will heal.  I hope we will recognize signs of an abusive personality and walk the other way. 

I hope we will choose love and leave abuse.

Thank you for visiting Dogkisses’s blog.

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Top news

A Beautiful Life!

He called to say, “I love you.”   On a dreary sad day, during a long hard year, he called just to say… I love you — to me — his one and only, “favorite,” mom.

This is not top news.  This is no a current event.  Not a story.  Just a very short post about love.

by dogkisses♥

 

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I AM FREE, an ode to my beloved companion

Remembering Free, with Love

This is Free in her element. Resting in between swims along the river. Free was my companion, a loved family member, my son’s best buddy and the greatest teacher in life I’ve ever known.  I loved Free and I will always miss her.

Free blessed this earth from 1993 - 2006 and forever lives in my heart

 

I AM FREE

I once had four legs with webbed paws.

I swam in rivers, lakes, ponds and the ocean.

I plopped down in big ‘ol dirty mud puddles too.

I absolutely loved water!

I fetched sticks and balls

and anything my human friends would throw for me.

I loved it on earth!

I had a great human mom and a

terrific big brother to play with me.

I went camping and traveled around the country

with my human family.

We had lots of fun!

I loved them very much and they loved me too.

I once ran so fast into a stick

that I had to have surgery.

I was very enthusiastic about fetching!

I swam in nearly every river in the southeastern

United States.

I camped in most national forests.

I went all the way to New Mexico

and once lived on a horse farm in Texas.

I did lots of fun things during my life on earth.

I totally digged food and raw meat bones!

I ate all sorts of things that my human family

thought I shouldn’t have.

I once ate an entire bag of Halloween candy.

Chocolate, caramel, suckers, chewing gum,

even the paper.

I liked everything in the bag

except for the very hot red balls.

I tried each one but they were no fun.

I was a very good girl

but I did steal toys from neighbors.

I was kind of spoiled

and as I got older I didn’t care much

for other four-leggeds in my territory.

I did like one in particular.

I loved visiting her

and running in her grass.

She lived on a farm

at my human aunt’s house,

so I guess we were first

cousins through human relation.

I lived on earth almost 13 years.

That’s almost 90 human years!

I enjoyed my life and loved my family

I will tell of that

and our wonderful years together.

I want my human family to remember our fun times.

I want them happy when they think of me.

I am Free.

dogkisses, 2006

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