For me I went through three to five years without getting closure with my family and my friends on an issue related to my separation. They did end up believing that I was a battered woman, but they found it hard to believe that this guy (my neighbor) was talking about me and wanting to break up my marriage. At the time, I told everyone that he had confessed but they all refused to listen, so I dropped it.
And they all believed that I had a mental problem and that the guy wasn't real. Well, I finally got my closure when I called my sister and friends and posted the facts on Facebook. I couldn't go on with having them think I had mental problems for the rest of my life because I knew 100% that I did not. Years ago, I had told them all that he had confessed that he was talking about me and wanting to break up my marriage, but they didn't listen. So, I didn't go more in depth about the confession. Finally, when I told my sister that he had called and his name was Jeremy my family now believes me.
And I told them that not for one second was anyone going to tell me I was imagining things when I was two yards away from where he worked behind the meat counter listening in on his conversations about me, my kids, my ex and incidents going on at the house.
So, anyway, closure feels great. But sometimes it takes a really long time to get it. So often we find ourselves shoving things under the carpet, leaving them there to fester and not get resolved.
We find that we go through life with people believing one thing when it's not what we really are. We get wronged time and time again.
I just happened to be the victim of a cruel emotional battering and having a sort of far fetched story that happened to be true. My family refused to listen as they saw that his house was just a little further away. But what they didn't realize is that our house was on a hill with a huge echo and in the middle of summer the neighbor was outside a lot talking and partying with his grocery store buddies and for sure getting a bird's eye view of me, which I also responded to and liked it. But we don't need to go further into private stuff.
And a few days later, I discovered he worked at the grocery store.
So because of being a victim of battering and hearing Jeremy talking about me, in court the judge didn't listen for a minute to my crys of being a battered woman. All she could hear was other people wrongly accusing me of being skitzophrenic when I was definitely not at all. Never was and never will be. So that is the sole reason, I didn't get custody of my kids. Which in my mind was a terrible deal of the cards, but what are you going to do?
It ended up okay anyway, as I can see them any time I want. And I ended up forgiving people, moving on and starting over.
But it sure is hard when you can't get closure. When you go through a divorce and things get really messy, how do you find closure for it? Sometimes, you just have to let it all take it's course and closure eventually comes. Divorce or a separation is never easy.
I'm actually separated. If I was to remarry, I would have to turn it into a divorce. I went through a time afterwards when I felt lonely, and definitely needed time to myself after everything that had happened to me. My friends and family told me not to rush into any new baggage. One told me that all men come with baggage.
On thinking of that, don't we all come with baggage? What we shove into our luggage is our flaws that we come with. And if we're smart, we find the lock and then throw away the key into some deep blue sea. And then we try to become a new and better person.
Death is a hard one to get closure on. It is the ultimate loss of losing a loved one. My Mom has been dead for just over 11 years and it's still hard. Closure does eventually come, but what will always remain with us is the awful void of them not being here with us. It can't be erased.
Time does heal, but it also doesn't erase all the pain and suffering that we go through. I remember every single thing from my messy divorce, hearing Jeremy talking about me and all kinds of other not so nice things that have happened to me. I remember all the awful things that my Mom went through as she was dying of Colon Cancer.
We move on, but when we get hurt by others significantly, I will tell you that we never forget it. It remains locked in our brains forever, always remembering what went down, remembering everything that got said, and we try to deal with it.
We start over, we forgive (or try to). To this day, I won't forgive my father n law for something very cruel he did to me. But I've forgiven most everyone. I've got kids and I don't want them pitted in the middle of anything.
I think if you are going through a divorce or separation, you can't put your kids in the middle of anything. They should never be forced to choose sides. And always, if you need to talk about anything private that is only for adult ears, leave the room and make sure that your kids aren't near you. They shouldn't need to know all the nasty details until they are adults and ask you or maybe even perhaps when we are dead.
I've written down a biography of that messy time in my life, but nobody is going to read it until I'm dead and buried (or scattered into the ocean with the dolphins). But out of convenience, my kids might end up tossing my ashes in a lake. I could see that happening.
Not everyone can find closure in death. Some of us need to have all their things near us for comfort and others can't seem to look at it. They need to get rid of it, so that it isn't near them. Some people can't make themselves go back to the house where their loved ones lived. It's too hard for them to go back and have all the memories come flooding in.
Everyone deals with death in their own way and have their own ways of finding closure. And some of us never end up getting closure.
Some of us can go a lifetime without getting closure for something. I know one thing I will never get is an apology from my ex. He pretended to believe that he never battered me. He's got to know deep down in his head though that he did batter me. He denied it, which is pretty much the same thing as lying.
A classic instance was one morning he told me to my face that I was in a depression for seven years, and I told him to his face that I was not. But he kept insisting that I was as he always thought he was right. Well, later that afternoon when we were with a marriage counselor (I didn't like her as I don't think she was a real marriage counselor and my ex charmed her to his side. A real marriage counselor doesn't take sides.), I brought up what he had said to me that morning and he turned and looked at me and then at her and said, "I never said that."
So, an apology will never come. But, I'm okay with that. We just have to accept the cards we get dealt with and should know that we can't change some things. We can't force everything to go our way.
The important thing now is that my ex doesn't say or do anything any more. It's funny how relationhips work. When we're in them, all kinds of things happen to create conflict and when we're out of them, everything is just great and stress free.
If things had been different, we might have stayed together. I blame a lot of it on Jeremy and perhaps my ex straying too. I could never say for sure, but my ex might have strayed and I could never prove that one.
I blame a part of me one year deciding to start dressing pretty again after years of looking dumpy. It happened one year that the kids preschool teachers decided to hire the first man teacher. And he started hitting on me and I was flirting back. Nothing ever happened with him, but it was a harmless flirting that might have been a little destructive. And one of the preschool teachers (a good friend) told me to can it. And then she laughed and said he was Gay. That was funny.
We do need to find our closure if we can. I think it is important to get it so that we can fully move on and leave everything in the past.
I don't really like rehashing the past too much. I do like to tell a lot of stories about the past, but when it is something very hurtful, I like to leave it there. None of us want to dig it up or remember things that hurt us. Or for another fact, we don't want to rehash things that maybe we said or did that wasn't very nice either. We want to leave all the bad stuff in the past.
But, I felt the need to bring part of it up in this last week, as I hadn't gotten my closure. I will probably be answering a few more phone calls from curious individuals and then it's all getting locked up and I'm moving on. It was a very hard part of my life. And looking back, there were a few things I would have done differently, but you can't change the path once it's been created.
It all ends up the way it got planned out and you can't go back in time to change a thing. All you can do is learn from your mistakes and try not to repeat anything. All you can do is move on and accept the things that others did to you, try to find a way to realize why it happened and to take the reason for it happening and go with it.
There's a reason why things happen the way they do and we just have to go with the flow. And to dwell on things is not a good way to be. Just move on and look to the present day and tasks at hand. Sometimes it's hard to accept what happened though. I will say that. All I knew was I wasn't going to accept for a minute that people were telling me I was skitzophrenic. All I could think of was that none of them were in my shoes, to walk in them every day while I was going through all the mess. Nobody could 100% say they knew for sure what happened in my house. They couldn't follow me to the grocery store and listen in on Jeremy's conversations about me.
All they could do was speculate.
And another thing I will say is when you hear a story that may sound far fetched, think very hard before you decide to tell the person that it didn't happen. Because it very well could be a true story. Mine was. You've got to think that you weren't in that other person's shoes to know. And then you've got to think in this life that stranger things have happened.
The world is a strange place, but many true stories get shoved away and not realized that they were true. Look at all the people that go to jail for something that they didn't do. It happens. People refuse to listen.
The funny thing about mine is that I told everyone many times that I was a few yards away from him in the grocery store when his friend said, "I know where you can find a nude Mrs. Fay." and nobody in my family or my friends took that into consideration. It's like they all blocked it for three years and refused to listen to that. They refused to believe that I could hear my neighbor talking about me all summer. What they didn't take into consideration is that all summer with the windows open, voices echoing and carrying, yes you can hear. Don't ever rule it out.
How many times have you heard your neighbors fighting or having a party? They get loud and yes, the neighbors can hear.
Jennifer Jo Fay
Copyrighted August 15, 2012
