Brave Little Gerda Knows More Now

[Rita]

DnJ, Cardinal -- and SBJ! -- thank you for the words, thoughts, wishes, inspiration.

Somehow, DnJ, I am always fortified when you mention your dark moments, I have said that before -- it just always seems so peaceful and pleasant out there among the trees and the tall grass, and your kids all sound so perfect, that I sometimes forget you went through the same griefs and didn't just jump out of a package marked, "DETACHED AND HEALED."

I keep thinking I will update and then I don't. It is overwhelming to even imagine catching up on my sitch. The cottage project is quite astonishing. I am hoping to make a YT channel for it so I have been recording some of the beginning. The before and after will be unbelievable, that is for sure.

I guess I can't really catch things up here, it's too much. So I will just give two sordid details --

First -- Once again, H has filed a fraudulent tax return, not claiming any of our rental income and claiming S16 as his dependent. I still have never received a penny of child support or any assistance of any kind from H, and he has not seen S16 since May, 2019. I received notices from my state and IRS that all of my refunds have been denied because someone else claimed one of my dependents. And I will not be getting the child tax credit payments because of it -- or maybe H will get some of the payments? I have filed motions to get full custody and child support and to have these tax returns corrected but there are three open motions that were never decided and it just never ends.

Second -- My D12, who now only refers to her dad by his first name, unblocked him yesterday, I guess she gets curious and misses him sometimes -- and received a text announcing that he had moved TWO BLOCKS AWAY and "spends his days looking for her on the street." REPLAY IS REAL, FOLKS. This man ran our business into the ground and left us for another married woman with two kids and after complaining for years that he hated our neighborhood moved six times in the last two years, three of those times to other states. Now he is opening the same business 6 blocks away and moved two blocks away, still while trying to sell our home.

It's all so textbook that it doesn't seem real. But it is real.

I used to live in fear of hearing from him or seeing him. Now I don't even think about the fact that he lives somewhere very close to me, we probably go to the same deli. It's like there is a wall around my heart and it's impenetrable, at least in the context of H. I am just me. I am just Gerda now.

Sometimes I remember we are to pray for our enemies, and I try to pray for H. I get confused because the truth is that if I am honest with myself, I don't want his salvation, I don't want him to get better or for anyone to forgive anyone. I want him to disappear and not to have to know about it either way. I don't want him to get better or be redeemed because it will somehow undermine what I had to do to myself, to change, so that I could heal and move forward. I had to stop believing in him, I had to look honestly at our life together and see clearly who he was all along, and how that made him capable of what he has done for the past seven years but especially the last three. It's hard to explain how this fits with my faith, with my certainty that there is a light all around us and a life beyond this one. But I guess I am just being honest. I do forgive H. But mostly because I don't think he has ever been capable of love.

I wonder sometimes how such a person could ever have a chance of being Good. He had a terrible childhood and was abused, and he clearly has NPD or some other Cluster C disorder. What chance did he ever have? How could he ever choose goodness and subdue his own will when he is mentally incapable of choosing anything but himself? I found a letter he wrote my son where he quoted this Rudyard Kipling poem, mainly these lines.

If
BY RUDYARD KIPLING

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
...
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
....
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

He truly believes he is taking the righteous path, he believes that this will one day be clear to his children that he did the right thing though he has lost both of them and that they will see him as a hero. What chance does such a man have to ever choose goodness?