The Chronicles of Australia Part Three of Three

The Chronicles of Australia Part Three of Three

Part 3

Great White Shark

The amount of stress that was building up was too much for anyone to handle and one ting I didn't know- I was pregnant.  I just never seem to know when I am and my body just doesn’t handle it well.

So around October by that time I had been so overwhelmed by the barrage of cruelty (by this time Daniel wouldn't walk beside me on the side walk he would stride ahead faster than I could go and suddenly it was a "habit" and he's always done it and he couldn't break that new habit. If he was going to the store or getting food he would just say he was "going for a walk" and wouldn't pick up anything I needed, but if I'd gone to the store and was unpacking what I got he would bounce over like a little 8 year old kid and go "what did you get me" because he was so used to me buying something to try and lower the tension, it was expected (I winder how his new partner has been handling this kid behaviour- she has two sons in their twenties and I'm sure this kind of thing would piss her the fuck off).


[Sex had become extremely unpleasant. Without going into details he tried to only touch one place on my body and literally nowhere else and it was kind of creepy and I felt lonely. Conversely, when I tried to kiss him he would giggle and kick and squirm like a little kid being tickled and that was gross and it made me feel like a pedo with a little kid. It fucking creeped me out. - Withdrawn from Blog]


So by the end of 2015 I was so depressed I couldn't move. I didn't feel safe getting out of bed because I didn't have enough energy to be treated like a criminal in my own home. I just would lie there in a semi-catatonic state- we didn't go out anymore, not even to the dog park. Watching other people's pets made me miss my own and the house had sold and Daniel wouldn't participate in choosing a place to move into. He put it all up to me. I was worried he was going to be even worse about the house cleaning than before. He said that when he was working on Uni stuff he needed the office room to his self and what was I going to do in those days or weeks? Just not use my PC ever? It was asking a bit much. He would compare me with thing like his brothers new wife let HIM do that, which is unfair- I didn't know them or have their contact information to start, and maybe they didn't have their studios in the same room, or maybe they didn't mind and neither got arbitrarily booted..... who knows? I said if I was renting 1/2 an apartment I wasn’t going to agree to be locked out of any room and the best compromise would be for us each to have a bedroom and then he doesn’t have to be mad at me for using my own workspace. he disagreed with every idea and suddenly it was like he hated everything. He's scream at me "YOU ARE SO USELESS YOU DON'T DO ANYTHING ANYMORE WHY DON'T YOU JUST KILL YOURSELF LREADY!" I just rolled up like a hedgehog and tried to use my spines from letting the words get to me.

Irukandji  Box Jellyfish

I hadn’t had a period in a long time (it has always been really unstable and at my age it sometimes wouldn’t come for months, in fact it was just starting up again after a 9 month hiatus (no, I didn't have a baby at the end of that). My period came back but it was the heaviest I'd ever had. I kept going through the most absorbent kind every couple hours. It was bleeding a LOT. I had to sit on a plastic bag in Daniels moms car as to not make the upholstery (embarrassing) it was blood and blood and blood. nice I must have forgot to flush and Daniel really panicked I think he'd never seem it before (it would be horrible being the only woman in a family of your husband and three boys, she must have gone right out of her way to hide it, who knows. But even for that it WAS a lot, the toilet water was crimson, I was way too burned out and I said I was sorry I must have forgot and nothing was wrong and just flushed it and went back to bed. I was completely tapped out. I couldn’t care about another thing.

Anyway a couple months after that blood tsunami I had some bad cramps but up high inside almost just below my diaphragm but if I was going to draw where there pain was I;d draw it as maybe six inched above the top of my head but inside me. I felt a gross slime come out and when I got up I looked and there was this burgundy coloured thing that if it was all together it would have been a bit smaller than a chicken egg and there were some white bits here and there in it. I flushed and immediately regretted it I should have scooped it up but I was so beaten down I couldn't really care that much. I went back to bed.

Later when I told Daniel he said I was amking it up "for attention",
1) What a weird gross way to get attention
2) Shouldn't you be getting some, if any, attention for your partner that you mmoved half way around the globe for? It woyld be weird to not want attention, but he was intent on ignoring me.


Jumping Spider

After a couple month of this something snapped inside. I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t go forward, not with being treated like this. I didn't know where Daniel went, but I couldn’t stand this greedy cruel Sophia monster that had taken over my kind beautiful Daniel.

Somehow, what she said made sense. I didn't want my doctors to get in trouble so using my prescription was out of the question. I did however have a lot of allergy medicine. I looked up the dose I'd need. It was a lot but I had a lot. I waited till Sophia was going to be gone a while.

If I was thinking straight I wouldn't have done it in the apartment but I was past that.
.

I took about 6 anti-nausea pills and waited a couple hours so they were kicked in and I had two super-size 600 pill bottles of knock-off 25 mg Benadryl, one was about 1/4 empty. I dumped them both in a bowl and started taking small hand fills of them and swallowing them down. It took a few hours to take them and sometimes I’d cough them back up and there was that bitter/blech taste of pills so I had some cola and some breath mints and I kept going.

According to the thing I read I should have just drifted off to sleep. That didn't happen. My heart started beating very strong- I could clearly see the comforter going up and down with my heartbeat. I felt scared and not at all tired. I was exhausted but the fear kept me up. That went on for about 18 hours and at about 30 hours I was kind of back to "normal" but I was very weak and angry that I was out of pills and it didn't work and I was still fucking alive and I couldn't even get this one thing right.

I called the crisis line and they said if I went to the hospital they would fast track me a social worker and help me find somewhere to live, and I phoned my GP and asked what the best hospital to go to was. So I packed a couple things, enough for a 72 hour crisis watch and got in a cab and went to the hospital.

The Chronicles of Australia Part Two of Three

The Chronicles of Australia Part Two of Three



Eastern Brown Snake

When she came out as trans I felt relieved, maybe this has been the problem all along. I let her use my makeup and things, and we made a system that when she said she liked some kind of girly thing, she would say "that would look good on you" and I'd buy it for her: nylons, makeup, clothes, plus she could use mine all she liked. (The ironic thing about this was that as long as I'd supported her from every angle including transition, she never supported my identity, gender or otherwise, once. She was constantly needling me to wear dresses, higher and higher heels regardless of my back, hips, and knees, and it was just more and more. I wanted to make her happy, so I went along with it. She had this game "we" played- Sophaniel would suggest what she wanted me to wear and I would do the same for her in her male form. So each of us would have the look that the other liked. Doesn't that sound like fun? Well first of all she lucked out because I'm not fussy about clothing so it was a long way in before I said anything but my two suggestions were just obviously too horrible and gross and yucky to do. 1) I like Converse. I thought some high tops would be cute, but Daniel didn't/couldn't because she uses arch supports so has to wear shoes that can support them. Ok fair enough. I suggested a side part rather than always in the middle. That was also vetoed because when Daniel was 10 some bullies beat him up over a side part. "So you're letting bullies from grade school still bully you? Do you think they will even remember? Wouldn’t it be empowering to shake it up a bit?" Nope. My two suggestions were too extreme.


Once she got drunk and decided he wanted to have sex- we hadn't in a long time- so long that I stopped using the NUVA ring- stupid hormonal birth control makes me irritable and takes away my sex drive and I'd rather do as little as possible to encourage cervical cancer if that's ok. I wasn't protected and I kept saying that I wasn't in the mood, no no no, please don't, please stop, and "can we do a safe word? the same word is NO the safe word is STOP. No! Stop!" the strength in my arms was gone and I couldn't push him off me and when he was done I just went in the bed and didn't leave it except to eat or use the washroom for three months.

There was a thing with the bathroom too. This happens to women my age, they feel like they have to pee all the time regardless of if they have to. It would get worse when there was tension I'd have to pee and it would drive me crazy cause it felt like I'd have to piss like a racehorse and three drops would come out and I'd still feel like I had to pee and there would be nothing there. Daniel would accuse me of needing to pee as an excuse to ignore the "talks" and so he tried to control how often I could go to the bathroom. That was extremely fucked up and sadistic.

He also accused me of throwing away or taking things, it started with a cleaner that said in all caps "DO NOT USE IF  YOU OR ANYONE IN TEH ROOM HAS ASTHMA, MAKE SURE THEY ARE OUT OF THE ROOM FOR 24 HOUR OR MORE". I do have asthma and I didn’t see any reason for it's use so I put it in the back of a cupboard and didn't really think about it but then Daniel started getting paranoid. That was missing, this was missing, the other ting was missing. I'd help look for them and they would usually turn up eventually. Catch 22 was of course if I found it, clearly I'd found it in the place I'd supposedly stashed it. Then his phone disappeared. That was a tense couple of days. I could feel his suspicious gaze burning a hole in me. After a couple of days went b he got an email from his mom saying someone had found his phone out by the intersection. He got his phone back but the sense of distrust wasn't repaired.


I didn't feel safe anywhere. She got meaner, she would scream "GET OUT OF MY APARTMENT" but I didn't know where to go. Once I went to go pick up my meds and I just lost it and I sat on a bench crying and a nice lade came and sat with me and she showed me where to go for help and they asked if I wanted to press charges (I had a tiny bruise on my wrist where I'd gone in the bathroom when he didn't think I should and right when I was on the other side of the door he whipped it open and it slammed into my arm. that wasn't the first or even the worst physical violence but it was a definite step up we were now at stage 5 out of the 7 stages of abuse, 6 was broken bones and 7 is death. That was as high as it had gotten with Dan S.

Funnel-web Spider

He would head to Newcastle, the town where hi parents live, once a week to lecture at Newcastle Uni- his mom would chauffeur him around because he was too scared to learn to drive himself- it was really stressful witnessing the way he treated his mom, he would give her about 15 minutes if he was being generous to be ready to drive him wherever he wanted to go. I was vocal about this that I didn't think that it was ok especially in his 30's to be expecting that of his mother and treating her like that but at the time I hadn't considered that was how they control each other.

His mom was able to assure that she wouldn’t be abandoned by her youngest and was able to control him and he had a robot that would so whatever he wanted. I'd never seen this sort of dynamic before and I was unfamiliar with it. I couldn't see what either was getting out of it as I was always extremely independent as a kid, even if I didn't want to be, no adult I knew would put up with that kind of toddler bullshit that Daniels mom put up with from him but I guess she liked the control and keeping him in fear of things was an excellent solvent.

A story that illustrates what I mean perfectly. Before we met, Daniel was telling me about this time that he wanted to learn roller blading. His mom was very worried so he was sure to get all the safety equipment- knee and elbow pads, the wrist things so you don't break your arm if you fall, helmet, the whole nine yards. Daniels mom said she was still worried and that Daniel was way too important and she didn't want to see him get hurt and she would rather he didn't. He really didn't do any kind of outdoor activities even though there were a lot of cool things to do there from snorkelling and SCUBA, regardless of the beautiful beaches, he didn't even surf. People even did hang gliding off the beach cliffs that looked super fun and I would have loved to give it a go if my spine wasn’t trashed. He had never done team sports, that's fine, it's not everyone's cup of tea, he doesn’t even know how to ride a bike (which is weird in a way but thin of that on the mom-as-controller perspective: if he would have been able to just cycle to wherever he wanted to go, he wouldn’t NEED her for transportation).  Ok so back to the story,  she says to him she doesn’t want him hurt and he's too important to get hurt. So he took back the roller blading stuff and never followed up on it. What kind of a kid would do that, just like that?  12 year old Daniel might have been upset but gone along with it. 14 year old Daniel might have been mad and maybe done it in secret, 16 year old Daniel might have flipped off his mom and done it anyway, 18 year old Daniel might have told her where to go and got them anyway. Ok, it's audience participation time. What age was Daniel when he obediently gave up his dream of roller blading because of hand-wringing mom and returned the equipment? Have you chosen and locked in your answers?  BZZZZZZ. Wrong. All of you are wrong. He wasn't a teenager. He was twenty fucking eight years old.

That's just not mentally healthy.

So there's this weird thing going on between Daniel and mum. She didn't like me and she expressed it in what I call "Catholic School Girl Bullying Style:- being mean but being so subtle that unless you weren't paying attention, you could miss it. Like on my birthday, there was a Uni ceremony and it was a long day and my pain was going up and I was getting exhausted. I'd missed birthday because on days I spent at their house I'd get allergic and when you are allergic even if its environmental, you can only eat certain things. People without allergies don't know or understand this. So I didn't have breakfast or lunch and then a 9 pm we tried to find an open restaurant and by then even though my blood sugar was very low, I felt too sick to eat so there was a dish offered that was churros and ice cream and some dipping sauces- the menu wasn’t clear about this but I really just wanted the ice cream. The ice cream was meant to be a dipping sauce (guh?) and was in a small deep dish. The waitress only brought cutlery for three so being the new one and under pressure to be polite (even though I was under extreme anxiety from Daniels bossing me for 3 solid days prior and feeling faint and packed with anxiety I passed along the cutlery to the rest and was trying to ask for another set.

In Daniels family they have this rule that makes no sense (or maybe it's just Daniel) that you can't ask a server for anything because it's a low key insult and it's rude or something. I just needed a spoon. Later I asked what people did when they weren't given cutlery and Daniel said they just go with it- I was like- you drink your soup by slurping it from a bowl and eat your pasta with bare hands? He said you just deal with it. This is another thing that was part of the crazy that started to slowly rear its ugly head.

Anyway I was in a bench and Daniel was by the aisle and they wouldn't let me out to see if I could get some cutlery. No one would ask on my behalf. I ended up having a panic attack and blacked out. Later Daniel said I had been almost shouting and making a scene about  needing a spoon, which since I was in panic attack blackout it COULD have been possible but it seemed very out of character. Why not just give someone a fucking set of cutlery in a restaurant? Isn't eating at least semi-politely expected rather then slurping ice cream from a sauce dish?

Later I relayed this story to my GP and my psychologist they both said that not being able to ask a server is weird and that behaviour by Daniels family was flat out abusive.

The Chronicles of Australia Part One

Pre-FrontalExplanationland

As you can see, I haven't uploaded in any blogs ages. that doesn't mean I haven't been writing, I just haven't been uploading. I'm not going to be around much longer and I'd like to tell my story even if it's not in order and even if not everyone likes it.

I've not even uploaded since D left Canada for Australia.

So I'll start there.

This is Part 1 of 3 parts.

These are The Chronicles of Australia


Preface: With all due respect, I am going to say that calling Soph in this context is not intending to disrespect her, her female gender as a trans woman, or any non-binary people, but I was with a male person named Daniel. I've come close to having girlfriends from time to time but never have, I'm simply not attracted to women sexually. So when I talk about Daniel, I'm talking about the person I loved, the person dated and was engaged to. Daniel would never do the things Sophia did, and if they were the same person, we would have worked it out and I would be married to Sophia. But that’s not what she wanted when she moved into Daniels body. From my perspective, in many ways they are two different people.

I miss Daniel and I grieve for him. It's a different kind of grief than I had when John died- in some ways it's harder and more confusing because I know the kind, sensitive, empathetic and loving person is still there somehow.

Please don't conflate what I am doing here as "dead naming". It is how I've needed to cope with what happened. I am and will always be an ALLY, even if others won't be an ally towards me.

One more thing: this is highly abridged, and it is my perspective. Clearly Soph has things that she remembers that might be different. She is of course entitled to her opinions and what see does with her own history.

I wish her well in the future.

Albatross

As some of you know, Daniel came out as trans and is now Sophia, which shouldn't have been a problem, but when she became Sophia she decided that she couldn't date anyone but another trans woman so once again I came to a point in my life that my existence as a person was a problem. This is what happened from my perspective as it happened.


It took me 6 years of knowing her and her convincing me she loved me and would never leave me to have me consider coming to Australia.

I asked her many times is there was ANY reason why I shouldn't come here and was clear that it was a serious question because I'd have to sell my house, re-home Pteri, sell everything I could, donate the rest and I would need him to fill in the places where I needed help and was unable to manage things for myself- huge Swiss cheese holes in my life from my learning disabilities, from being neglected and not knowing how to manage things that most people my age seemed to be able to figure out, and help with thing I just couldn't manage any more because of my spinal injuries. I asked the question time and time again in different wording and at least three times in obvious clear, concise words:

"Is there ANY reason at all that you can think if that I should not move to Australia to get married to you?"

"No, I want you to come here, I love you, we will get you help here, my family will also help, we'll get you better, I love you". I felt insecure but I trusted him and that he was being honest. I loved and trusted him like I'd trusted no one before in my life- intelligent, seemed stable, supportive in ways that I've never seen before, he loved my jokes, he were that kind of couple where we could finish each others sentences and know what the other was thinking. Daniel had never experienced that before and was amazed by it

The house didn't sell as fast as we would have linked, in fact it didn't sell at all. I don't know if what's-her-face wanted a signature in blood but no matter how many times I asked she never listed the fucking thing. I was stuck. I couldn't go home because I'd taken alone against the sale of the house to GET there.

Blue-ringed octopus

It wasn't even 6 months before Daniel started to morph. He became more and more irritable (a tiny studio is way too small for two introverts and Daniel had never lived with anyone except his own family- he didn't understand that other families had different rules, values, and so on and so he conflated some of the ... lets use the word "unique" things about his family with "being Australian".

Once Daniels mom realised I wasn't a walking talking baby oven, the passive aggression started and I didn't want to be a pain and I was really shocked at how dependant Daniel still was on his mommy at his age. He was not like this in Canada, but back under the gravitational influence of his mom, the sun, he was malleable putty in her hands and she could manipulate him with a glance or with the cadence in her voice.

The hostility started to leech into the apartment, Daniel would get furious if I made "too much noise". The result too much noise would be caused by the following but not limited to 20 to 45 minutes of haranguing about:
- vigorous typing or clicking the mouse "too much"
- plastic wrap of food packaging crackling
- metal spook clinking the side of a cereal bowl or mug.





Cassowary

He stayed up all night on the computer (I now realise it was spending Second Life with someone new - I did ask if he was cheating and he said "no" but I maybe could have been more specific and said that I meant online sex). Because of this, he wouldn't go to bed till 7 or 8 am and the apartment had to be silent and dark till about 2-4pm or even later when he decided to get up.

He became cruel, didn't help with the housework, blamed everything on me, and kept drawing lines in the sand creating hostility when we should have been working together to be a stronger couple. I was fucking terrified. I didn't understand what was going on.

He would want to "talk" about what was going on and so did I, but he had rules: he got to talk, I had to stay silent, not "interrupt" and not get to say anything. If I did dare say anything, he "would have to start at the beginning again" because it was a fucking lecture he'd prepared or something. That wasn’t talking, it was a critical laundry list of abuse. It was Chinese Water Torture with really insulting patronising insults. It would go on and on and on and in any other kind of home a person would be able to go out to another room. All I could do was put n my noise reducing headphones and try and tone him out.

A couple of times he ripped them off my head and it would bend my ear painfully because of my neuropathy in my face nerves. Once he grabbed my laptop and posed like he was going to throw it out the window of our apartment on the third floor down to the asphalt in the back alley. I was terrified: My art, my photos, my contacts, my writing, my medical files- he was about to destroy all of everything. Of course later he downplayed it and said he would never do such a thing, that he was "kidding" and I should have known he would never do that. But there were other things of mine that he HAD broken, and his point of getting my attention wouldn’t have been effective if I didn't honestly believe he was going to do that. Later, after he'd broken something that appeared small and like something that could be easily replaced (it wasn't), he admitted that he gets feelings of rage and will just sash the first thing that he sees regardless of whose it is. That is a sign of a very dangerous person, who knows what happens to a partner of someone that loses their shit that much. That is how partners get killed.

One day the phone rang at 12:50 pm in the afternoon. It was a wrong number. Daniel was annoyed that the phone woke him up but he didn't say anything. The phone rang again, it was the same person making the same error again. I said it no problem and I went back to the futon and back to my cereal. Apparently I was intentionally and enthusiastically clinking and clanking the spoon on the bowl like the drummer from Hüsker Dü a million zillion times super loud just to annoy him because he started tearing into me verbally about making all this noise when he needed so badly to sleep. We got into this things about why doesn’t he just go to bed at a normal time, blah blah blah. He got into comparing me to his mom (a common topic) and I said I'm not, never will be, and am not interested in becoming anything like his mom, nothing wrong with wanting to be my own person and he needed to grow up and untie the apron strings or something along that line. He totally lost his shit and leapt out of bed and grabbed my neck and started choke-holding me from behind and shaking me by the neck and milk and cereal was going everywhere and dribbling on my laptop keyboard and I was trying to hold everything steady and going "Stop! What are you doing! Stop it now!" and his clock alarm thankfully went off and he snapped out of it. It was set for 1 pm. All that for 10 fucking minutes of extra sleep. I was starting to wonder where I could go if things got Dan S. Level of psycho-danger.

Drop Bear

16 months was too long to stay in a studio apartment with someone who was getting more and more hostile and abusive in stages. He was becoming mentally and emotionally more and more childish, he was saying "this is your mess not mine" - like when I lived with others, the person who prepared dinner that would be their job, and the other would do the clean up. Not with young little Danny Boy. He NEVER cleaned the toilet "he didn't know how". In fact "he didn't know how" to do a bunch of things. It was clear that his mom was coming up the 3 hour each way drive and and doing things like cleaning and defrosting the fridge and cleaning the toilet and all kinds of things. He didn't know you had to wash the mop and broom and cleaning things periodically. He didn't like that the dish towels were getting used looking with age, so I bought my own that I could do whatever with. The he started to get mad because too may extra things were coming in the apartment and I was "a hoarder" because I'd keep and reuse reusable containers rather than making landfill fodder. I really tried to encourage ecologically friendly cleaning- not wasting paper towels when it was necessary, etc and he thought it was stupid. When I'd made dinner so it was "my mess to clean up". He wouldn't clean the bathroom because "my shampoo bottles were in the way" because it's so hard to move something for a minute while you wipe it. If I carried his dishes to the sink after dinner then they would be "my mess", it was right fucking out of control.

I said we need couples therapy and we went- it was awful because as soon as Daniel started talking about how much he adores his mommy, the therapist got moo eyed and it was stupid. She said Daniel needed to find other outlets for his temper and that breaking my things and threatening to smash my laptop was inappropriate (enter "I was just kissing" mode) and that I did need a place to have a desk and draw and not have to always eat balancing on my knee as soon as possible. He took that to mean "after the move". He warped anything people said to suit himself. She was right, though. Daniel definitely needed some physical activity to take up all that pent up aggravation. He'd continuously blame me for his feelings and had no self control over his emotions and they were always someone else’s fault. I had offered to teach him how to ride a bike for example (there are lots of places around that even rent out tandem bikes, that would be great to teach an adult with, but he was too ashamed to start learning anything where people might see him learning, in his imagination people would be laughing at him and it would be unbearable.

The rudeness and the bulling kept getting worse and I dealt with it the only way a person who has been abused their whole life can: stay quiet, do what they want, try and make them happy. He expected me to pack his suitcases but he didn't SAY that, he just kept putting it off till the last minute (I had been reminding him to pack for over 24 hours then it was 1/2 n hour till he had to leave for the air port and I caved and packed for him as he had tantrums all around me for not being fast enough. I found myself doing ridiculous fucking things like tying his shoelaces for him while he was yelling at me that I wasn’t doing it fast enough.

It was insanity.