Well.. I finally moved house last friday.. and what a nightmare it has turned out to be for us all!

First of all our removal team turned up at 8.15am.. we were almost ready, but not quite..lol. they proceeded to start packing everything in site.. papers, rubbish the lot.lol they even packed the bin full of rubbish! we were all fretting about getting finished on time, we had a call from the solicitors at 10.30am to inform us that everything was completed, all the paperwork had been done and my house sale had gone through! I now owned the new house. The removal team left and we beleived they had all the items on the trucks that they were meant to have, but after they'd gone we discovered that they had left all my kitchen china and glasses, saucepans etc behind, I tried to get them to return but they refused! So We finished of with packing, squeesing everything into the car, and headed off to the new address.. where we expected things to go smoothly.

I think we expected far to much! the team unloaded everything into the kitchen! even though I needed to keep it pretty empty, so we spent the next three hours or so moving everything out again, then we tried to get the electric to work! but my sellers had left a debt which we had to settle before we could get the power on.. after we found out who our supplier was this was sorted and I called my solicitor to inform him hoping to get my money back! The house was in a complete mess... and we needed to clean it big time! next problem we found was we had NO WATER! our neighbour downstairs informed us that there had been a serious leak last week, I had not been informed of this even though by that time I did in fact own the property! The previous owner had come in and turned of the water! I had to call out a plumber on saturday as we couldn't even flush the toilets! A trip to the supermarket to but bottled water to flush away! and 9, 5 litre bottles later the plumber arrived.. he informed me that the leak would cost me the sum of £112.80 to fix, having no choice if I wanted water I had to agree to get the work done.
A new lock on the front door set me back a further £98.. so all in all a very expensive move in weekend.

This morning I went to see my solicitor to find out if I can get these costs back from the seller, I am still waiting to hear back from him! What is happening to 'Customer Service' in this country? it is virtually NON EXISTANT! to top it all BT still haven't connected my telelphone even though they promised it would be working by the time I moved in.. I have just 30 minutes ago managed to get on line .. the incompetance of the so called service providers in this country are appalling.. try to get something done when they promise to do it and you'll be a very lucky person indeed. Tomorrow I am meant to be getting a new kitchen fitted, but half the peices needed are not here! only some of the delivery has arrived. I am also meant to have recieved a new bathroom suite today, but so far no sign of it! If I ever say I'm moving house again please try to disuade me! This weekend has been so stressful that I honestly don't know if I can cope with it all again at any time in the future..

Friday Evening..

Today was therapy again, this time I actually admitted just how low I felt on tuesday night! OMG never thought I'd do that! But Jane was great, she understood completely how stressed I am right now with the imminent house move along with trying to deal with my past. She suggested a few relaxation techniques for me to try and reminded me that things will get better.

She asked me how it felt to be finally leaving this town? and I admitted I was glad to be going but said it would be very different from the last time I left here.

As a 16 year old I left this town with the clothes I stood up in and a small suitcase leaving most of my own possessions behind. It was very hard that time, no one knew we were leaving so I didn't get to say goodbye to my friends that I'd grown up with, My mum had decided we should leave on my birthday! By that time she had married this guy 'john' at a time when DON was back with his wife! John was a big drinker and often came home on a friday night worse for wear from drinking, but Mum put up with it, he had moved in with his 3 sons from previous marriages and there was just mum and me left at home, everyone else had moved out by this time. On my birthday John had written in my card 'Apples are ripe and ready for plucking, girls of sixteen are ready for fucking'... Mum went crazy! asked him what he meant by it and he replied that I was now old enough to really live life to the full! I think Mum decided that day that we should leave, so on monday morning as soon as John left for work, Mum woke me up and told me to get dressed, we were leaving! We packed the cases into the car and headed of to who knew where.... neither of us knew where we would end up that night.. as it turns out we headed north to an old friends mum... she was shocked to see us but welcomed us into her home.. then our journey around the country started until finally Mum called him (Don) and he came back.. we ended up moving back down south and renting a small apartment near where we used to live.. well in fact in the town that I'm now moving to next week!

Is history going to repeat itself? That town is where the worst of my childhood abuse happened, where I decided finally that enough was enough and I had to get out! and I did!.

For the move out of this town, this time I will be hiring a removal truck and taking everything with me! and Wow is there a lot of stuff! so far we have packed some 60 boxes of things from around the house and there is still more to do! We have to be ready to move it all by 9am next friday.. so I sure have my work cut out this next week ... we exchanged contracts this afternoon and its now official that I will be moving on friday 27th.. been a long time coming but thankfully the light is there at the end of the dark tunnel that I've been in these past few weeks!
Hopefully things will go smoothly from here on in, but I have to be prepared for the unexpected eh!

Jane asked me if it felt different this time and I had to admit yes it does.. of course.. this time its my choice to move and I have chosen where I'm moving to.. I am not running away from 'Abuse or threats of Abuse' I'm going because I want to go.. a big difference from last time eh! I may not get on here for the next week or so, but will maybe try to blog about how things are going during the week..

Thursday night..

This has been a very hard week, everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and I have been so stressed out with the house move and everything that on Tuesday night I actually beleived that I couldn't handle anymore!

I had spent a lot of the day in tears, crying for no apparent reason and by the evening it just got to much for me. I actually told my friend that I would jump of 'Beachy Head' a well known suicide point in the UK? I don't think I would have actually done it though, it was just that I had no fight left in me to carry on. Thankfully I didn't do anything stupid and am still here to tell the tale.

Its strange what stress and life can do to a person, one minute I am fine the next I feel I can't cope at all anymore? Why I have no idea at all. As a child or young adult I managed to live through all the 'Abuse' that came my way and coped with it as best I could, but now I am stronger and trying to deal with it all, on top of selling my house and trying to move away from here and it all gets to much for me? I found out on Tuesday morning that the house I grew up in has been sold at auction for £126,000 some poor sucker has money to throw away I guess and spent it on that hovel! I hope they are planning on demolishing it completely and starting afresh, because it has way to many bad memories for me and many others in this small town.
Time will tell eh!

It was confirmed today by my solicitor that we will exchange contracts on my new house tomorrow and complete, i.e. move in next friday (27th) fingers crossed eh! as long as the stress of it all doesn't get to me first I should make it. I really can't wait to get in there and see what I can do to the house apart from a new kitchen and bathroom.. it needs redecorating throughout... we'll get there eh!

Tomorrow is therapy once again and I am going to try and tell my therapist whats been going on this week, about how low I really got on tuesday evening, we'll see what she suggests I can do to help me cope better, the nightmares are back again as are the flashbacks and I am having major problems coping with them all.. I hope they settle down soon!

Sunday Afternoon..

I'm not really sure what to do right now? I have had a friend visiting me this weekend who is being Abused at home by family members! She is a grown woman and to escape moved from the UK to The States.. but sometimes she has to return here on business as in this visit..

Naturally when she is back she likes to visit her mum, but there are other members of the family i.e Uncles and Cousins who seem to get pleasure in Raping and abusing her..
She arrived in the UK on the thursday before easter and went to her mum's house, by the Sunday her Uncles called and told her to go round where they raped her again, she has the bruises on her thighs to prove it! By tuesday she left on business and then came to see me for the weekend.

My dilema now, is that this morning she had to return home, and I took her to the train station! knowing that when she gets back it is very likely that she will be raped again! Before she left I gave her all the options open to her, from stating NO! this ends now! reporting what is happening to the police, calling me to collect her, going home to The States early, or just not going back to her family at all! I even gave her a help line number and made her promise me that she would do all she could to prevent this happening again.. So why do I feel so bad? Why do I feel so angry? I really do not understand how people can be so damned cruel? They tell her that she is evil and she beleives them? But I know her to be a kind caring person with a heart of gold.. obviously this is their way of keeping control over her, by telling her she is evil and they are cleansing her? What the hell! As if being RAPED cleanses anyone? in fact it makes you feel extremely dirty used and horrible...

I know its likely that by about 6pm tonight my friend will be raped once more by so called caring family members yet there is nothing I can do to stop it happening to her! I had told her that I would call the police, so she won't give us her full address in the UK, all I know is that she is in the leeds area of England and this terrible ordeal awaits her! I feel so helpless right now!

There are no agencies I can call on for advice, the police would think me crazy and probably lock me up if I called them and said 'I think my friend is about to be raped' So what can I do other than sit here trying not to think about what might happen? I'm tearing myself apart as is my friend who lives with me.... there seems to be nothing we can do to help her except be there to pick up the pieces afterwards!... and that is so hard to do when we sit thinking about what we have done! we took her to the train station, we let her go knowing what awaited her! but it was the choice she made as she explained if she didn't go back it would be worse for her in the long run! So we sit it out and hope that she is strong enough to stop it happening again, strong enough to say 'enough is enough'....

We did ask her to send us daily text messages to let us know she is safe, if we don't get those we will try to contact her.. but if we can't! Do we assume that something has happened? or do we wait for her to contact us, if she does? Do we just sit here knowing what may have happened and do nothing? WHAT CAN WE DO???

Friday 13th April...

An unlucky day some may say? But so far today it has been pretty good for me, I have a friend visiting from The States and although we have chatted on line for nearly two years we had never met! But today we finally did.. We met up after I had been to therapy as I usually do on a friday.. thankfully todays session wasn't to hard for me..

Today I confirmed to my therapist that I am moving house in just two weeks time, so will not make it to that session, we talked briefly about whats been going on for me these past few weeks since I saw her last time, and I told her the sort of thing thats been going on! very diverse different things that are mainly involved due to the move, things that will settle again once I am settled in my new house..

Then she asked me about how I'm different today to what I had been like as a child, a big question really as I am so different these past two years than I have ever been before. Just tow years ago if anyone dared to raise their voice at me 'out would come kate the mouse' I would shy away into a corner rather than face a confrontation of any kind. Don't get me wrong I still don't handle confrontation easily but I am getting better at it, occassionally I will say my bit but a lot depends on who it is with! For instance just a few days ago I had to have a tradesman round to the new house to measure up for my new kitchen, I told him what I'd been promised by the store and he told me that I was expecting miracles! I said no, just what I was promised and he started raising his voice at me, my friends who were in the other room at the time felt that he was being aggressive and came into the kitchen ready to pounce ...I had reverted back to the mouse, it was a man shouting at me! I just can't handle that at all... but put me in a room with women shouting and I'll hold my own anyday, I can cope with it over the phone as well without any problem but just not face to face.

Jane explained to me that this was likely because as a child when 'he' shouted at me it was usually in advance of being beaten etc so now when a man raises his voice its 'triggering' me back to the day when it happened regularly. I really do hate it when this happens as I feel that I lose all my confidence and am unable to care for myself properly.. If a man shouts at me I just want to run away! Afraid of what they may do if I stay around! So it's not good for me to be in these situations at all.

I had another incident this past week that has caused me to lose faith in my own son! I do not trust him right now, he has totally broken my trust with an incident that has happened. I had put a DVD in my underwear drawer as I didn't want him to watch it, but somehow, most likely when I was out he went into my bedroom and through my stuff to find it, I noticed it missing on Monday and asked him about it, he denied all knowledge of its whereabouts but I found it on Tuesday in a box he had packed? When I asked about it he said he had no idea how it got there? Yet he claimed his friends had not been upstairs when they were here last week! The last time I saw the DVD was a week ago? SO who else could have taken it and placed it in his room and then box ? If it wasn't him!

I know in my heart that he took it, he invaded my privacy and broke my trust all in one day, yet when confronted he is not man enough to admit his mistakes, He has made me feel violated all over again? unsafe in my own home unable to be myself! Yet just either doesn't understand or just doesn't care about how much he has hurt me even though when we spoke about it I ended up in tears? How heartless! I honestly thought he was a kind sensitive lad who was concerned for me and my feelings, but I guess I was wrong once again!

The way I handle things these days is so different to how I reacted as a child, I am now determined that NO ONE will ever hurt me again, no one will ever be allowed that close to me so they can hurt me the way I was hurt as a child.. It's been a long hard road that I've had to climb to get to this point and there is still a long way to go yet but I will travel the distance and get my life back to where I think it should be going. No one is going to stop me anymore! Especially a man! There was a time not so long ago when my ex husband would come to visit the children and he would treat my house as though it was his, but eventually I complained about it and it no longer happens, in fact he hasn't really been down now for nearly a year! which suits me great.. I told him straight that he gave up the right to tell me what to do the day he walked out on us all.. and it worked, that was the first time in my life that I'd stood upto a man and I won! It was a great feeling and one I hope to have again.. Jane asked me what made me do it that particular day and I told her that I'd been talking to a friend on line the night before telling her he was coming down and how much I dreaded it, she persuaded me that I didn't have to take it anymore and should try to stand up to him! well I did and he crumbled..so that alone gave me the courage to try and get stronger for myself and my children, it was the best thing I'd done since leaving home at the age of 16yrs..

Obviously sometimes I still get upset and 'triggered' by shouting, especially if its by a man like the other day, but it doesn't happen as much these days, I'm getting more confident in my own abilities to say what I think and will not be spoken down to anymore, I deserve better and will get it!.

Jane asked me as a child how it felt to be shouted at and beaten! and I said from what I remember it was horrible, I used to try and cower in a corner or get out of the way whenever I could, that wasn't always possible of course and if it led to a beating then I had to endure it without crying, because if I cried I got hit more! and when he hit it wasn't just with a hand but often with a belt, buckle end, or a cane or even his slipper if nothing else was around.. I often had welts and bruises from the beatings but no one noticed or if they did they didn't care enough to do anything about it! It was a horrible way to grow up and one I wish no one else had to experience, though unfortunately hundreds and thousands of other people have expereinced it and many still do every day! When will it all end? When will people realise that CHILD ABUSE IS WRONG? Someday soon I hope!

Sunday Morning..

Well thankfully I am now able to access the internet from home once again, Had been disconnected by my ISP over a week ago in error but it took them a full week to re connect me! Appalling 'Customer Service' to say the least! They charge a fortune to have the broadband and then when they mess up they just don't care about leaving you in the lurch.. well hopefully this past week I have shown them that the 'Customer' does count! as without them there would be no jobs for any of them.
I actually got so angry with one call centre on friday, a so called 'technical help desk' that I told the Manager that he needed to re train himself and his staff to give the right information to the customer, it turned out that they had given me the wrong user ID and that was why my router wouldn't connect me! I had even gone out and purchased a new one thinking mine was broken! So £50 down the drain because of incompetance... luckily for me I have one good manager contact within my ISP and she has told me that they will cover the cost.. but that alone is not good enough.. the inconvenience of not being on line last week was costing us big time, we work from home here and had to get a connection from a friends house just to do our job! thankfully my employer knew it wasn't down to me and was kind enough to let us do what we could..

As for me! well I'm looking forward to moving away from this house in just 3 weeks time... if it actually happens this time! we have started packing now with avengance and having a big sort out at the same time, throwing away as much stuff as we can, see I'm a bit of a hoarder and sometimes keep things 'just in case' I might need them... but now I am looking forward to a fresh start in a new home and trying to clear out some of the stuff that I know we won't need.. can only be a good thing eh!

Once I'm settled in the new house I intend to start writing my second book about my life and the Abuse I suffered.. some of it will be the poems I have written on the subject and some story about how things really wee for me growing up in the house from hell! My sisters have all supported me in the writing of the book and hopefully they will help me fill in any blanks that I have to make it as true an account as is possible.. it will be factual not fictional... I know its going to be a hard book to write and will no doubt stir up many memories, but I have those anyway so what will be new? maybe it will help me to sort things out in my head and realise that I have in fact Survived it all and can move forward in my own life!.. time will tell eh!

Wednesday afternoon..

Its been a very hard week, and seems to be getting harder by the day.. the nightmares are back with a vengeance as are the flashbacks. The added stress in my life right now isn't helping me either.. but I have no idea what I can do about it all..
In trying to let some of it out I wrote a poem last night about 'Customer Service' or lack of it...

My Feelings are REAL!!


Anger, Sorrow, Feelings and Stress,
No matter what, I cannot guess.
'Customer Service' is no more,
Many companies have shown it the door!
They used to say, 'The Customers right',
But don't anymore, that's my plight.
Appalling Service, but no one will hear,
They don't need our business, have no fear!
Treat us like dirt, they just don't care,
So every customer, please be aware.
The list is long, grows by the day,
There's no way for customers, to have a say!
There's BT, B&Q Comet and more,
All have shown 'Customer Service' the door.
What can we do? Boycott them all?
My nerves are in tatters, heading for a fall.
They all mess up, push you from pillar to post,
At the end of it all. it's us who have lost.
No idea how to talk, or show respect to me,
What is their problem? Why can't they see?
They'll lose the business, they may even go bust,
Because non of their customers, in them can trust!
They don't keep their promises, give us false hope,
How on earth do they expect us to cope?
Lies after lies, is what their employees tell,
Maybe its time for me to tell them as well?
I've kicked some butt! not been very kind,
But it serves them right, because they are all blind.
Blind to the distress and sorrow I feel,
It's time for them to realise, my feelings are REAL!

Maybe this will go a little way to explain what is happening for me right now, in my everyday Life, it seems to be one problem after the other, as I get one thing sorted out something else happens to me and adds the stress back up! I feel as though I am heading for a melt down, I'm losing weight again which I really can't afford to do as my weight is low enough already.. But unless I can find a better way to deal with stress in my life this will no doubt continue.. I have yet another new laptop now and this one is vista enabled, but can I get into all the programmes that I'm used to? Nope! It won't let me into windows messenger so I can't even talk to my friends on line for extra support when I need it... I just want to scream at everyone!!!

AAArrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh !!!!!

Well.....

It's been a week and a half of stress, stress, stress.. first of all my house move didn't happen! Due to an incompetant Solicitor.. its been delayed until the end of April.. so another 4 weeks of feeling unsafe at home..
To top all that my internet provider decided in its wisdom to disconnect me anyways? I have been fighting them since last thursday to get my connection back on. What happened basically is that I had booked to have the connection stopped on 30 march, but on the 20th when I was told we would not be moving I cancelled it, in their wisdom the guy didn't do his job correctly and the order went ahead anyways.. So I have no internet at home at all at the moment. My Niece has very kindly allowed me to come over to her house and use her connection today.. hense how I am here now writing this..
I hope to be back on line at home by thursday morning! if not there will be some major phone calls being made to get it sorted out..
I saw my therapist on friday as is usual, and had a weird session.. its always the way if I am not seeing her for a week or so as she doesn't want to leave me thinking of anything difficult for a length of time.. this last week we were talking about how different things are for my son against how I was at the same age..

Its easy to compare really, he is now 18yr old,living at home with all the comforts that brings whilst he completes his education, at his age I was living alone in London struggling to get to work each day and look after myself, I had no one to call on if things were hard... it was a very lonely time in my life... my average day back then was getting up in the morning and going to work, when I came home at night I would usually watch a bit of TV before going to bed.. I led a very lonely life back then.. it was strange talking about how my life was in those days..