Why I Can’t Seem to Clean Out My Closet

Many years ago before I met my sweet Randy and after my divorce from my kids’ father, I met a man who convinced me I was damaged goods.  I was 30 years old, divorced, and had two small children, who was going to want to take that on?  In hindsight, I can only admit that I was extremely vulnerable after being replaced by a nineteen year old.  I believed at the time that the love of my life was gone forever and that I should just settle for whoever would have my children and me.  He was thoroughly convincing and was truly a con artist doing an outstanding snow job.  I took the bait, hook, line and sinker and will regret it to my dying day.

This man slowly but very surely alienated me from my friends.  The divorce had taken care of that with the only family I had in Arkansas.  Eventually he convinced me we should move out to California where his family lived so that’s what we did.  Very quickly I begin to realize what a huge lack of judgment I’d made for not just me, but my precious babies as well.  I won’t go into all the details but it turned out to be the biggest mistake of my life.

Three days before we finally were able to leave California this man and I had the biggest argument I’ve ever had with anyone.  It got physically abusive and resulted in me being pushed so hard I blacked out for a few seconds.  I slid down the wall my head had hit and when I begin to slowly open my eyes, what lay within an inch of my right hand?  A perfect weapon, a child’s T-ball bat, and the man who needed me to hit him with it bending over me at the perfect angle.  Without a single doubt, to this day I believe God provided me with that bat.  I grabbed it, began to rise, and swung the bat with all my might in one fluid motion.  It landed squarely on his nose with a satisfying crunching sound and that nose immediately began bleeding profusely. He yelled as he grabbed it and said, “You broke my focking nose!”

“Good!” was my reply as I rushed out the door and ran to the neighbor’s house where both my kids were playing with her two.  Those kind people let us stay at their house for three days while my brother-in-law flew out to help us.

During those three days that man managed to clean out my entire walk-in closet including shoes, purses, jewelry, hats, underwear, bras, all my work clothes, jeans, t-shirts, blouses, skirts, everything, except one set of sweats and a pair of tennis shoes.  He did the same thing with my kids’ things as well.  Not only that, he put sugar in my car’s gas tank.  Ruined it.  My brother-in-law called the police and said he’d stolen all of these things from me but the cop looked me straight in the eye and said, “I think you should count your blessings and get on back to Texas.”

So that’s what we did after my brother-in-law bought us some more sweats at K-Mart and home we drove.  I’ve never regretted leaving him. 

An after affect of this trauma is that I can’t seem to clean out my closet.  I might need those things!  Who knows when someone will take everything I have accumulated over the years!  I guess I have PTSD but it is what it is, right?  Do you think I should get some help?