The decision was made that living all cramped up in a small one bedroom flat was obviously the cause of all our problems.....
He quickly became totally bored with the responsibilities of being a landlord so the flat was put on the market and quickly sold but the big question was what we should do with the little bit of the small profit we had made from the sale of it ?
His answer was simple , it should all go into a savings account ( remember I owned 30% of it ) but at the time I obviously didn't have a bank account so he very kindly sorted it all out with his own bank for us . It stayed in there earning a lovely bit of interest until a few years later when the decision was made and it was all spent on buying him a lovely nice new car and my 30% share was never to be seen again .
It's now almost the late 90's we had a nice house with a garden and I was now a mum of 2 . He still had those bad days when you didn't know what he could do next or when he would do it but at least I could now escape from him by being in the garden with the children or at least in another room . In fact sitting in the garden on a hot summers evening with fairy lights glowing is still one of my favourite things .
He'd discovered we could claim a few nice benifits so the forms were all filled in and sent off then everything of course naturally all went into his bank account and I of course never saw a penny of it .
It was about this time that the " fat , useless and ugly " comments first started to appear and from then on it was said almost daily . He hated the fact that our nice new neighbours liked to have a little chat over the garden fence sometimes and that the elderly lady up the road would ask the favour of me doing a little bit of washing for her , so again the neighbours had their chats during the day and the washing got done whilst he was at work instead and in return she would give me a little bit of money to buy the children some sweeties on the way home from school .
In fact he hated any form of contact with anyone so we very rarely went out for an evening let alone have anyone come round , even the children as they got older hardly ever had any of their school friends come round to play .
I'd become quite good at spotting when his moods where about to change but just occasionly like a volcano he would suddenly erupt unexpectedly and I'd get the full force of it . There were still times I thought I was about to get a smack for daring to disagree but looking back now I don't think he was ever brave enough to go ahead with it .
I know the neighbours heard him a few times kicking off because I would get asked " is everything alright ? " occasionly but I'd do the typical standard cover up pretending everything was just fine ( maybe I was becoming a little bit too good at doing this ) .
Emotional and mental abuse is a vile thing , it slowly burns away inside the very core of your soul creating unseen bruises and scars . It chips away at your sanity till you begin to seriously wonder is it really is all your fault after all . You start believing just how " fat , useless and ugly " you must be and that it all must be true that even your own family doesn't like you because if they did why didnt they want to visit you ? " .
You even learn to cry silent invisible tears over time because they seem to really enjoy seeing you upset so you learn to hide it well . In a weird way they sort of recharge their batteries by creating as much negativity as they possibly can and then when their finished they act like nothing has ever happened which then in turn leads you to question if any of it actually did happen in the first place 🤔
Confusing isn't it .