#11 More fights, affairs and a trespass order.

Blog # 11

I don’t want to bore you with journal notes, but these last few will show you Craigs state of mind during the last couple months he was awaiting deportation. His attorney had prepared both Craig and I for the inevitable, so he was dealing with the stress of never seeing his family in the US again, and I was dealing with raising the boys on my own after their Dad is deported to another country.

Journal

Fri 04-20-2001

Craig got mad at me on the phone again today. He says I’m not loving and affectionate enough, then he hung up on me.

I left work at 2:30pm very distressed and upset. He attacks me on almost every phone call. I can’t take it any more. He is upset because I told him I was going to dinner with Kathy (my sister) tonight.

Then Kathy called and was running late, so we met up at 8:30pm. She had been in an argument with her husband and needed to vent, so we chatted and hung out until midnight. Honestly, I needed the time away from the phone too. After I got home Craig called me at 1am. He was very mad that my cell phone was off, I told him I was in bed already. We had another big fight, I feel like he is always picking on me.

 I don’t remember how he was calling me on my cell phone at this point, but he was.

Sat 04-21-2001

Craig called me and we got into another big fight. He says I am not being affectionate enough again. It seems every phone call is about me not being supportive enough of him. That is all we discuss anymore.

Sun 04-22-2001

Craig called me at 10am. After I answered Hello he immediately said it sounded like I didn’t want to talk to him. I was flabbergasted! He is so sensitive and emotional, which is understandable, but I don’t know how to deal with it. He is irrational and illogical.

He called me again later while I was at Denny's with Mom, Kathy and the kids. For the entire 30 minutes of the call, I was defending myself from all his accusations. I told him I was in a restaurant with my Mom, Kathy and the kids but he just kept on yelling. I had to sit there and take attack after attack about how unsupportive I am and how I don’t care about him, and how unaffectionate I am. I started shaking with anxiety again. He pushes and pushes, it is so difficult. He interrogates everything I say and tries to trick me into saying something conflicting. SO frustrating!! He is threatening to call my Mom! Why?? She would not be able to handle his anger, threats and attacks.Why would he want to involve my mother? I didn’t ever call his mom when he CHEATED on me, why does he want to involve my mother??

On a side note, my family still had no idea how bad our relationship had become. I just told them Craig was stressed and hurt and scared of losing his family, but I didn’t ever tell them how bad things were. Somehow I felt like that would be deceiving him, and it wasn’t right to do that to him.

Friday 04-27-2001

Craig and I had another big fight today. I had mentioned to him I was getting a lot of unknown numbers calling on my cell phone, and he said that meant I have a boyfriend!! What?? How does he come up with this ridiculous stuff?? I exploded. I totally blew up at him.

END OF JOURNAL NOTES

For some reason, I didn’t write in my planner for the whole month of May. Maybe I was writing somewhere else, but I don’t know where.

HOME FROM CO

In June, I received a phone call from Craig. He was at the Salt Lake Airport. He had been suddenly released. The INS had said they couldn’t find another country to accept him, and they had already accepted the Political Asylum plea for South Africa, so they decided to send him back home. They told him to stay out of trouble, basically not to so much as spit on the sidewalk, and if he stayed out of trouble he would stay under the radar and be ok. He had been given another chance!! I think this was the second one I knew of. No prison time for the felonies, and now escaping deportation.

But now my hell was about to start.

Once Craig was back home I quickly realized he was a very different person than who I knew before he went to CO. He was much more demanding and insecure. I knew that he had suffered a very traumatic event and so I did everything I could to keep him happy. We went to a see a counselor, that Craig had chosen, and that counselor diagnosed Craig with possible bipolar disorder, triggered by a traumatic experience, almost immediately. He asked Craig to take some blood tests etc but Craig refused. He also refused to take any medication, stating that he wouldn’t take anything “to make Eve feel better”. Craig would argue with him until he had no more answers. (Something I was very familiar with). This counselor was clearly scared of Craig and finally he refused us coming back to see him because we were not following his counsel. Craig called him a wimp (he used much worse profanity) with no back bone, yelled at him and marched out of his office.

Craig went back to massaging his same clients, including Bruce and Liz. He talked Bruce into funding a coffee shop for me because I had always dreamed of running my own coffee shop. Bruce trusted Craig like a son and gave him anything he asked for. By Feb 2002 Bruce had given us $250K to design, construct and open our coffee shop. He paid for it as it was built, and Craig would take the invoices to Bruce, who would hand Craig a check to cover each invoice as we received it. Everything was put into my name, including the bank account, because of Craigs record. But Craig came and went as he pleased, he didn’t want to be tied down to it, so it worked out well for him this way.

I LOVED that coffee shop! It was my baby and I loved everything about it. It was also a good place to be when I didn’t want to be home with Craig. I would be there from 5am to 8pm almost everyday except Sunday. Wil was 14 and would drive up there at 4:30am to start all the machines and get it ready to open. By 7am he hopped onto his bicycle and rode off to school. After school he would come back and work until we closed and come home with me. Everyday. He was incredible!  The younger boys would come hang out after school, and then go home and Craigs parents would do their homework with them and cook dinner for us. I think I have said this before, but to this day I am SO grateful for all the help we received from them. They ran the boys around to their activities and ran the home without me. I worked really hard in the coffee shop and wanted it to be a successful business.

Unfortunately my relationship with Craig just intensified in the worst way. He became extremely obsessive and possessive and so insecure it drove me crazy. According to cell phone records he called me 70 times a day. Literally every 10 to 15 minutes he had to reach me or he would become furious. I could be serving customers or paying bills or cleaning the ice cream machine….none of that mattered to him. If I loved him, I would want to talk to him all the time and pick up the phone every time he called, and never sound too busy to talk.

During this time Craig brought Liz back into our lives. He told me he had always wanted a threesome and after his 6 months in jail he deserved it. He told me it had nothing to do with love, just the thrill of the game. I was already torn apart. My heart was shattered and my emotions were raw. The last thing in the world I wanted was to deal with another woman in my marriage. I literally remember sitting on the side of our bath tub one day, with tears pouring down my face, begging Craig to just give our marriage a chance. He could not understand it. It was ALL about him. He reminded me that he could cheat on me behind my back, but he didn’t want to do that. He wanted me to be a part of this joyful and exciting experience with him. I never, ever agreed to it, but he made it happen regardless. He was always talking to Liz about business, but I could hear by the sweet, flirtatious way he spoke to her on the phone that he was “working” her. All I could do was tell him I did not want it, I was already very hurt by his previous affairs, and that I would not be able to give him this last thing he asked of me. He made me feel a lot of guilt, he reminded me how terrible his 6 months in jail was and he told me I owed it to him for all the pain he had suffered.

So Liz would arrive at our house, late at night after everyone was in bed, with a bottle of wine. She was always very nice to me and part of me believes that Craig had convinced her I wanted to be part of this game. One thing would lead to another and once we got to the bedroom Craig would have his pleasure with both of us. By the time Liz left, I felt empty and used and very, very lonely. Craig was very happy and excited and could not even see the devastation in my face, let alone feel the pain of what he was doing to me.

This happened a few times. Everytime I begged Craig to stop, we would end up fighting and he would win. It got to the the point where I refused to participate. So Craig made excuses to Liz, for me, that I wasn’t feeling well or something, but I had to sit on the bedroom floor and watch…..and get this….to MAKE LIZ FEEL COMFORTABLE! Apparently she was picking up the vibe that I was not happy and didn’t want to do this, so Craig made me sit and watch to prove to Liz that I was fully supportive. I felt sick to my stomach and the walls around my heart grew very thick.

Then one day Craig didn’t even tell me she was coming over, so when I opened the door and saw her standing there with a bottle of wine, I burst into tears. I couldn’t help myself. She was very shocked and asked me what was wrong. Craig was standing right there and glaring at me, so I lied and told her I was sick and she was welcome to stay, but I was going to go next door to my friends house to lie down. I went over to my best friend next door, (I will call her Olivia for her privacy) and just cried. I told her, and her husband, what was going on and they could not believe it. While I was talking to them, less than 15 minutes, we noticed Liz’s car leave from the front of my house. And then Craig came over to Olivia's house and started pounding on the door. He came in and was SO ANGRY that I had upset Liz and made her feel so bad that she left. Craig was in a rage. So Olivia's husband told Craig to leave a number of times and then ended up calling the police because he would not leave and was raging so much. Craig received a trespass order that night. One of many to follow.

And here we are at 4 pages already!!

As a heads up I will tell you that Craig arrived home from CO in June of 2001. I eventually moved out in June/July of 2002. I will give you the details of the year before I left, and then there is a horrendous year after I left, until he was arrested in July 2003. Then came years of letters of manipulation and more threats.

So you have LOTS more to hear about, and I am busy putting it all together for you everyday.

I also have some pictures I can post of my facebook page so please make sure you are following that too!

Thanks again for your support, Keep love in your heart always!!