Chapter 46 - Moving to the Property - from my book Changes

Chapter 46

Moving to the Property

I flew home after that month at the property with my sister, and my husband and I rented a moving truck and packed it with everything I thought I would need to set up a little nest at the property, leaving most things at the house in Florida since my husband would still be living and working there much of the year.

Looking back at how we arrived at the property with that moving truck makes me laugh every time I think of it.

We had no structures built.  It was getting dark.  We laid out a tarp on the ground to sleep on, with some bedding on it, and we all laid down together for the night.  Then it started raining.

My husband got a tarp out of the truck and threw it over us and did his best to trench around the tarps to keep the rain water from coming in to where we were laying.  I don’t even remember why we has those big tarps with us, but I’m so glad we did!

We managed to stay dry under the tarps, though it was a very different experience sleeping in a pile of cuddled up people, with a tarp laying on all of us, keeping the pattering rain off us.  But we did finally sleep.

At that point in time we had our two oldest daughters off on their own, our oldest son on a church mission, and that left the younger 6 children with us.  The youngest being about 4 years old at the time.

The next day we realized how silly we were to think we could just unpack our furniture and household things on a property where we had no structures to house them!  We went into town and found a storage space to unload all our furniture and household things we brought, taking only the most basic necessities to the property with us.  Then we went to the the local Walmart and bought some tents for us to live in while we figured out what to do next.

Looking back I can see I was just a little bit out of my mind, but having been so depressed previously, I was taking drastic measured to escape my desperately unhappy situation.

During the Seven Levels of Quest class I had recently taken, I talked to my teacher Malcolm Ringwalt about my decision to leave my husband, and how I was worried how it would affect the children, I remember him asking me how it would influence them if I stayed.  That helped me feel more solid in my decision to leave.  I didn’t want them to think that a person should stay in an abusive relationship just because they are married.

. . .

My husband spent time reading the books I insisted he read.  Whether he actually read them completely or not, he got the gist of them and apologized profusely for having acted the way he did.  He said he didn’t realize he was being abusive.  I think that may be true, because we behave the way we are brought up for the most part, and the things the book describes as abuse are not at all uncommon ways people try to communicate with each other.

Patricia Evans’ books Controlling People and The Verbally Abusive Relationship go into detail about how we talk to each other and how we may be unwittingly abusing each other.  I highly recommend the two books.  My husband, after reading the books, even bought extra copies to give to his clients he thought would benefit from them.