I Married A Creepy Stalker

I think the title says it all. I'll just get right to the meat of the whole topic. This is his weekend, which means that the children are with him. This also means that this is my weekend to do whatever in the hell I want, which is basically sleep. I got up early this morning to get my oil changed, and then made it back home pretty early, and watched some TV, cleaned my bathroom and my bedroom, and decided I had had enough. Nap time. So I put this little tripe post on facebook that says something to the effect of "I've been up long enough to need a nap" or something to that effect.

I get in bed and drift off, because I can sleep anywhere, anytime. But then the phone rings, about an hour after my post and a half an hour into my nap. It's The Ex. Here's the entire conversation:

The Ex: Hey, Steph, sorry to wake you up from your nap, but where are the shirts that go under the cheerleading uniforms?
Me: They haven't come in yet.
But I'm thinking, it's 80-some degrees outside and they don't need to wear their turtlenecks and besides, the game isn't for another five hours. Why are you calling now about this?
The Ex: Oh, okay. What about the hair bows?
Me: I told you the other night I would bring those to the game with me and do their hair there.
The Ex: Oh, that's right. Well, go back to sleep then.
Me: Hangs the phone up.

And here's the creepy part of this exchange. I un-friended him from facebook in February and my profile and everything on my page is private. This means that you can see my picture, send me a message and send me a friend request. That's it. I know this because I'm super secret about my stuff for the masses, because of where I work and what I do. I'm not one of these people who thinks I have a private profile but don't, I'm one of those people who actually do. When I un-friended The Ex, I cut most of our mutual friends out, unless they were friends who I brought to the relationship. Periodically, I've culled the herd even further down. I left a couple of people who were his friends, because we had the same games, and because I thought these people were mature enough not to be passing on my information to him. As of this afternoon, those few remaining people will no longer be able to count me as a facebook friend.

Well, I realized as soon as he got the first sentence out of his mouth that he's still watching me. I swear, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and my heart started beating a little faster. I thought, oh my god, he's still watching me. If you've never felt like an someone is watching you, studying you, memorizing your every move, you have no idea how absolutely terrifying and blood chilling this is. This is how I felt through most of my marriage, although not constantly. But every now and then, I would catch him just staring at me. I would catch him watching me doing nothing. And the way he looked at me then was creepy. He would randomly show up at my office, and if my car wasn't in the parking lot, he would sit there in the parking lot and wait for me to come back to work.  Sometimes, when we were married, I would wake up in the middle of the night and he would be leaning over me asking me questions, I suppose trying to get me to talk in my sleep (which I do sometimes). He would search my car, go through my phone, find a reason to be in the room with me when I was talking with my girlfriends on the phone, and he hacked into my email. I found out later that he even answered my work cell periodically. There were times during the separation when I was sleeping on the sofa, and I would wake up to see him in the glow of the blinking blue Wii connector watching me in the dark. I would lay there, and fake sleep, and watch him between through my almost closed eyes, and try to keep my breathing even so he wouldn't know I knew he was watching me. He tried to insist that he would be the person who moved me into my new house, and then tried to insist that we should exchange keys to each other's houses just in case of something. Yeah, I don't think so. After I moved out, we arranged for him to drop something off at my house and leave it on the front porch. He texted me later that day and asked if I wanted him to get rid of a piece of gutter laying in the side yard. Okay, we agreed he would leave the bag on the front porch - why the fuck would you be in the side yard? So now I insist that he not drop anything at my house unless it's the children. My mother is of the opinion that he probably rides by my house at night when he doesn't have the children. The whole thing is just so creepy, it's almost creepy scary. I still catch him looking at me sometimes, when we have to be somewhere together, watching me, and I fucking hate it. I hate the way he makes me feel, I hate him for being the way he is and I hate me for marrying him. 

The hardest thing of all for me is when I wonder if I was in an abusive marriage. I mean, it was never physically abusive, although there were a couple of fights where things went south so quickly I was pretty sure I was within a few seconds of getting the living shit beat out of me. Of course, when someone is screaming that they're going to drag you by your fucking hair and make you do what they want, this would be easy to believe. I keep going back to this thought in my head, how could I marry someone abusive? How could I have married someone who treated me like this? I'm too fucking strong for this, I'm too smart and I've got too much experience in the ways of how this stuff works for me to have married someone who thinks it's okay to threaten me, to intimidate me, to throw stuff at me, to manipulate me and guilt me into as much as he did. He told me for years that the reason he did all of these things was because of the way I treated him--he had no choice. I drove him to it, and that's left me wondering if I'm the one with the problem, if I'm the one who caused and created all of our problems. But somewhere deep within me, I know that's not it. After all of these years, I feel like the fog in my brain might be clearing and I know that it wasn't all my fault. I wasn't the person that he almost succeeded in making me believe that I was. I think my shroud of denial about this marriage is slowly falling away, and I'm faced with the fact that this probably was an abusive marriage, and no one else has named it as that because either they just don't know, or they don't want to be the person to say it out loud.  When I make little pithy comments on here about the psychopath I married, please believe that I'm not joking. I'm being dead serious.

I wonder to myself, what do I have to do to get this man to leave me alone? What do I have to do to feel normal again, to not feel paranoid? Sometimes, I think the paranoia is in my head, maybe this is one of the after effects of being in a marriage that was never right, and maybe this is me just kind of slowly working my way out of the shell shock. He told me for years that I was the fucking nutjob, and that I was the one who needed psychiatric help, and that I was the one who had all the problems. It's hard not to kind of start to believe that, if you hear it enough. I decided a few months ago, the best revenge for all the shit he's done to me will be for me to just live well and look good doing it. But then something like today's phone call happens, and it's hard to feel like you're living well when you're being semi-creeped, or whatever you can call this dysfunctional shit. It's frustrating, too, because he has a girlfriend. Why make comments or worry about what I'm doing? Worry about your girlfriend, although, that woman will turn into me one day and will run the fuck away from him, too. I guess if there's any lesson in this, it will be that The Ex is the first and last creepy stalker I'll ever marry.