Fiery Mama’s Blog

Archive for April, 2019

Mama’s on a mission!!

Today is a new day and today is the beginning to a new me, its time to be more open, its time for me to tell the world my story! So where do all stories start from the beginning of course…

On a warm summers day in mid July all was going swell…… ugh! Scrap that garbage right… In 2011, this is the year it all starts and as i go on I may need to go back a couple times to make sure i have all the details just right. But bare with me. So here we go again, in the year of 2011 my son and I were living in a rental property in Gore, Southland. My son was all of 8 years old, he went to a Primary School not far from where we were residing, if i remember so it was all of about 3 blocks away. This was perfect as my son was at that age where he liked to bike to school on his own, he was gaining his independence and i was one very proud Mother. Of course id still watch him with eager eyes from the window until he made it around the corner and I could no longer see him. Nonetheless he’d be home at 3:10pm on the dot everyday like clockwork. I was a stay at home mum for the most part, but during the day I would work casually for a small lawn mowing company, this worked out well as I could do this during school hours and if my son was home sick, I could just stay home with him and the owners would work around that which was really appreciated. We had it good for the most part, a nice rental, good school, friends. Life was moving forward and we were getting places.

I don’t know why I felt anything needed to change, everything was going so good with our little lives, but i had a void in my heart, an emptiness, I wanted another baby. My son was getting older and I thought to myself, I really shouldn’t leave it to much longer before he had a baby brother or sister to get along with and give him what i have with all 8 of my sisters, an unbreakable life bond. But how do you have a baby without a man!? I barely went out, I didn’t want to end up with some drunk at the pub, that’s no way to find a life partner… so i did what any desperado woman interested in looking for love does when you live in a small rural town… I signed up to a dating site. It wasn’t long before I of course had perverts galore messaging me, asking if I wanted a one night stand, or if I’d give them advice on what the best Panty Hose brand was at the time, or even just sending dirty pictures of there you know whats with no words attached like really! if you want a woman’s attention you don’t send them your floppy skin and think its going to turn us on because believe me it just doesn’t. It took a wee while of dodgy emails and reading through profiles to come across a farmer boy, from an ever smaller place called Tuatapere, but still not too far away we couldn’t visit each other. We started emailing back and forth, which led to texting then phone calls that would last for hours… 3 months went by and we still hadn’t met but i thought this guy was the bees knees, he was hard working as he spent most of his time driving a tractor when we were on the phone late at night. He was sweet but shy at times, had a lovely phone manner. He told me he would come and meet me as soon as his new vehicle had arrived it was coming down from Auckland he said to me, a Holden Crewman Double Cab Ute, like i had a clue what that was at the time. I said I had a vehicle, mine was a cute wee 2 door Mazda MX5, just enough seats for my son and I. I didn’t mind coming over to see him at his home, but he refused and told me it was more romantic if I waited for him. So that was fine. I didn’t rush the subject. I decided to go on a bit of a holiday to Melbourne for 2 weeks during this waiting period so to speak, I had gotten some modeling jobs over there and thought YES!! what a way to make some money, my flights were paid for and I had an absolute blast of a time over there, I stayed with a wonderful family, who were very hospitable to myself. My son stayed with his Dad in the North Island when I went over there so I didn’t have to worry about not being around for him as I made sure it worked around his holiday contact time. The Family I stayed with took me to their local Speedway where their young son raced cars. I did the couple gigs I had planned on doing while there, it was an epic time. But soon that 2 weeks was over and I headed back home, the next weekend this was in February 2012, this man i was previously crushing on over the phone, came to meet me in person. I got a bit of a shock at first when i seen him walking up my driveway, as you see I had only ever seen 2 pictures of his face this whole time we were talking, he was quite the big boy. I thought to myself is this why he put off coming to meet me for so long because he was ashamed of the way he looked? Oh well i shrugged it off, i mean his size still bothered me a little bit and I can admit that but I told myself, I am not going to be that shallow person and base a mans character by his looks as over the phone he was always lovely and i liked that about him. That night he bought my son and I some dinner to our home, after dinner I then put my son into bed as he was still only 8 and needed his sleep. We watched some movies afterwards and kept talking like we’d known each other for a while. He had driven quite a wee way out to meet us and spend time with us, so i did the hospitable thing and asked if he would stay over so he didn’t have to drive back so late. He agreed to this. We spent most the time just cuddling, he seemed shy, so it was up to me to make a move, after that happened you can only assume what came next.

The next day he got up early and returned back to his home, he wasn’t messaging me as much after that night so i thought maybe it was me, maybe he didn’t like what i had to offer, or maybe in the long scheme of things he was just being polite til he got a shag and then that was it… either way I wasn’t feeling right anymore, he wasn’t really the same person i had been talking to on the phone. So I called it off. I told him it was lovely to meet him, but that we just weren’t connecting in the way I thought we would. He didn’t speak to me again after that. I was pretty embarrassed too. It also had me feeling less confident about myself as I thought I was the problem. I left his number in my contacts, now I know I should have deleted it!! A few weeks later I found out I had gotten pregnant. I was over the moon about this I can tell you now, all i had wanted for a long while was a baby. But I chose to do the pregnancy on my own or so i thought until i was 5 months along and found out I was having a Daughter. Alarm bells went off in my head! Daughters need their daddies was all I could think about.. I cant have a baby daughter and her not have a Daddy, what was I thinking!! If it had of been a boy I would have been all over raising a mama’s boy on my own but NO! I had to have a Daughter…. I got a copy of the scan and I built up some courage and I messaged him. I sent the scan picture with a message that said something along the lines of “I’m Sorry about what happened between us, but it looks like we are having a baby girl, I just thought you had the right to know, I don’t expect anything from you but if you would like to give us a go for the sake of this wee girl I would like to give that a try” I didn’t get a reply from him for a wee while which I thought fully understandable and didn’t think I would ever get one to be quite honest. But then I got a message, he was willing to see me again. This time I drove to his place, which I didn’t even realise was actually a granny flat on his parents property. He introduced me to his parents, they could see clear as day that I was pregnant, but he hadn’t even told them it was his baby, he’d never even mentioned to them that he had ever even met a girl. You would think the fact that he hadn’t mentioned to his parents that they were going to be grandparents should hit some alarm bells there but I thought Okay just let it slide he obviously just did not have the confidence to tell them yet even though it had been about a month since I told him… anyway at 8 months pregnant, I decided I had to move back to Central to be closer to my Mum, my pregnancy had been rough and I got sick alot, so i thought what better thing to do then to move closer to mum so I had her support when baby girl came along. I got a rental property basically right across the road from Mum so it was perfect really. He still hadn’t told his parents that baby was his and I wasn’t just some random pregnant girl who he’d only just met. I can tell you I was not Impressed, however he continued to come visit me in Central without any notice either he would just show up and say he was here to surprise me, he’d bring me a milkshake and a chicken sandwich as that is what I enjoyed eating the most during pregnancy. I didn’t really like that he would show up announced though to be honest, it started making me feel like he didn’t trust me and he was just trying to catch me out with another bloke. Some kind of proof that I wasn’t being loyal to him so he could get a way out of having this child. Say it wasn’t his or blame me for being a Slut and just trying to get a payday out of him… I didn’t feel like myself much anymore.. Our Daughter was a week late, He stayed with me though as the time grew closer to her birth date, she was due to be induced on November 26 2012, she obviously didn’t like that idea and waited til we were on the drive to the Hospital to start coming on her own accord!

So we got to the Hospital and that’s when things started to quite obviously change, I was the one in Labour, but you would not think so with the fact that I was not the one in the center of the attention like I should have been that day, well at least until baby girl had been birthed then of course she would be! I moved around all over the place, I was in so much pain, all he could do was take photos, I was given gas for the pain, but wow I do not enjoy feeling high as a kite, so the anesthetist was called in to give me an epidural, now when you have an epidural its supposed to take the pain away, well at least it did with my first until I had to push at least.. But No! They didn’t turn it up as much, so I could still feel the unbearable pain clenching down on my Uterus. It was agony but did he hold my hand? No! Where the hell was my support!? The Size of the needle and the fact that he got a whiff of the gas, he decided to faint, so all the nurses rushed to him, while I lay there cringing, wanting to get this child out of me, she was already half way down the birthing canal at this stage so it was like COME ON!!! He got back up on his feet and decided he would keep taking pictures, this annoyed me because I did not need pictures taken of my shit as it fell out of me during labour.. i didn’t need all that gory stuff, i needed a bloody hand to hold..I needed help to hold my legs up as i pushed, i needed support! But finally after all the agony, she was here, my beautiful little angel was here, and all the bad feelings I had just dissipated. All I wanted to do was focus on this tiny little miracle I held in my arms. He of course still taking pictures, now these pictures with Mother and Baby having their first bonding moments these pictures are the ones that matter. We were discharged from Hospital within a few hours after her being born. We then transferred to the Birthing Home in Central where we stayed for the night to make sure everything was going the way it should with a newborn. It was a bit of a shit start I had trouble breastfeeding, I was happy she got the colostrum needed at the beginning but I hated myself for the pain I was in just trying to persevere but it just got to much and I couldn’t handle it, so bottle feeding it was for baby number 2. So many other things were going on at the time too but that was the one experience that has stuck with me not being able to feed her myself. she had her first bath there too before we traveled home with her. When we got home her big brother met her for the first time, he was so gentle with her, it was love at first sight, it didn’t take long at all for their sibling bond to stick. Her Father stayed with us for the first week after baby girl was born, helped us get settled in. Then he headed back to Tuatapere. He was only down there for a week, when he told me he had been made redundant from his job. So naturally I felt bad for him. I told him he could move in with us, seeing as we did now have a baby together and I would support him until he could pick up work in Roxburgh, where we now lived. He jumped on that bandwagon pretty quick didn’t even have to think about it. He was moved into our home the following weekend.

After Mr J moved in, It wasn’t long before his attitude towards us completely changed, he became more controlling, more verbally abusive, financially draining on myself and that took it’s toll on my children also. I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong to upset him so much all the time. Don’t get me wrong there were days when he was great, when we would go on trips to his parents Family Farm, go for rides on the motorbike and generally just do what most normal families do, but little did I know that when we were out in the Public eye, he was building his story against me, why would anyone now believe me when I told them what he was doing to us behind closed doors? In the Public eye he was this charming, talented individual that to everyone else looked like he looked after us really well. But it was all wrong, they were all wrong, our relationship was far from right. One instance, my daughter was about 5 weeks old, her father, decided it would be a cool joke to put her in a cupboard and hide her from me. I didn’t know where she was, he told me that my boy had taken her over to Nana’s house, which was across the road. I rang Mum, my boy was there but she was not. Wasn’t long before she woke up and I could hear her cries that I knew exactly where she was. He laughed! He thought it was the funniest thing playing a prank on me and putting my baby in the cupboard, that funny he even took a picture on his phone. I was angry. I yelled at him. I yelled at him alot during the span of our relationship if that’s what you can even call it. But that’s what I did, whenever I got upset with him, I yelled at him, he provoked me every time, he knew exactly what pushed my buttons. We spent the first year of our daughter’s life in this rental across from my mums, little by little he tried and nearly succeeded in isolating me from my family. My Dog Belle of 9 years passed away, while we were at his parents one weekend. He had told me that he took me away so that my step dad could shoot my dog, that they didn’t like her so I shouldn’t have her anymore.. Now this had me cut up inside. My Mum couldn’t do that to me, could she? I was told by my Mum that she got hit by a car, on the main highway where we lived, she apparently tried to crawl back into the driveway but just didn’t make it, so they buried her in the backyard before I got home so I didn’t get traumatized from seeing her the way she was. I thought this was more of a plausible story but I just couldn’t help having bad feelings in my head. It was all his doing of course, he had put so much garbage in my head about my family. My confidence in myself was so cut down, I couldn’t think properly for myself anymore.. How could a man make a woman feel this bad about herself in such a short amount of time. I was Broken. I kept going on with my casual job as a cleaner, I didn’t have many hours as at the time I was still on the Domestic Purpose Benefit and I was only allowed to make an extra $80.00, of course he still wasn’t working then a year later, I kept nagging at him to pick up a job, He found one working for a local guy, that lasted all of about 2 months and he was out of a job again, the money he made there only managed to pay a small amount of the debt he was in from not having any work. So he was back to being in the house all day, sitting on Trade me, spending MY MONEY!!! He would barely look after the kids for me when I had to go to work, usually mum would do that for me. I couldn’t rely on him to do anything, I would come home and still have to cook dinner for the kids, clean the house, it was all on me and I was exhausted. One afternoon I came home, I cant quite recall if I was working or if I just had something to do, but that day he looked after the kids for me. When I came home, my son was balling his eyes out in his room, I asked him what was wrong He said to me ” He chucked me in the wardrobe and locked me in after forcing soap in my mouth, I’ve been in there for ages mum, he only let me out because he seen you come home” I asked her father “WHAT THE HELL HAS BEEN GOING ON?” In a stern voice.. He told me that my son had been naughty for him and swore at him so he made him eat soap to learn his lesson, then told him to go to his room…I was furious! My son doesn’t tell lies to me! So I pushed her Father, I was so upset that he had manhandled my son!! I yelled at him and said ” How do you like to be pushed around by someone not your size? Well? Get out of my house!!! ” I made him leave! I do not tolerate someone touching my child! I had gone straight over to my mums after he left and I cried and cried. My grandparents were there as well. They were all so angry when I broke down and told them everything that was going on for us. I told them I had made him leave, I couldn’t handle it anymore, the put downs, the harming my children, the bruises I was constantly having to hide from him. They all knew it, but they had to wait for me to find the strength to tell them myself. What kind of man does this to a woman and children? This man who would put me down so far, I didn’t feel worthy of living. He would tell me things like he wished he was screwing my sister she has far better looking tits then me, he would tell me I was loose, he would tell me I was a useless mother. Call me all the names under the sun like Swamp Donkey, Slut, Whore, Fish, these names hurt me alot… I didn’t do anything to deserve this treatment but I still thought it was all my fault… My grandparents and my family were absolutely disgusted at the things I was telling them. I was so Hurt. 3 days passed with no contact I thought he was gone for good. I spent most of my time over those days with mum, the kids and I would go over for dinners etc but then I got a text message. “I’m at home, please come home and talk to me” My face immediately dropped and mum knew something was up. I said can the kids stay here, I’m just going to pop over home for a bit, I’ll be back soon. She agreed but she didn’t believe me because it wasn’t more then 15minutes and she’d followed me over home.. I was there with him. He had apologised to me, he was crying so I thought he was genuinely sorry for what had happened and I stupidly took him back into our lives. Mum and I got in a spat because I chose to go back to him after everything we’d already gone through. What could I say, “I loved him” Mum was angry of course and went home again, I went and got the kids back and bought them home. We kept to ourselves a bit more after all that had gone on. We were starting to have issues with the rental we were in by then, it was falling to pieces, We decided it was best to move house for the sake of the kids health. Now by this time it had been 18 months and he still had no job. So this meant I had to get a bond for a new place through work and income, and to state the obvious I was still on the DPB through work and Income because I didn’t know how else I was going to pay my rent and bills and still feed my children, my daughter was still far too little for me to be out working full time and that should have been his role. I still supported all of us, no idea now how I managed on my own, but I did it.