am back

October 7, 2006

Hello everyone. The kids and I are safe and we are rebuilding our lives. I just got internet hooked up today in our new place. We hardly have anything and are sleeping on the floor (couldn't manage to grab all our stuff when we made our mad dash to escape from my husband), but we are safe and we are in hiding. Thank you for your prayers and words of encouragement and support. We needed all the help we could get and still need them for a little while longer. My abusive spouse has filed for divorce, which is quite fine with me, but he is also suing for alimony. It wasn't enough that I had to endure his abuse and also support him and his lazy grown son, now he expects me to grovel and scrape by and send him my earnings so he can continue to lay on the couch watching tv while me and my kids go without. I'm not having it! So please keep us in your prayers as we begin our legal battle against the jerk. He is enjoying my furniture, my kitchen appliances, mine and my kids

clothes, the kids' toys, etc, etc...all the things we had to leave behind as we grabbed stuff and took off in fear of his retribution. It's not fair that he be allowed to continue to profit from our misery and my hard work. I ask for prayers to help me make the judge see what hell we lived in, how we feared that, though the cops took him away thanks to the order of protection, we feared still that he would return in the night and punish us. With that in our minds we knew we would not be safe in that house and made arrangements to grab as much of our stuff as we could and just GO. We gave away one cat we had and released into a nearby creek a pet duck we'd cared for (better that than they should suffer...my husband has killed animals before for much less and harmed pets before just because he was in a bad mood), so we have just one old ailing cat with us. We are lucky we could talk the landlady into letting us keep her here. We have no furniture yet and most of what

we grabbed sits in a storage unit (I did rent a truck, however after two sleepless nights guarding the kids as they rested in husband's house I was very weak and could not fill the truck with all our belongings, I did manage to save most of our family albums, knickknacks that had been handed down, the kids' baby items I'd saved, etc but with no place to live all that went into storage). We spent a month essentially homeless, living with a relative and sleeping on the floor before I could scrounge enough to rent this place (it took longer than I'd thought...the bank had not closed our old account when I asked them to and husband went and made out checks and withdrew money via ATM, so I had pay back over $1300 to the bank before they would close the account). Still, despite such setbacks and the long hard battle with charitable organizations (they say they like to help, but one must jump through hoops to get that help), we are finally in our own space. It's a small space,

but it's clean, it's close to my kids' new school, and HE doesn't know where we are. I'm sorry. I don't know when I'll have the chance to email again. I will try and come again to visit the groups in the next few days, but I'm still going to be very busy running around gathering much needed supplies for the house and getting things we need out of the storage unit, so I don't know when I'll have much free time. Also, I still work far from home so I am never home till after 6:30 at night, sometimes later through the week. I ask for your continued patience. For those in or near Cookeville...greetings. You have new neighbors among you. We hope to meet with some of you soon, perhaps when the next sabat celebrations come up for discussion? Again, thank you all for your encouragement and support during this time. Blessings to you all. I've missed you.

Everyone is raving about the all-new Mail.