Anatomy of a manipulation

I have decided I'm not a forty something year old unhappily married woman, mother, daughter, domestic servant, paper-shuffler and general door mat. I am in fact a fifty foot tall, very old and blood thirsty Greek Goddess...

He's in trouble and he knows it. He knows that I'm a very long way from closing the book on his most recent stunt. He's lost a lot of ground and his way of retrieving it is to put me on the back foot. This is how he does it.

First of all he waits until I'm tired. Yesterday I was up at 5:30 to make sure he got to work in reasonable time (which means late but within his usual degree of lateness). I left work (the afternoon/evening shift) and got home at about 9:20pm. I was tired by this point, hungry and therefore potentially vulnerable.

I want to whip up a quick bite to eat and then sit down and eat in peace, but I won't get the chance.

Things kicked off when he asks about progress with my visa extension application. That isn't going as well as I'd like and I'm not in anything like the financial position to seek professional help this time around. I spoke with someone at the Home Office yesterday and received advice that flatly contradicts the advice given by me last time I spoke to someone there on the question of which form I should be using. Which is typical of Home Office-type government department help lines.

There isn't much I can do besides include the name of the HO staffer who advised me to use the form I use when I submit my application (which is now delayed by days as a result of this set back).

In order to explain the next step it is necessary to understand that at one point my 'immigration status' was 'irregular' which is a delicate way of saying I was at least technically an illegal immigrant. An interesting predicament for an essentially law abiding person; married wholeheartedly to someone with a law degree (or so at the time he claimed) who'd sought professional advice (or so he claimed) as to the best way forward for us when we married.

This was an instance of him telling me what I wanted to hear (that he'd obtained professional advice and we were doing the right thing) rather than needed to hear (that he hadn't done anything and hadn't a clue as to what was best).

No need to tell me I should have checked independently. I hadn't his measure in those days. But when I began to see that he couldn't be relied on absolutely I began to track back over the things he'd claimed he'd done and soon realised what he'd done.

To be fair the IND has been generous in letting me fix up the mistake but not quickly and not without delivering a slap at the same time. I have to reapply every two years and every two years applying means jumping through an elaborate arrangement of hoops.

The sorting out was finally done with professional assistance organised through legally qualified colleagues of mine and a professional immigration advisor.

This is ancient history - it stretches back over nearly 13 years.

Last night 'everything' was my fault by proxy because the legal advice of colleagues at a firm I joined in 1998 (yes, that's 8 years ago) was wrong in some nebulous way. Somehow he thought he could argue that a problem that arose 13 years ago would not exist but for advice I had obtained from my colleagues. Importantly I did seek professional advice, and I did get the mess cleaned up.

This is his way of attacking me: he drags something tangential from way out in the rough where it has been lingering for years and flings it at me. His problem is that I've become accustomed to these attacks. Once I would actually attempt to pick apart and argue methodically. Now I know that there's no point. He will writhe and latch on to isolated factoids and ignore chronology in his endeavour to bamboozle me into losing my grip on the central argument. Once I could actually be driven by these tactics to wondering if I wasn't after all mistaken and even possibly losing my mind.

Now I know better. I keep documentary evidence and when in doubt I take it out and study it. I have the evidence of his asset stripping (some of which required him to forge my signature), I have the evidence of his theft. I know that he lies and steals, and I can hold onto that knowledge when I'm under siege as I was last night.

He has a back up tactic for putting me on the wrong foot and he deployed it fully last night. After retreating to the garden for cigarette and a think he returned to the dining room where I was waiting for some peace before eating my meal.

His mother's doctor, he announced, thinks she has cancer of the colon. Now this, if it is true, is terrible and I said all the appropriate things. This, if it isn't true, is contemptible. But notice how he's put this. His mother's doctor thinks she has... He can't lose with that one.

He had told me she was off to see the doctor yesterday, but I was sure he'd said she was off to the foot doctor. I said as much. He explained that she'd actually had two appointments. (So he'd told me about the foot doctor but not about the second one - the one involving a biopsy sample being removed from his mother's colon.)

I'm beginning to feel a little confused and off-kilter, but I plunge on: I suggest he go over to spend some time with her tomorrow (ie, today) which is entirely feasible as he finishes work at 1pm and I don't need him to take care of B at all. But he says no, no; he'll go and see her when she's got the results. I'm slightly stunned. He's an only child, she's a widow rattling around on her own in a large house in London - and he's not going to take the first opportunity he has to go over and spend some time with her in the period between the sample being taken and the results coming back.

It is quite possible that we're about to plunge into a major crisis involving his mother's health that will require all of us to put other problems back onto the rear burner. For me to insist on anything else (like a divorce) would be callous in the extreme.

But I'm a blood-thirsty old fifty foot Greek Goddess and behavioural norms are so passé.