So, I agreed to date Leah. One thing I find amusing since our breakup is that friends that were enthusiastic about this three years ago, are now claiming that they didn't like the idea but didn't feel that they could tell me. I find this a bit silly: there is nothing wrong with having been wrong back then. Leah came off sweet and came off as someone very much in love with me. At that time, I was still hurting from a bad breakup: Leah seemed very different, and seemed exactly what I needed. A grand total of one of my friends noticed that I was not attracted to her and I was turning her away for several months . . . and she saw that this was a huge change from how I normally behave, and a clue that maybe this relationship was wrong from the start.
It didn’t take long before Leah started talking about moving in. After all, it was less than a year until her move-out deadline. I told her that it was a bit hasty to start talking about that, and I even told her that I feel it would be better if she found her own place. She maintained that she couldn’t afford her own place. She wasn't overtly pushy about moving in, but it became something "just assumed".
Leah’s step-mother became a big villain in her life at this point. Leah’s step-mother would get in moods and start lecturing Leah about any and every failing. Leah often called me in tears because of her step-mother’s rants. Sometimes, when Leah came to visit, she was in tears over some rant earlier that day. At one point, they got into an argument due to Leah’s cell-phone bill. Leah used this as an opportunity to beg me to put her on my cell-phone plan. I wondered at this point: why was her father letting her step-mother act this way? Leah indicated that she wasn’t telling her father about some of the more vicious things her step-mother was saying. I would later see that this didn’t matter: he let her say whatever she wanted to his daughter.
I have wondered if Leah had just made up these incidents. Leah knew how to play me, and she knew how to play on my desire to protect her. She presented me with an abusive situation -- her step-mother -- and a solution I could do -- let her move in with me. I particularly wondered about this when I saw how Leah remained friendly with her. This woman criticized Leah constantly to the point where Leah was in tears . . . yet Leah would go to her with help with her math homework? Something clearly didn't add up. Note, however, that I saw her step-mother in action once. I saw her go in to one of her rants; I saw Leah with this "beat down" look on her face as her step-mother went in to her assault; then, I saw Leah act consistently with someone that badly wanted her step-mother's approval.
Around this time, Leah’s relationship with my older son changed. My older son was and is difficult to deal with. He was 15 at this time, and was exhibiting the standard no-one-understands-me teenager mindset. He refused to eat anything she would cook, so she dictated that this meant he needed to do the dishes. She started becoming critical of him. She never spoke to him or of him unless it was a complaint. This continued for the next three years and got steadily worse: before she finally left, I confronted her “you saw him in four plays this year . . . yet you never once said ‘good job’ to him.”
My ex-girlfriend (the one that had been living with me) returned to my life. Leah saw her as a threat. Leah started having nightmares that the abusive ex-boyfriend from Virginia was trying to control her (remember that in her mind, he was larger-than-life, a strong dark wizard). She called me the next morning repeating this, and then she hung up on me. That day, she didn’t contact me at all, which was very unusual for her. When I finally got her on the phone, she said that she wasn’t allowed to talk to me. The ex-boyfriend, she claimed, was coming to get her, and he had told her that I was a bad person and she couldn’t talk to me. For some reason, she continued to talk to me. After a few hours of keeping her talking, I called her father. He didn’t notice anything unusual about her that night. He promised he would keep an eye on her, but he also said that he didn’t think there was anything he could do. He seemed surprisingly calm.
The next morning, I was speaking to Leah again. I stumbled across the right combination of words to get her out of this state, with a huge headache. Leah described how she felt as though he had put her in a see-through box, and she was forced to watch herself go about her day but she couldn’t control anything. After this, she suffered memory loss. I helped where I could, and slowly her memory appears to have come back.
Did this actually happen? At the time, I had no reason to disbelieve her. In the week before Leah finally left, she claimed that she was in a similar state (in a box, unable to control her own actions) when she told me she wanted to leave. There were aspects of this story that didn't make sense. I believe that Leah was making this up, and that leads me to question if she made up this incident, as well.
I think this was around the time when she started talking to her parents about me. She mentioned talking to her mother about the fact that I called her father at this point, although I get the impression she had already been talking to her mother about me. She told me that her parents hated me (her word), because I was too old, a divorcee, I had kids, and I’m not Jewish. Leah was not careful about what she said about me, and didn’t seem to care if she completely violated my privacy. Leah told me that her mother had some comments about my ex-girlfriend . . . why on earth did Leah tell her mother about my ex-girlfriend? Leah told me that her step-mother had choice words about my parenting because of my older son’s difficulties with school . . . why on earth did Leah tell her step-mother about my son’s difficulties with school? This has been a problem right up to the very end, where Leah thought nothing of posting my medical information on Facebook! Note that Leah generally remained silent regarding all of her ex-boyfriends, and has never been able to answer why this was very much not the case with me.
I told Leah that if she wanted to live with me, that mental breakdown episode could not happen again! At my insistence, she told her parents what had happened, she started talking to therapists and doctors and underwent a number of tests, and she started taking her meds again. None of the doctors found anything physically wrong.
There were a few other mental illness episodes. Leah spoke, at various points, of voices she had been hearing. One time, I told her to write down what this voice was saying. She faxed me a piece of paper, and the remarks coming from this voice were brutal! On one other occasion, I was talking to her on the phone and she started speaking as “the voice”. “The voice” tried to taunt me, as though I were its enemy.
Were the voices real? Again, I had no reason to disbelieve these, until Leah’s final week before leaving. After having claimed that her behavior was due to her being "trapped in the glass box", she claimed that the reason she had to leave was because the voice was telling her to leave. By this point, she had gone through so many excuses that I simply didn’t buy it. This makes me wonder about previous instances of “the voice”: was this all just a game? Did she want to see me fight for her?
Once she knew that moving in with me depended on these things NOT happening, things started to normalize. Around this time, I first introduced myself to her father. She had begged me to not do this, saying that he hated me. When I introduced myself, he recoiled when I offered my hand for a handshake. He didn’t say a word to me and wouldn’t even make eye contact. After several attempts over the next few months, I did finally get him to say two words to me and accept the handshake! He was treating me as though I had some sort of plague . . . yet he barely knew anything about me.
Before she finally left, I applied the word "racism" to her father's behavior. Prior to this, Leah had no problem saying that he hated me because I wasn't Jewish. The fact that I was older? This wasn't a problem for her mother, and Leah saw that complaint as hypocritical. The fact that I was divorced and had kids? Her parents were divorced and had a child. Again, she saw this as hypocritical. That left the fact that I'm not Jewish. When I called this what it was -- racism -- she was up in arms. Suddenly, despite years of making this statement, she backpedaled: that was NOT the reason for their "dislike" (she stopped using the word "hatred") of me. The last time she spoke of this, this reason became ". . . and yes, he would have preferred you be Jewish". When she saw that this could not explain his behavior those first few times I met him, she decided to ignore that. She decided to make up more reasons, horrid ways I was treating her and the like. In the end, she decided that she would justify racist hatred, even if it meant lying through her teeth to do this. Her behavior was incredibly offensive to me, and I believe helped me to see that she didn't belong in my life. 
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