lets go back 33 -bones of contention - missed out earlier post, should be a few posts ago

I continued to be part of the L community despite the distance, my relationship with JM was still extremely difficult and FM continued to throw tantrums which always caused me distress and wore me down, but I loved my friends in the benefice.

 FM’s tantrums were totally random, for example he was photographing some little children who were with us doing the graveyard clear up, they were sitting on a tombstone, and because that was early days for me, I did not know and I asked him if photographing them on a tombstone was appropriate, for some reason he utterly flipped, this is just one of hundreds of sudden furies from him, and it has certainly not done me any good to learn his temper, but he is one who can get away with it, untouchable in the rectory and with money, I get condemned as mad and bad for my temper, FM suffers nothing for his, and JM irons it all out for him.

But I was drawn to the community where I was, I had always found it difficult to get to L.Gardening club due to other commitments, but I thought I would try the local Gardening club, and also the amateur dramatics, but due to not having enough money for the fees, and in the case of the amateur dramatics, they didn’t send the necessary paperwork and newsletters as promised, so I was discouraged, but I did go to church, I was badgered into the church by a woman called Jill Lihou, who was insistent once she had found me, that I became part of the church and then part of her housegroup.

Jill and her husband George became my friends, though from early on I had concerns about Jill because of my experience of the other emotionally disrupted people involving themselves in my life and causing chaos, Jill told me early on that she had had problems, she told me that she had problems with her relationship with her children for years after their births and wished them to come to harm, she told me that when her daughter Heather went to school she hoped that Heather would have an accident in the playground and she hated her,  and she didn’t acknowledge this problem for years until one day when her vicar (at a previous church) asked her to help with something and she became emotionally distressed (I actually don’t understand this completely), and when Jill collapsed in front of the vicar he got her to seek help.

 In the time I knew Jill she showed this emotional disturbance constantly, crying in church frequently, and crying about people’s sufferings very frequently, even crying about me, which sent me mad with distress, I will elaborate later. I remember one day she was getting emotional about ‘poor women in Africa who had had babies and been torn given birth and ended up leaking both ends and no one really cared for them’ this kind of sickened me, the graphic detail, but she was somehow involved in some project to help them. Jill’s whole life was mission, which in a way is not bad, but she was fanatical and made herself ill over it, this she freely admitted to me, but in the end I took the brunt of the blame for her over involving with me and making herself ill over me. To this day I remain broken-hearted and traumatised by my friendship with George and Jill, though I have no doubt whatsoever that not one of us meant any harm to another.

And yet it has been used against me again and again by the Deanery and Diocese employees, who are where they are because they claim to be Christians.

Jill and George were overflowing with kindness but were also extremely set in their beliefs, and I was not comfortable with some of these beliefs trying to push my own beliefs out of the way.
This is so hard to write as it is still hurting me.
(written in 2011 of course.).

Jill hated people working on Sundays, and if I did any freelance work or delivery driving on a Sunday, then she grouched, I said to her ‘What about Vicars?’, ‘What about doctors, firemen, police?’ she said ‘well they have to’ I said ‘So do I’, but she didn’t agree. This was one of our bones of contention,

 but there were a number of small bones like this, another one was ‘Fair-trade’, Jill and George were well off and bought ‘Fair Trade’, and Jill was fanatical about it, she said everyone should buy fair-trade, but I could hardly afford the supermarket’s value foods, let alone fair trade, my life had been about buying reduced goods at the end of the shop’s day, Fair Trade was the top end of the spectrum, so I was guilty of robbing those poor Africans who made fair trade stuff just because of my own poverty.

Some of my life was lost in Jill and George’s rescue of me, a lot of my rare as gold dust self esteem was lost there in their way of thinking and doing.
And yet I am punished over and over again by the Church of England for all this, while no-one else is punished for their side of things.