It Happened To Me: After 17 Years Of Silence, My Stalker Just Contacted Me Again
After my ex-husband went to jail for stalking me, I thought that part of my life was over for good. Until one Instagram follow request changed everything
Hello there,
This fresh post that we (royal we) have for you today is actually a follow up to an It Happened To Me story that ran back in 2011 on my old site, XOJane. The writer, the lovely Cate, emailed me last week proposing this second story on the same topic – because, unfortunately, the topic hadn’t ended.
Send your It Happened To Me pieces to me also at jane@anotherjaneprattthing, if you like. And either way, I so appreciate you joining me here at AJPT. It would be nothing – and very boring – without you. See you this weekend.
Love, Jane
By Cate Meighan
It was a normal enough Tuesday afternoon. I was in the middle of my workday when I heard a phone notification. But, the weird thing about it was that I thought all of my notifications were on silent. I work in radio and usually keep everything muted, so this little ping was supposed to get my attention. And did it ever.
At first, I continued working and I actually forgot about it for a few minutes— until I went to check my phone. There it was, my past looking up at me with an Instagram icon.
It was a follow request from my ex. He was not just some random person I’d known a million years ago.
You Need The Backstory
In normal times, this ex and I were married and had three kids. That was before he nose-dived into addiction and chose that over everything else. Once I accepted that I couldn’t save him from himself, I quickly understood that I had to save myself and our kids, because the drug-infused version of him was dangerous and quite possibly deadly. I ran with two bags and three kids and never looked back.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I intended never to look back. I hoped that a custody arrangement and visitation would follow. I hoped that maybe losing everything would prompt him to get clean so we could co-parent amicably and have well-adjusted kids. That was my intention, but it certainly wasn’t his. Instead, I had custody and he never requested visitation, he paid not a dime of child support and when given the option to either pay up or spend a year behind bars, he chose the jail cell.
So I was a single mom with three kids under the age of six, bound and determined to create a stable environment with as much normalcy as possible. That was, once again, not his intention.
Instead, he began stalking me. First, it was a clear-cut mind fuck. I would wake up with my front porch furniture thrown in my backyard, snow shovels pulled from my shed and placed beneath windows, once he even set up dinner for two on my back porch.
The things that I found for the first few months were crazy and designed to make me look like I was completely off my rocker. I was directed to file a police report after every incident but police often don’t get the memo on how stalking cases are built. They would show up and look at me like I was wasting their time and then never even write up a report.
Instead of helping me, law enforcement was bolstering his mission because he truly believed that he would never be held accountable, and so things then escalated. He began breaking into our home and his access point was a mystery to me. I took the kids to school one morning and returned to find that a man had shaved weeks' worth of stubble into my upstairs bathroom sink. Another time I returned home from an evening of Disney On Ice to find that the free-standing lamps that were left on in my living room had been shoved between my couch cushions. It had been like that for hours and I was lucky that my house didn’t burn.
It was strongly suggested at that point that I move to a house that he wasn’t familiar with and as I loaded the car with boxes to take them to the new house, I locked the door behind me. Every time I returned, usually within an hour, for more boxes my doors were wide open. My dad thought that maybe the back door was the weak spot, so I had placed a chair beneath the doorknob, and that chair was left in the doorway of my front door. I was relieved to be moving and I really did believe that a secure house would fix my problems.
Of course, I was wrong. He couldn’t get inside the new house, so he started to leave dead squirrels on my front porch, and then there was the night when a landscaping lock was hurled through my living room picture window.