New Day or End of Days?

I went to court this morning to pick up my divorce decree that had been signed and filed last fall.
I asked in the county clerk's office if it normally took almost 5 months to notify a petitioner that their divorce had been signed. It had been signed and filed only 4 days after. I was told, "your lawyer dropped the ball."
I had been in court with a lawyer (mine had assigned someone to cover for her, she was out of the country) on the 2nd order of protection, had stood in front of a judge for the 3rd time asking for him to be removed and had not known that my divorce decree had already been signed and completed.
I would assume that had the judge known I was no longer married and living with my abuser who the court acknowledged as such by giving me 2 OPs and ordering him to get out, that asking for removal would not have been an ordeal, but would have meant a phone call to 911.
My legal fees had been paid up. My paperwork had been in order with plenty of evidence of his shenanigans and my lawyer was a female.
I will say no more on this subject because there is nothing left to say about the legal system or lawyers. The gentleman kind enough to speak with me for a few minutes said, "We hate lawyers here and don't forget, judges are also lawyers, its a big club." Verbatim.

I left the county clerk's office and the building and stood in the pouring rain, not ready to get to the office. I finally went into the subway and as I was about to go thru the turnstile a woman stops me and says...What's your name? Did you ever live in Crown Heights?
I didnt recognize her and feeling sieged by the questions asked "Who are you?"
20 years after leaving CH, moments after receiving my divorce from a goy, I meet a woman who had been a neighbor. She (said) she couldnt believe she was seeing me, she had only been talking about me days earlier because every pesach I made her pesadike chocolate cakes and we exchanged baked goods. She remembered my name. I knew her name but not her face
...only I wanted to keep her there, to hold onto her, keep her talking as if maybe I could make the past 20 years disappear, fold time into a tiny ball and blow it away like the collapsed useless thing that its become.
I wanted to talk to her and explain what had happened...myabe if I epxlained it finally if someone heard what life had been inside that President St apt, that I could go back and fix it, have my children safe and with me, be their mother again. She said so many people had wondered what had happened to me.
How can you explain why a wife and mother would intentionally rupture her life, her frumkeit and the lives of her children unless there was a valid reason?
She said its over 30 years she and her husband are there...the kids have grown, the daughter wears pants, the son is in CA...another is married and she works in the courts.

It was all I thought about all day...is it a sign to forget the past or a door to return to a sane(r) life. Being frum in a vaccum never worked for me. Even the long lost tribes of african/chinese jews had communities, generations, families, a legacy of some kind to pass on, talk about, live with. I live like a ghost, born to ghosts who were cut off from their own families and forced into isolation.

It seemed in listening to her, that having a frum husband, a frum husband who worked to build his family and 'home' and protected his family (taught and cared about his family) had made the difference...we became frum almost at the same time, had kids at the same time and davened at the same shul.

She gave me her phone number and took my business card...I will be shocked if she calls. And I cannot call because I do not think I am welcome in CH. If the Rebbe z'tl secretary's wife, our neighbors, could look down her nose and be as cold and nasty as she was, even when I bourght her in to see M's strap marks from J's belt and she would do nothing to help, what kind of welcome is there for me now? if neighbors I breached privacy to ask for help to speak to him and the only suggestion they offered was to put my children in Ohel and sort things out, how do I look at such chazerim now? I was not the problem, I didnt hit, scream, stay in bed and not work, bring filth and obscenities into the home. I was ready to take 5 kids and live in a basement, find work to keep things together. Rabbonim, neighbors...it took him marrying a big mouth who broadcasted and continues to tell anyone she can what a 'monster' he was to live with. But it felt right to them, to believe the beard, kapota and haimische yiddish than a geress who became a jew by choice and long before she married.

In the court lobby was a table and on the table was a newspaper, Hamodia. Free copies of a jewish paper, I took a copy. Inside is a magazine and it has an article about keeping silent in the face of suffering. Its a sin to complain and question what befalls you unless the question is asked to correct your own actions. What befalls you is all correction from Hashem. This is what Rav Laitman says kabbalah teaches also. Until you can accept the correction and correct what is making you "suffer" than you will continue to live as if you are suffering. Is it simply perspective? Is it first living as a torah jew and then from that perspective, accepting whatever happens as beshert?
I dont know...I dont know where being passive and accepting begins and being courageous and alone in trying to survive begins. I know that I have tried, but clearly to me anyway the choices I made to become frum, life in CH, make a family were not correct unless living with a man as J was, was all I was meant for. That thought alone is enough to drive me to suicide, that the Abishter saw me as worth so little to place me with such a man. Is that ego? Is asking for kindness to oneself and ones children, misplaced ego? Is the expectation that a husband and father would get up each day to do any kind of work, anything-other than look around for tzedakah, too much? Should children be raised as beggars in a community where shidduchim will be based on such matters? Where futures are defined by what the parents do?
I thought, if I go away it will be better for them, surely the pain I feel is mine alone, they're too young to understand what their father is doing and his family wants him to move to them, if I go everything will be intact, without me.
Does anyone understand what is means to cut your heart out and live with it., missing, like a hole you carved in your own chest? Like cutting your own limb to save your children but not sure if it was going to help or kill them. No one alive knows. YOu kill yourself inside to do this and live. I dont know how women give up children by choice, I could not 'place' mine anywhere. It was better even to let them stay with a father as he was, then put them with strangers or separate them.

When Mendi was 5 yrs old, a year before our divorce, he spent a year in public school because Rabbi T. refused to allow him to continue at Ocean Parkway. He flourished in that year, his grades changed, his face changed and his spirit changed. He wrote and drew, learned how to interact and hold himself responsibily. Only 5 years old and already broken by the yeshivah system. He wrote something that will always stay with me.
His teacher asked the kids if they were the strongest person in the world, what would they do?

He answered if he were that strong he would "hold the hands of time and stop it from moving."