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Adult daughter stole entire life savings
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<blockquote data-quote="jeanne in CA" data-source="post: 629311" data-attributes="member: 18036"><p>I find I am having nightmares several times a week which are followed by headaches and bone-weary fatigue. I can’t remember having nightmares before discovering the identity theft. That is not to say I slept well. For the entire time this entire mess was going on, I never got one full night’s rest. Even during those nights where I slept on the floor beside my mom’s bed, worried to death about her, I could not escape the anxiety over what was happening with our finances. I could not stop thinking about the fact that I could not write a check that didn’t bounce or get any real resolution through all of the growing number of “representatives” who were supposedly working on my accounts. I now realize that there was a genuine opportunism in my daughter’s timing---that she chose the long, dark months of my mother’s terminal illness, a time when I was particularly off-balance emotionally, to increase the tempo of her thievery.</p><p>As things got progressively worse with our finances, so did my nights. It was one crisis after another during the day. At night, before falling asleep I worried about all of the things that were going wrong. I would examine and reexamine what actions I had taken, and what additional actions I could take the next day. I kept a notepad and pen on the night stand so I could write ideas down as they came to me in my sleep. That is using the term sleep very loosely. Every night I would pray the same prayer, “God, please give me strength, wisdom, and patience.” and then swallow two Tylenol PM just to try to settle down enough to sleep for a couple of hours.</p><p>I was always tempted to take something stronger to help me sleep but was afraid for two reasons. First, I was afraid that anything stronger would make me too groggy the next day to do what I needed to do, to work my list of action steps. Second, I was afraid that anything stronger could be addictive, and that was the last thing Jmy husband and our kids needed, a drug-addicted wife and mother. Nothing would ever get straightened out if that happened. I didn’t want to contribute to the problems, I wanted to solve them. For the same reason, I never resorted to alcohol. I often joked that if I drank, I would be an alcoholic, Given the circumstances, I wasn’t about to take any chances. So, I would say my little prayer and pop my two Tylenol PM and hope for the best.</p><p>The best usually lasted from about midnight until 3:30 when every night the demons would come. They came in the form of what felt like an electric shock shooting a very high voltage current through my entire body from the tips of my fingers to the bottoms of my feet. It was physically excruciating. The first few nights that happened I felt sure that something had actually shocked me. There had to be a concrete explanation. We have lamps, telephones, and electrical outlets etc. around our bed so I started examining everything that could explain it. I came up empty. Slowly I came to realize that the “electrical currents” were not actually caused by outside forces. Rather, they just were the instrument used to jolt me out of sleep and set my mind to worry again. Every time it happened, I would immediately start thinking the same litany of thoughts, “Why are you sleeping? You don’t have time to sleep! You have to fix this stuff! You cannot sleep until you get your brother paid back. You just need to work harder, do more, be better!” Every single night it was the same thing. Eventually, my mind would turn to dread. I would dread what horrible emails would be awaiting me first thing in the morning, what collection calls would start coming in as soon as it turned eight o’clock, and what awful news would be in the mail that day.</p><p>My husband had his own sleep issues during that time that continue to present day. He would fall asleep on the couch until about four in the morning until he would turn off the TV and come to bed. By that time, I was awake, but pretended I was asleep. There was no point in sharing what I was going through at the time. He had his own burden to carry and he couldn’t do a thing about what was happening to me. Most nights I would wait until he fell asleep again, and then creep downstairs where I would sit in the dark to cry and worry. I would turn the TV on just to have a distraction but that seldom worked. On more than one occasion I would discover that Comcast had shut off our service claiming that we had not paid the bill, so the TV would not even come on. Sometimes I would go back to bed and try to get a little more sleep. More often than not, I would just sit in the dark with a cup of tea anxiously awaiting the day.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="jeanne in CA, post: 629311, member: 18036"] I find I am having nightmares several times a week which are followed by headaches and bone-weary fatigue. I can’t remember having nightmares before discovering the identity theft. That is not to say I slept well. For the entire time this entire mess was going on, I never got one full night’s rest. Even during those nights where I slept on the floor beside my mom’s bed, worried to death about her, I could not escape the anxiety over what was happening with our finances. I could not stop thinking about the fact that I could not write a check that didn’t bounce or get any real resolution through all of the growing number of “representatives” who were supposedly working on my accounts. I now realize that there was a genuine opportunism in my daughter’s timing---that she chose the long, dark months of my mother’s terminal illness, a time when I was particularly off-balance emotionally, to increase the tempo of her thievery. As things got progressively worse with our finances, so did my nights. It was one crisis after another during the day. At night, before falling asleep I worried about all of the things that were going wrong. I would examine and reexamine what actions I had taken, and what additional actions I could take the next day. I kept a notepad and pen on the night stand so I could write ideas down as they came to me in my sleep. That is using the term sleep very loosely. Every night I would pray the same prayer, “God, please give me strength, wisdom, and patience.” and then swallow two Tylenol PM just to try to settle down enough to sleep for a couple of hours. I was always tempted to take something stronger to help me sleep but was afraid for two reasons. First, I was afraid that anything stronger would make me too groggy the next day to do what I needed to do, to work my list of action steps. Second, I was afraid that anything stronger could be addictive, and that was the last thing Jmy husband and our kids needed, a drug-addicted wife and mother. Nothing would ever get straightened out if that happened. I didn’t want to contribute to the problems, I wanted to solve them. For the same reason, I never resorted to alcohol. I often joked that if I drank, I would be an alcoholic, Given the circumstances, I wasn’t about to take any chances. So, I would say my little prayer and pop my two Tylenol PM and hope for the best. The best usually lasted from about midnight until 3:30 when every night the demons would come. They came in the form of what felt like an electric shock shooting a very high voltage current through my entire body from the tips of my fingers to the bottoms of my feet. It was physically excruciating. The first few nights that happened I felt sure that something had actually shocked me. There had to be a concrete explanation. We have lamps, telephones, and electrical outlets etc. around our bed so I started examining everything that could explain it. I came up empty. Slowly I came to realize that the “electrical currents” were not actually caused by outside forces. Rather, they just were the instrument used to jolt me out of sleep and set my mind to worry again. Every time it happened, I would immediately start thinking the same litany of thoughts, “Why are you sleeping? You don’t have time to sleep! You have to fix this stuff! You cannot sleep until you get your brother paid back. You just need to work harder, do more, be better!” Every single night it was the same thing. Eventually, my mind would turn to dread. I would dread what horrible emails would be awaiting me first thing in the morning, what collection calls would start coming in as soon as it turned eight o’clock, and what awful news would be in the mail that day. My husband had his own sleep issues during that time that continue to present day. He would fall asleep on the couch until about four in the morning until he would turn off the TV and come to bed. By that time, I was awake, but pretended I was asleep. There was no point in sharing what I was going through at the time. He had his own burden to carry and he couldn’t do a thing about what was happening to me. Most nights I would wait until he fell asleep again, and then creep downstairs where I would sit in the dark to cry and worry. I would turn the TV on just to have a distraction but that seldom worked. On more than one occasion I would discover that Comcast had shut off our service claiming that we had not paid the bill, so the TV would not even come on. Sometimes I would go back to bed and try to get a little more sleep. More often than not, I would just sit in the dark with a cup of tea anxiously awaiting the day. [/QUOTE]
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