Lately I have been reading some blogs by women who have gotten out of or are working to get out of abusive relationships. I think part of this has to do with feeling kind of isolated and disconnected lately, which is another post for another time. But I also think it’s just a general need to connect, to remember, to plot my progress in some way. Maybe this is hard to understand for more ordinary people, but the way my life has been, the ability to say, “I remember what it was like to feel that way,” is a huge step forward. Most of my life, I did everything I could to forget my feelings, and pretend things weren’t as bad as they were. In some ways, I’m picking at a wound, but in other ways, that’s a luxury I’ve never had before; I’ve never had anything heal enough to scab before.
I think (hope) blogs like this, or the ones I’ve been reading, serve a few purposes. There’s the purpose it’s serving for me, right now, a kind of affirmation that I am not alone, I am not crazy, and my god, I am so much better. I’m sure for some women, it helps them recognize the abuse in their own lives. I don’t know if it would have been that way for me. I was a women’s studies minor, we had entire units on domestic violence, and it never clicked. But maybe that’s because I was keeping the subject academic; maybe it would have been different to hear an emotional account. And, too, out of all the women’s studies topics I read about, domestic violence left me completely cool and uninterested. That was a major anomaly in my general pattern, and should have tipped me off.
Maybe, in the spirit of disclosure here, I should describe my own story of how it finally “clicked.” I have read some stories from women about seeing a pamphlet, or an ad on a bathroom stall wall, describing abuse, and they finally understood. Well, like I said: women’s studies gave me all that in spades. I read the Power and Control Wheel obsessively (in case I was tested on it, you see), and yet when I came home and Mr. Flint had been kicking our cat because he was in a foul mood, and stealing my money because “you smoked all my pot!”, I never connected it back to the wheel. There was always some other, “rational” reason why Flint had done what he’d done. That reason was never abuse, but always because his life was hard and I had to help him, be better, work harder. It wasn’t his fault I was a bad wife.
During the six month period between when I told Flint “I met someone else, and it made me realize things have to change or I can’t stay with you” and I finally left, a period that I consider the worst in my life as Flint bore down on me harder than he ever had, I spent a day with my bear, who had driven from another state to see me. We were talking about my marriage, what I was going to do, whether I was going to stay. I told him Flint and I were really making breakthroughs, I mean, really. Flint had admitted to me the other day that he used to tell me I nagged, that I was a nagging bitch, because he knew it would shut me up and make me feel bad. I told my bear, that felt so good to hear! All this time I’ve been thinking I was a nagging bitch and I find out I’m not!
Later, while talking, my bear accidentally said the word “abuse.” I asked him quietly if he thought I was being abused. I really didn’t think he’d say yes. I’d been abused before. My father was abusive. I thought, how could I have left him and just get abused again? Don’t I know what abuse is? But my bear said yes, and I asked him how he knew. “When he told you he used to insult you just to make you feel like shit and shut your mouth, all you could feel was relieved,” he said. “You didn’t feel angry. You just felt relieved. That’s not normal. That’s fucked up, that somebody tells you they’ve been intentionally hurting you, and you’re just happy they finally admitted it.” After that, I looked at the things Flint said and did in a different way. No more benefit of the doubt — he didn’t really mean it that way, he’s just angry today, if only I would try harder, he’ll make it up later. No matter what he said to me, I started to respond with, “Why did you say that to me?” I could never get a reason, an answer. Just another insult to deflect me. Abuse, I thought. Yes, I think that’s what it is.
It occurred to me that one thing these blogs may not do is adequately describe abuse to somebody who has not been abused. Not that those people will probably be looking at abuse blogs, or need to. But I think somebody who hadn’t been through abuse, or seen another person go through it, wouldn’t be able to discern the depths of confusion, fear, and pain inherent in something like, “He used to decide where we’d go to eat.” For people who have never seen abuse, a partner who decides what restaurant to eat at isn’t terrifying, primarily because a non-abusive partner isn’t deciding where to eat in an abusive way. They say, “Let’s have Italian, okay?” And you say, “I feel kind of like Chinese.” And they say, “How about we get Chinese next week? I was thinking about lasagna all day.” And you say, “Okee-dokee.” The end.
An abusive person says, “We’ll have Italian,” and you say, “I don’t really feel like Italian,” and they say, “You never feel like doing anything I want to do. You’re so selfish. You just take and take and take and always get your way. Have you thought about what I want for a change? Have you thought about the day I had? And then to have to come home and deal with you? You’re always demanding and manipulative and the stuff you like to eat is disgusting and makes me embarrassed to be seen with you in public, so just try to keep your mouth shut for the rest of the night, okay? You know what, just forget it. You can eat what you want. I’m going out for the rest of the night. Where’s your wallet.”
Unfortunately, I don’t think that comes across very clearly in women’s accounts of abuse. Anything can be abusive — where to eat, whether to open the windows, how you chop onions — if a person’s primary reason for discussing it is to cause another pain and fear. But if you’ve never experienced that, “he used to criticize the way I wore my hair” sounds ridiculous; from there (with a little bump from misogyny), it’s easy to make the leap to “that woman must be crazy and needy, if she can’t deal with criticism about her hair, for god’s sake.”
I realized that I have an opportunity to illustrate abuse a little better. Why? Because Mr. Flint emailed me obsessively after our divorce. One email in particular stands out. It was his “get everything off my chest” email. Now, for normal people, living normal non-abusive lives, I’m sure they have received or sent embarrassing emails after break-ups. I’m sure they’ve said things they’ve regretted, and feel bad about. If I were to try and describe this email, you might suspect that’s what it is, and that I am crazy for thinking it’s abusive. So maybe you need to read it.
Posting this, I felt like going through it and making some rebuttals — no, I did not have an affair while he rotted in bed, I was working extra hours to afford his medications; no, I did not “fool him” into thinking we could start over after I told him I wanted a divorce, I did not let him think things were okay by making love; he raped me — but, well, you’ve already lost when you do that. Everything he’s saying is so crazy and vile, to argue it is to give it validity. “I didn’t have an affair,” gets met with “Well, you might as well have.” “That doesn’t make any sense,” is met with, “So I guess your feelings ‘make sense’ but mine don’t. That’s fair.” “I didn’t mean that,” “It doesn’t matter what you mean; it matters what you say. And you’re telling me my feelings don’t matter. How can you do that and then wonder why I don’t want to talk to you?” “I’m sorry; please talk to me.” “Well, I don’t want to. I don’t have anything to say, until you grow up a little and can admit what you’ve done.”
I’m doing it. I’m rebutting. I’ll stop. I’ll say what I had to teach myself to say to people after I left him: I don’t think I need to tell you what to think; Flint does a pretty good job of speaking for himself.
There is a high possibility that this will be the last time we have any form of meaningful communication. Inevitably, there will be things I need to badger you about; little meaningless trivial details over photographs and loans. But aside from that, we may never speak
again.Where to begin? First off, I still love you. It hurts and I don’t know if I’ll ever get over that, but know that at the end of the day, I love you. I’m sorry you couldn’t gather up the energy to actually try to work this out with me. Secondly, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for a lot of things, I’m sorry for a lot of things I’m about to say. I’ll leave it at that. It was a cheap shot when we last spoke to bring up the fact I could pursue alimony. I said it because I was angry, because you’d threatened me with cops. It wasn’t meant as a threat. I brought it up because frankly, you betrayed me. You lied to me. And you treated my family and I like shit. The fact that I could
pursue legal recourses with you has less to say about my vindictive personality, and a lot more to do with how many mistakes you made over the last six months of our marriage; That they amounted enough to a plausible legal case.On more than one occasion, you told me that you wondered if you were a good person. That you felt as if you were merely going through the motions and that underneath it all you questioned whether your reasons were pure. I inevitably told you not to worry, that you were a good person, that you had the capability for being even better. Now I wonder.
For six months I tried to atone and redeem myself. I opened up to you, I told you things that I’d never told anyone else. I allowed myself to be vulnerable with you for the first time in years. And all you did was hold it against me. You had an affair, and when I voiced my concerns and my anger about it, you acted like I was fucking insane. It took going to a marriage counselor for you to even realize that there might be a problem with how you were acting. After pleading, and cajoling and arguing with you to no avail eventually I reached my limit. I told you, under extremely bad circumstances that I felt like killing you and (bear). A statement that while understandably creepy, my psychologist assures me is fairly normal. And then I apologized and tried to explain it and instead you held it over my head like the sword of Damocles. And why not? You weren’t ever going to stop having the affair, and isn’t it easier to justify
betraying someone you love if you can paint them like a monster? Fairy tale romances are a lot easier after all, when your flabby knight in sweaty armor can save you. Looking back on that, I’m sickened. Considering how unhappy your childhood was, considering your own unpleasant thoughts, considering your experience and knowledge of psychology, considering how you knew how unhappy and distraught I was, you instead used an omission I made at a moment of
great personal weakness to help you justify your affair. Because the alternative would have meant looking at me like a person instead of as a monster. What cowardice. Worse, what hypocrisy. You never let me get away with shit like that. Your mental problems were of limits to criticism. But fuck me.You lied to me so many times I honestly wonder if you ever loved me. You did it out of fear and you did it out of convenience. Breaking your word was easy enough, because you knew I’d take you back. You knew I’d try to forget it and move on. You used my desire to reconcile with you to fuck me over again and again with (bear) and I took it because I loved you and I thought that you loved me enough to work through it. But you never wanted to work. You just wanted what
was ever easier at that moment. When I was wasting my life smoking pot and staring blankly at wall, denial was the easiest option. But when I came to, realized how much of a fuck I’d been, realized how much of my life I’d wasted and how badly I’d treated you, suddenly it was all out in the open. And you had two choices: you could work with me or you could just let it slide until you finally gave up. And then (bear) came along, and while I convalesced in our apartment incapable of moving from pain killers you had an affair. And when I demanded that you work with me, you said you’d try, but didn’t do a god damn thing. And when you finally got up the guts to say you were leaving and I broke down crying and begged you to stay, you acquiesced,
because that was easier. So you put on a fake fucking smile and held my hand and made love to me and all the while it was a lie. You cowardly fuck.When you told me one thing and then did another that made you a liar and a betrayer. When you hid yourself from me, when you held me to a standard you would never hold yourself, that made you a hypocrite. When you did nothing but wait for our relationship to end all the while saying that you loved me, when you told me we may have a chance rather than break cleanly, when you hid from me afterwards and threatened to call the cops, that made you a hypocrite. And after my family helped support you for years with education, finances, clothing, food, love and almost a grand in driver’s lessons you left in the night without saying goodbye, thanking them or frankly, anything. And there’s a word for a woman who takes and takes and takes until it no longer suits her interests; it’s called a whore.
So if you’re still reading, congratulations, that’s all of the vitriol and anger I’ve been repressing for six months and that has sent me through a roller coaster of hell since the divorce. A lot of this I’m sure is just my aching, bleeding heart. Particularly the insults. But a lot of it is true. I loved you for 8 fucking years. I still do. It hurts, and I hate you, but I still love you to death. But I look at what you did to me and my family and I have nothing but bitterness. And now you’re dragging another poor fuck into your life, who when the going gets tough you’ll discard like so much garbage. At least this one’s enough of a loser that it’ll be easier.
I love you Harriet. But you tore out my heart and then took a big steaming shit on it. If you ever want to speak to me again, in any fashion that goes beyond business, we’ll need to talk about this. I spent six months trying to atone while all you did was get your own punches in. My soul is hardly clean, but at least I know I tried. I doubt you can make the same statement.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged abuse blogs, divorce, domestic abuse | No Comments »
