Shameless Survivors

He asks, boldly, when no one has dared, what did it feel like? This virtual stranger calls out my experience, wants to know if it was painful, but does not fully understand his question evokes an emotional layer that has taken me all this time to process. I silently thank him for the chance to finally release it. He is like the visitor to the jail, who seeing the key moves it in my reach. He does not offer to leave with me, only observes as I begin this new journey.

There is a stillness before a storm, as though everything has stopped. A quietness. You sense the change, the difference, and wait, not knowing when, only that it will begin. It is this calmness that I noted the night before, and in it an inescapable foreboding that still shakes me. I could not have known the degree to which the storm would destroy our lives, only it’s impending arrival.

The night before….the moon was brilliant as it rose from behind the trees. We had a bonfire in the yard with my son’s friends dancing and telling macabre stories after his birthday party. There was little interaction between my husband and me. It was the culmination of the chaotic, violent week which affirmed the necessity of leaving and I was very aware of the need to remain detached from the events and him. Married 21 years, and involved years prior, we had been together a long time. It was this emotional separation I knew I had to assume to do what I had to do for the children and I.

It is like swimming in deep turbulent water with your partner and you understand too late the distress they are experiencing. So close as they struggle and desperately grab onto you in an effort to save themselves and in that moment you know you must make a choice. You know they will take you down with them, that you will both drown if you try to save them so you use all your strength to wrench free and swim out of reach. You cannot swim fast enough or far enough to not witness their own struggle pull them under. You live with it knowing it was your only choice. It is a brutal truth. A blinding last scene that replays over and over, unchangeable.

The day after the bonfire I returned home from church. As he came into my bedroom demanding to know how I would live if I left, I stated confidently I did not know how but I had tremendous faith. He begged me at first to lay with him, then to just hug him. I knew that moment had passed for us and I could not. As I sat in the chair in the corner of my bedroom he returned with the gun, covered with a hand towel, and stood at the end of my bed, four feet from me, and for a split second I thought he was simply threatening me as he had in the past. Uttering the words ‘I love you too much to live without you’, he removed the towel and aimed at my head. As we held each other’s gaze for that fraction of a second, I immediately understood.

Only now am I able to burrow down through the layers of emotional insulation to the core of that moment, to his eyes. He looked directly into my eyes. It was a millisecond of final intimacy, the last intimate gaze between a husband and wife, lovers and friends. It seared painfully through me and felt like the ultimate betrayal of that intimacy, of trust. It was not rage or anger. It was a calmness. It was sadness. The disparity between empathizing and grasping his sadness with his intent is emotionally complex and perplexing, but it was my survival. It was his moment of being painfully human but final in his mistake. The choice he made left him no choice. Nor me. It was that final moment of kicking free from the drowning person and swimming clear.

I made it. I fought for it and I made it and right now I’m more than just a little at odds with the emptiness of victory. The burden of the weight of survival. So grateful, so tortured, I seek to find a place for my tragedy within my high spirited, driven psyche. Coming to terms with this is a work in progress and I can only reflect it has just begun. This painful work to find my way.

Artist Susan Singer paints women. As women. As themselves. Hurt, human, scarred, broken, triumphant, Beyond Barbie. As part of my own healing, I commissioned Susan last summer to paint my portrait, nude, showing the residual scars from the shooting and the surgery that saved my life. I thought in modeling, and having the portrait, I would learn to accept my changed body and what the scars represented.

Out of hundreds of photos, I chose a picture in front of the window in my bedroom, with the sun streaming in onto the ‘killing chair’, wearing my husband’s Brooks Brother’s white shirt, scars in plain view, a look of determination, will, defiance in my eyes.

When the work was complete, her Beyond Barbie show was opening at the Crossroads Art Center and Susan asked if she could include my portrait. The stories behind the portraits in the show were so powerful an eight week performance series was born. I saw my portrait as an opportunity to further the understanding of what domestic violence looks like and wrote this to accompany my portrait. I named it the Portrait of Domestic Violence:

I am in my husband’s shirt, Brooks Brothers cotton oxford. He always looked so nice in it with a coat and tie, always the gentleman in it who made me feel beautiful and loved and wanted.

Even then there were scars. Out of view. Hidden. Underneath.
When he took off the shirt, he was someone else.
He was not careful enough. He exposed me, the face of domestic violence. My scars, now visible to the world, post-gunshot wounds delivered by the man who wore the Brooks Brothers cotton oxford shirt.

I wear the scars for you to see in memory of all the women who die, whose children die, at the hands of their partners. Women who were once made to feel beautiful, and loved. This portrait symbolizes their stories, untold, and the life that could have been theirs.

A reprise of highlights of the show took place in April to an audience of more than 100. Included in that audience was a crew to film the performance as part of a documentary on Susan’s work. Susan asked if I would again read excerpts from my blog. It was an amazing and powerful evening which spoke to the strength, tenacity and courage of women as they move through their lives.

I many times struggle with what to write in this blog, in my book. How much to reveal. Whether it is a subject that has been served, over discussed, over emphasized. I question my why. I come back to the Beyond Barbie performance and am affirmed that yes, every person, every woman, has her own story. It is when we hear another’s we so many times find our own, and in it, our power to change it.

This must be my why.

At Susan Singer’s Beyond Barbie, presented by the Chesterfield County Domestic and Sexual Violence Resource Center and Domestic Violence Task Force, I read excerpts from my blog along with other writers, dancers, poets and musicians in a celebration of the strength of women to creatively heal and empower. The documentary producer who with her camera crew was filming the performance asked me to stay and answer more questions to follow up an interview in November as a model for Susan. Everyone had left but the producer, the camera woman and I.

Following the interview, emotionally spent, alone, I walked to my car feeling very hollow. I welcomed the cool breeze in the residual warmth of the night. In the middle of the parking lot I paused, and looked up at the star filled sky, breathing deeply to decompress the intensity of the night. Then, as though I had just discovered something, a sudden revelation I was shocked to learn, I remembered with acute anguish. My husband shot me. My children’s father, my intimate professor of love, my soulmate wannabe looked into my eyes, and he shot me. And he kept shooting me.

I continued walking, unlocked the door and sat in my car in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn, with these words flooding my head.

the performance

I am an oddity
A freak show at a carnival
An unusual deformity
This woman wonder
This curiosity
Caged beauty
On view here today
 
Come on in
Touch her wounds
Hear the pain
Watch the transformation
of this emerging butterfly
 
Hear her gripping tale
of defying the odds
Watch as she walks the tightrope
suspended between then and now
dangerously traversing with no safety net below
 
She will make you laugh
Make you cry
Bring you to your knees
Your jaw will drop at the incomprehension
as you cover your mouth in shock
You will love her
You will hate the part of you she is
 
She loves
She laughs
She mourns
She bleeds
She mesmerizes with her prose.
Watch as she exchanges energy,
leaves the audience breathless and silent
 
Step right up and get your tickets here
So rare – one of the few left in the world
Here for a limited time only
Cmon folks, catch her while you can
See if she makes it to the other side
Watch her rattle against the chains that bind her,
break free and walk out
 
This rarity
This one woman show
This solitary ghost
This spirit on loan
 
Come on in
(c) ldj  14apr2012

At times it is very difficult to grasp my survival. As grateful as I am, beyond words, it is at the same time difficult to live with. All that has happened, and the girl I was before any of it lost forever. It is the quiet hours that still prove most challenging. I continue piecing together these fragments to create my life, meanwhile still seeking solace and escape to a place where it doesn’t exist.

It is a fight with an invisible enemy, punching into the darkness to keep it at bay.

Fifteen years ago today I had my first child, a beautiful girl. What a special gift she has been. 

The ‘deal’ was no kids. Since he had children from a prior marriage, he would marry me only if I agreed to no children. I’m the youngest in my family, among the youngest of my cousins, and was never much of a child person. It seemed acceptable. I took the ‘deal’.

Eight years later, the moment I held his oldest son’s first child, I knew my life would be missing something without a child. At 38 it was more than a loud gong of my biological clock; it was a longing that I can’t describe. I told him I wanted a child. Much to my surprise, he agreed. I knew the marriage was on shaky ground. I didn’t fool myself it would improve anything. I also knew if I left I definitely wouldn’t have children. But he agreed we’d try. I stayed. He was a gambling man so he was likely counting on the odds in his favor. I got pregnant, against the odds. I figured I could handle it, him.

I was excited when we found she was a girl, thinking she would get more attention than if she were a boy given he already had two sons. He seemed excited, too and I took it to be a good sign. I was in labor 32 hours. When my water broke he was at work and met me at the hospital. When it was decided I needed Pitocin to bring on full labor, he left to finish up some things at the office. He checked on me early that evening, then left to get dinner. He came back the next day at lunchtime, then again in the evening as my labor finally began progressing. For a long period of time he stood outside the hospital room door to chat with a friend whose wife was also in labor. The nurse went to get him when it was time to push. Our beautiful daughter was born and when he held her, I thought everything will be okay. We can do this, together. He loves her, so he will be good to me. He went home to sleep, I went to a room.

We took her home and she slept in a bassinet next to our bed. A few days later he said she made too much noise and began sleeping in the guest room. My hopes were dashed but I was too busy and too tired to deal with it, him. He never returned to our bed.

Two days before her first birthday he was headed to Atlantic City, stating “she’ll never know what day we celebrate, she’s one. Why are you making such a big deal?” I pleaded that I would always know. He left anyway. My best friend came from out of state to be with us and celebrate. When she left I realized how alone I was in parenthood. It was then I began emotionally checking out. I had a child I loved more than life, who needed a mother, and I couldn’t give them equal attention, a grown man and an infant.

Over the years, when I’d ask for help, his line was always ‘you wanted them, deal with it’. I worked to pay for their clothes, childcare, carried and paid for their medical insurance, paid for their birthday and Christmas gifts. How many times I heard “You wanted them.”

Yes. I did. I wanted my children and I was the parent to my children, and have done, and continue trying my best to wade through the mess, then and now. On this day of my daughter’s birth, I am on my knees thanking God. I was made to feel like I was wrong for wanting and having them, but in the end my marriage would have been the same, things would likely have ended the same. I cannot contemplate what my life would be without them, these two beautiful blessings, my children.

We have decided to buy an oriental rug for a recently completed master bedroom/bath addition, so head to Green Front in Farmville which houses an entire warehouse of oriental rugs. The addition itself is cause for continual harassment as it was a choice I made without him to spend money my mother had left me rather than give it to him. I felt it was an investment that would (and did) greatly add value to our house. By the time the addition was complete we had been sleeping in separate rooms for about six years, and in our three bedroom home it was now time for my daughter and son to have their own rooms.

My inheritance could have purchased me my freedom, yes, but at the time it was a quiet part of the cycle (remembering I didn’t realize at the time it was an abusive cycle) and I was again hopeful that the painful experiences would maybe be a thing of the past.

Not remembering until it started again that nothing, absolutely nothing, could be easy and relaxing. He could never join in my excitement about anything, nor was he able to let me be in it. He had a way of deflating any enthusiasm with his attitude, his words, purposefully making sure I was ‘in line’.

We drive to Farmville, park close to the rug building, and enter through a smaller storefront into a cavernous room brimming with oriental rugs. Pile upon pile upon pile of rugs filling two floors of an old tobacco warehouse. A salesperson shows us to the area with rugs the size we are looking for and another climbs atop a huge pile and begins pulling back the corners of the rugs so we can see the pattern. Twenty minutes into it my husband firmly states, “Pick a rug!” I haven’t seen anything that I like yet and struggle with the sinking feeling of where things are headed. I ask is there one he likes. “I don’t care. Just pick one and let’s get out of here.” I am exasperated. Feeling pressured I stick firm as this is a major purchase, thousands of dollars. I plead we’ve come all this way, I’d like his input. He walks out.

The salesmen are uncertain what to do, and look at me. I shrug. I tell them I’ll chose a rug without him, privately knowing full well if it is a choice he doesn’t like, and he will not like it because he likes nothing I choose, I will hear about it for years to come.

When I do decide on some options I exit the building and walk to where the car was parked. Only it is no longer there. This, by now, is rather normal. I simply find a bench along the street and sit and wait. He comes back about an hour and a half later. I don’t ask where he’s been, but meekly say I’ve picked out some rugs for him to ‘approve’. I ask can we go see them? Understanding that isn’t going to happen, I get in the car, and he drives off. I am beyond the point of argument.

A few months later we purchase a rug privately from an ad in the paper. I don’t care for the rug, but I want something on the floor so I buy it. Yes, I was buying the rug, yet I needed his approval to avoid his perpetual disapproval.

After the shooting, when I was released from the hospital I was fortunate to be able to spend a few weeks at a friend’s house until I had recuperated enough to live independently and care for the children. Days before we were to come home, my friend accompanied me to my house. When I mustered the courage to go back into the bedroom I noticed the rug missing. I later called the cleaning company that was dispatched after the shooting to inquire where the rug was. They said it was ‘unsalvageable’, meaning they could not extract the blood stains.

Unsalvageable. A word that describes my marriage as well. Irrevocably stained at the end, unable to extract the pain, to be made clean.