Shameless Survivors

We attended the wedding of the mother of my ‘companion’ and her ‘sister’, whose story I have shared. I have a special love for these two girls, and consider them compatriots on this strange journey. It was a little over three years ago, May 2010, that they told me their story as we waited at the trauma therapist’s office. Three years since I reassured them they can be happy after their own day of betrayal.

When I received the wedding invitation I had to ferret out my own feelings about remarriage and my own relationships from my concerns for the girls and their mother. I was initially cautious and skeptical, knowing what their family has been through and that vulnerability is a wide open door for subsequent abusers. I have also had to come to terms that if their mother’s life has resumed to the point that she has the emotional energy for a deep intimate relationship, where I am in my own post trauma recovery?

Still, I couldn’t help but be excited for her to have found someone who not only cares for her, but is willing to take on the challenges of her residual health issues, her daughters’ emotional needs, and her son who, in a wheelchair, has still not been able to return home to live. His attendance at the wedding marked the first time he had been back since the shooting and added to the emotional intensity of the day for all.

The wedding was small and lovely. At the reception, as the newlyweds danced their first dance, both smiled yet they seemed awkwardly unfamiliar to one another, as though on a blind date, placed together for our benefit. Perhaps it is because the groom is gentle and quiet, but there seemed an absence of intensity in their connection. They seemed emotionally blunted. But there they were, in each others arms, content.

As I watched them interact I reflected on how I long for deep abiding love and the palpable passion that is unmistakable in soul mates. I mused I will hold out for my George, so named by my psychic who is certain he will come into my life. Scoff at my belief in a psychic if you will. When you have had every belief about the longest and most intimate relationship in your life proven false, you grasp at the chance to believe in something or someone that will mitigate your experience. She may be mistaken of his name, but I believe her because I believe God has a plan for me.

I wondered though, when nothing is normal, is comfort love? Maybe when you need someone and that someone shows up for you, it is enough. That he stepped up, stepped in, maybe love starts there. Maybe it is enough and everything else can come.

A week after our twenty first wedding anniversary I awakened early, while the children slept, to tell my husband I wanted to leave. It had taken me months to muster the courage; in truth, years. His initial response took me by surprise. “You would deprive your children of a father?”

I was confused, not understanding how separating would change he was their father. He said he would never see them again. I was reminded of a core reason I wanted to leave. A favorite tactic was manipulating me by using my desire to protect the children from the dysfunction of the relationship. If he chose to do that it would be him doing the depriving, not me.

Those words bounce around my head these days after the wedding though, and I feel suddenly, woefully inadequate. I have had my share of kind, empathetic men who seem willing to take it on. Have I, in my unwillingness to accept anything less than my George, unknowingly deprived my children of the strong male role model to help guide them, a person for whom they long to complete our family? Am I too quick to judge someone is not ‘the’ one? Do I play it safe and walk away too soon and deny myself sharing a rich full life with someone, and my children the chance to experience the comfort, security and love of two emotionally healthy adults joined as a family?

As always I have more questions than answers.

love
n.
A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness. A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair. An intense emotional attachment.

The cooler, shorter sunny days are reminiscent of that fall. We finish up yard work and my daughter joins me on the screened porch where we hear the whine of the rescue squad’s siren echoing down the long steep hill to our house, preempting its arrival. We watch as it turns onto the road that runs beside our house. As the vehicle comes to a stop to the side of our house, close to where I imagine it must have been that day, the siren ceases.

I feel her tension and I am very uncomfortable too. We seem to sense what is going through each others minds but do not acknowledge it to one another and open that door. She wonders out loud why it is there, stopped where it is, and I see she is uneasy. My daughter comments on the increase in sirens lately, saying she notices them everywhere. I note they are the same as usual in my opinion and think quietly her awareness indicates she is beginning to remember.

She suggests I go see what is going on but I am anchored where I sit, fixated on my neighbor’s yard where I dropped almost four years ago to the day. I dismiss the presence, directly across from the scene. Perhaps they are tending to an elderly neighbor, though I don’t understand why they would be stopped where they are if that was the case.

After ten minutes the ambulance ambles down the side road and turns directly onto our street, moving slowly along our property line and past our driveway. It unnerves me and I am not emotionally composed enough to interpret her demeanor.

I don’t know how to talk about the day of the shooting to her or what to say. Perhaps I don’t approach it as I don’t want absolute confirmation of what the initial police report indicates is true. My close friend suggests until my daughter revisits that day and is guided through it she will be unable to fully heal.

We are at a crossroads, a juncture, where once again I must choose between the fantasy my daughter has created about her father and risking her further instability by exposing who he was. A conversation that should never have to happen, yet I am left to decide whether to remind her of the truth, and how much of that truth to tell. My slow acceptance that it was intended for all of us makes me want to protect her more because even I can’t bear that truth.

Later in the evening, a rare night when both children are spending the night out, I hang clothes in the closet and notice my box of sadness which resides on a high shelf above. In it I have compiled all the news clippings, forensic pictures of my wounds, the emails between him and me, and my therapist and me that last summer, the police reports, the search warrant, the surgeon’s report, the pictures of me. I can’t stop myself from taking it down. Sitting on the bed, I open it. I take out and read each item.

Going through the box, which I initially began for the children when they are older and have questions or need to know more, I am taken back to that day from the viewpoint of others who responded to the 911 call. Despite the indisputable clear evidence of the shooting, my daughter has needed to believe a made up world to accommodate the part of her that is her father.

I have stayed quiet and let her draw her own conclusions but I now find I am living the life I lead before, in hiding, in secret, covering up details from the children while watching her slip from me in a blur of depression and PTSD. It feels like a no win situation. I have come too far, fought too hard for a better life for them to perpetuate the sugar coating of our former life. As we embark on yet another new journey, once again I have only faith to sustain me that it is the right path, to take her back to that day so she can move forward.

A snap of cold air and chirping crickets mark an abrupt end to summer and invite a brilliant moon. As it rises through the trees, cresting the treetops, a feeling wells within me. Though I fight it, refusing to participate, the moon becomes a riptide pulling me into an impossible current as I am once again experiencing the events before the shooting as a scene replayed.

Neither reasoning nor logic provides a clear path to break out. What were intermittent remnants of sadness are now reversed to intermittent remnants of sanity, and the stress of the weeks leading up to that day swallows me. Waves of panic wash over me, reminders of his relentless emotional pounding as I struggled to keep the shore in sight that I was leaving that week to keep from drowning there with him. His threats, assault, isolation of me and attempts to alienate my family and friends, insistence I was his, his stalking…were replaced by a calmness. My fear escalated to foreboding.

I try to stay present and not give in to the feelings. I escaped death. I am here now. I am free now. I won. I have claimed my life and claimed happiness. Still, I am haunted by more than just the memories and trauma. I cannot deny the disturbing knowledge that I loved him.

I hated how he treated me, how he behaved, who he was with me and that loving him became synonymous with fear. The fact remains that I loved someone who, in our last moment together, left me with his final cruelty when he made me choose between him, my children, and my own survival.  I wish I could boldly say I stopped loving him that very day, but it has been a long process to mourn, untangle, and finally deprogram.

I join you in failing to comprehend how I could love someone who not only meant to harm me, he negated any guise of affection for his children by his attempt to leave them motherless, using them as pawns in his deadly game. My pain is perhaps greatest for my children as they struggle in their own ways with behaviors and risk taking that lies in stark contrast to those hopes I have for them. I am no longer singing lullabies, holding them tight as we rocked to Goodnight Moon, dreaming dreams of their futures. My loving hold has been pried loose by an event wedged between us; intended to tear us apart, to destroy each one of us, yet we remain, the three of us a family.

I keep sweeping; sweeping  away the debris, the dirt, desperate to find where innocence goes when it is lost, knowing it is not reclaimable but trying still to clear a path to it for my children.

Though the cost of freedom was high, I would not turn back. La liberté à tout prix. La liberté à tout prix.

There is evidence our subconscious minds evaluate others within seconds of meeting them, sensing and processing imperceptible signals to evaluate our safety. Based on my interactions with many survivors of intimate partner violence I believe through our intuition we receive warnings. We then proceed to rationalize, excuse, dismiss, and deny our early feelings that something is amiss. We see a flame, and in it sense danger, yet at the same time it is as though we are inextricably drawn to it and we continue towards it as if it holds some previously unrevealed secret we must know.

I believe at the beginning we are so blinded no one can stop us. We chose to ignore it, perhaps in our desire to be part of something, a part of someone, to lose ourselves in the moment, forgetting; and there begins the fantasy we create. We fine tune, constantly molding it to look like what we’ve always wanted, pinning our hopes and dreams to that one relationship. We insist on making it fit, rather than it fitting us comfortably and effortlessly.

That love was ever enough; that we could be sustained only by it. Rather it is the other million tiny little things that burn away the sugar coating, the bliss, the softness, and leave only an etching of what it used to be; what and who we loved.

At the end we chide ourselves for our foolishness at the beginning, caught up in the should-haves, could-haves, if-onlys. But you would not hear what I have to say and I am not sure it is mine to tell you, rather yours to live out, to become aware, and to choose.

Perhaps the most difficult part of supporting someone in a violent relationship is to understand it is ultimately their choice; whether out of love, loyalty, financial or safety concerns, no matter how much they do or do not know about abuse, it is their own timeline that brings them to it and out, not ours.

Opening a door by simply by asking how we can support them, rather than jumping in assuming, is perhaps all that is necessary on our part. We may  plant and nurture seeds of change, offer hope through living examples of healthy, functional interactions which infer the longer they persist in that relationship the further from a satisfying relationship they remain. Provide positive and consistent support and continually help deprogram them from the skewed thinking and reactions their abuser has instilled.

It is my hope perhaps someone reading this will end it at the beginning; that my experience will be credible as a wake-up call and spare them my dangerous lesson. Listen and yield to initial gut feelings. Be confident enough to not tolerate being treated anything less than respectfully and kindly in all situations. Look to others to complement, not complete. Develop and know boundaries and don’t let others push through them. Do not be fooled that alcohol, bi-polar, medication, disease or childhood trauma are the cause.  Create the life that is longing to be lived rather than just living a life that has been presented you. Above all, be kind to yourself and believe you deserve good things.

But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Romans 8:25

There are times I apparently appear so ‘normal’ I realize others assume it was easy to get here. Perhaps my strength and detachment from the emotional aspect of my experience as I tell it seem as though I hold some magical secret to healing that I can bestow to make all the hurt and the trauma of others disappear.

I am resilient and have had an undercurrent of happiness woven through me since childhood. But understand it has taken work to get here post abuse. Intense, miserable, brutally painful work. No one likes to do emotional work. I didn’t want to do it either. It was not until the pain reached a point where it was unbearable that I undertook the task of getting myself better through active participation in therapy; the only way I saw to get back what I’d lost.

There were days I was too distraught at the end of therapy sessions to drive out of the parking lot outside my therapist’s office. What was stored away safely was stirred up and rose to the surface. I would sit in my car, desperate and crying, until I could pull myself together and go on with the day. I did not skip away into the sunset of a perfect week between sessions.

I gladly share how I’ve done it, gotten to this point. Though I have enormous compassion, I can’t do it for anyone else. Not only is saving someone from their own journey unkind and controlling in its own way, emotional health is our individual responsibility. I am not a therapist, nor a guide. Just a fellow traveler. I’ve looked into my own abyss. Perched on a ledge still precariously close, I cannot accompany you to yours.

There are certain things….a particular angle of the sun, or the moonlight streaming into my bedroom, being startled or an unwelcomed memory, a dream of the confusing recollection of intermittent normalcy followed by instantaneous verbal assault…that take me back. I still have days when the enormity of the psychological abuse and the final moments make it an extraordinary effort to even get out of bed. I cry because I need to. I get up. I do the next thing.

If I have anything to offer as a way out of hopelessness and despair, it is only this: be willing to do the work. If you are not willing, pray for the willingness. The rest takes care of itself. It doesn’t ever completely go away. Truly, I only know how to live with it. You must find your own way to co-exist and as you get stronger it loses its power over you. I share openly, intent on being a beacon that despite the worst, there really is a happily ever after to be found and claimed. Though for many we simply have to do a little extra to create it.