Living-Deliberately.com

When I left him, I didn’t use any labels: I told the story. Most of our friends and family had not seen any warning signs of domestic violence so the story always came as a shock. Over time, a few came to me after processing and a bit of hindsight, and memories started to seem like luminaria on a path. The story rang true. When I told my lawyer the story, he handed me a book, “The Battered Woman“. I hid it in my drawer for a good two months before I cracked it. That woman’s bruised face surely was NOT my story.

I remember the heavy feeling in my gut when I read the ad in the paper for the support group for survivors of domestic violence. That day was one of the first I felt the weight of the honesty of the label. I was in the group for a year and a half. Not a single woman there fit the stereotype I’d carried. We weren’t crack heads. We weren’t minorities. We weren’t low income. Our husbands weren’t drunks. And none of us had been punched in the face. Most of us didn’t have filed police reports. All of us had been battered.

Most of my year of private therapy dealt with moving on. Dealing with what was real, the new challenges, the legal fight, the single parenting, feeling safe again, and preventing it from ever happening again. Last spring, this time a year ago, I began feeling sure-footed and strong and stopped looking over my shoulder all the time.

But the last week and a half have been hard ones. You see, a few things happened in the world around me that triggered body memory I thought had been laid to rest.

My mom and I went shopping on the day my Tennessee legal case was signed into Florida jurisdiction. At a busy, 6 lane intersection surrounded by noisy car dealerships and no little shops or restaurants or sidewalks, we saw a woman get out of her car on the passenger side. Her face was red, her step an attempt to look determined but it was clear she didn’t know to where she was walking. My mom wondered with a chuckle what she was doing; I knew in half a heartbeat exactly why a woman leaves her car and walks into traffic. It was safer out than in and I didn’t need the glance up I gave it to know it was a man driving that car.

And then an old high school friend shot his whole family. His sweet wife and homebirthed babies and then finally himself. Behind closed doors, where no one knew the level of his depression or the demons that haunted him. Friends and neighbors said they saw no sign of previous violence but I wondered right away what their fights were like. I felt the urging pursuit at my back that night I  raced to gather my babies and enough laundry for a few days and threw them into the car at midnight before he came back. I knew if I was there when he got back he’d kill us in his insanity. I’ve heard he doesn’t remember that night. I’m certain I’ll never forget it.

And despite buoyantly hopeful, wonderful days that string together like crowded beads on a chain now, I had one day last week that picked scabs scraped open from scourging. I started crying around 10 am and couldn’t turn the water works off until about 10pm. The cummulative power of remembering bare feet worn sore from 5 miles of walking home pregnant after fleeing the car. The nervous anxiety of counting sharp objects and taking inventory while he was yelling so I’d know which way to move or stand so as not to draw his attention to their presence. The midwife visit canceled because I couldn’t let her see the stripe marks on my legs and the headache I blamed on hormones that was really from the door jam. The knowledge that these memories will not ever really go away completely and the tenuous apprehension of what effect they will have on my future. I think that day I tried to tell myself that it was all wanting answers for the days ahead that spurred the tears. I sat before a man with mature self-control and cried my heart out and felt something profound: my emotions didn’t anger him. They didn’t make him want to shake me. He didn’t begin to blame me. His inablity to fix my problem didn’t make him feel insecure in who he is. I poured it out until exhausted, a purging left in the river and walked away from rather than stuffed back inside.

One good thing that has come from the past two years has been a refusal to hide what is real. I won’t ever again carry a secret so heavy or prop up a life that can’t stand on its own. I let my intestines do more of the decision making than any part of me because my gut doesn’t lie like my reasoning, idealistic brain does. I choose to surround myself with people who love me for who I am, or who don’t and are honest about it.  There is comfort in a sacramental approach to a simple life: eat, pray, love, dance, grow, rest. I don’t think people make a whole lot of sense without the context of one another and life is not as hard as we sometimes insist on making it. We have one lifetime and it’s later than we think. If I spend the rest of my days doing those six things: eat, pray, love, dance, grow, rest, I think it will be enough.

I haven’t had a lot to say lately, mostly because I’ve been doing two things:  living a very full life in such vivid color that there is no energy for both living it and talking about it, and, thinking stuff in my head through that hasn’t crossed over to “articulate enough to print”.

One of those things is the endless advice mothers get about their children and how often ideals must be set aside for the sake of honoring what is best not for your ideal children in an ideal world but for your unique children in a very flawed, messy world.  Another of those things is the memory of how often I’ve chosen things for my own children that live outside of the Ideal Box, shunned all that well-meant but too-far-removed advice, and gone with what I knew in my heart was best for them. Coupled with it, of course, comes the memories of years of chasing ideals, adopting ideals, and letting them become my other gods. These decisions always missed the mark and left a scar pointing in the direction of where I should have been.

In my heart I knew that birthing them the way I did was right for them.  I never regret the project that went unfinished because I was nursing and napping with my baby but I’ve often regreted weaning too early because of a number and someone else’s opinion. We spent long days together that became long years together, making mud, prowling the library, sleeping in, and cooking, doing that right thing called “Homeschooling”. We hiked past national monuments, through deep snow, and all through China Town doing that right thing called, “Be Safe”, which most certainly attacked ideals. And we’ll do it again, as this year, without a doubt,  will hold its own life-changing choices as we pursue that right thing called, “Moving Onward”.

My friend Julie wrote a great piece today on Motherhood that took a few of my inarticulate thoughts and helped me find some form. Read it and then go find a kid and kiss ‘em. Motherhood doesn’t have to be martyrdom.

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So went my recurring thought today.