Author: Bekki

That which yields is not always weak

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I spent ten years in an abusive relationship with my ex-husband.

It’s taken me three and a half years to be able to write that sentence.

***

The first incident I really remember happened when we’d only been dating a year or two, shortly after I moved into his place. I’d gotten in the habit of folding his PJ pants and putting them on the bathroom counter, so they’d be ready for him after he got home from work and showered. I didn’t do it one day – I don’t remember why. I forgot, or I was busy, or I didn’t see them on the floor.

He pushed me over the side of the bed and spanked me. Hard. Hard enough that it hurt, a lot, much more than was fun. When I asked what was going on, he said he was punishing me for not folding his pajama pants.

***

Abuse is rarely obvious. It starts slowly, creeping up on you, until your sense of “normal” is so far from okay that you don’t have any idea how much is wrong.

You probably read the bit above and said to yourself, how on earth could she not see that as abuse?

Easy.

We’d been playing around with a bit of spanking in the bedroom. It was something I’d said I’d be interested in trying. So when it happened, I thought that I hadn’t been clear enough about what I wanted or that I wasn’t enjoying what was going on.

I tried telling him I didn’t like being “punished.” That it hadn’t been fun or exciting for me when he did that. I couldn’t quite articulate what about it I didn’t like, though, just that I didn’t like it. I don’t remember exactly what he said, just that he didn’t listen to me and said something along the lines of, I said I was masochist, so I should like getting punished.

I walked away from the experience feeling like it had somehow been my fault. But also, I don’t think I ever folded his PJ pants again.

***

Abusers are masters at making you doubt yourself. Again and again, my ex-husband refused to listen to me. He told me what I thought and what I felt. He did it so often, and so forcefully, that there didn’t seem to be any point in speaking up for myself.

There were words I had to excise from my vocabulary because he didn’t like when I used them. “Worry” was one. I wasn’t ever allowed to worry about things – I could only feel concern. “Hate” was another. If I used these words, he would tell me that I was wrong. I wasn’t worried about something, I was concerned. I didn’t hate a thing, I disliked it.

***

By the time I was done with law school, there were people I wasn’t allowed to see, either. He never said it in so many words. Instead, he told me he didn’t like hanging out with certain of my friends. He couldn’t ever give me a good reason why, but it didn’t seem worth arguing about. I thought the transition from “my friends” to “our friends” was a normal part of the relationship escalator. It seemed to be how everyone else did it. I attributed the fact that it became harder and harder for me to make friends to my job at a law firm, since I was working crazy hours and didn’t have much time for anything else.

***

Abusers isolate. They make you feel that they are the only source of comfort, the only one you can turn to. They get upset when you go elsewhere for your emotional needs.

A few years, after Harvey Weinstein, after #metoo, after my Facebook feed became flooded with my friends’ stories of sexual assault and rape, I wrote about my own rape.

My ex-husband was furious. Not at the man who raped me. At me. For daring to tell my story to my friends, to the Internet, to total strangers – but not to him. Even though he knew about it, even though he’d watched me struggling with rape triggers for months.

***

I got out. I met someone who slowly and gently and kindly told me, over and over, that it was not normal. And by that point, I’d had enough to grab that lifeline and hang on.

***

I’m still not out.

Yesterday evening, at custody exchange, when I asked him to use my preferred name and not my given name, he said “I’ll call you whatever I want.” And then called the police to force me to give him a document to which he is legally entitled but does not need – and which I had said I would give to him at the next custody exchange.

***

I have been silent about it for three and a half years. I rarely tell my friends how bad it was. I haven’t said anything to his friends or family. I didn’t want it to get back to him, because that would make the abuse worse.

***

But. I watch woman after woman come forward with their own stories.

And I have learned these past three and a half years that there is nothing I can say or do that will make any difference at all in the way he treats me.

So I am saying it. My ex-husband is abusive. What he has done is not ok. It was not my fault. And my voice is worth being heard.

I Can’t See New York

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Today is the 25th day since the fires and the smoke started. The deck is covered in small piles of ash, like a toddler came home from the sandbox. Even with the towels at the bottom of my doors and an air purifier constantly running, my house is still filled with smoke.

***

Things with E— blew up for almost exactly the same reasons as they did the last time, although the way in which it exploded was rather more painful than I’d expected.

“Can we talk again in a few days?” he’d asked.

“I’m not sure,” I’d replied.

We didn’t. I spent the next few weeks thinking about what I wanted from the relationship, and what he brings to my life, and whether it made sense to let it go. I thought about the dissonance between his asking if we could talk again and the radio silence that followed. I thought about the fact that I hadn’t exactly been sending talk to me signals. I texted him, saying that I didn’t want to close any doors but I was still too angry and hurt to talk. He wrote back that he didn’t want to close any doors, either.

I did my best to put it aside. I went on distance visits and Zoom calls with friends, engaging in what passes for a social life these days, and tried to get outdoors for the brief stretches the air was breathable, all the while acutely feeling the E— shaped hole in my life.

***

I can’t wrap my head around the numbers. At least 9/11 was quick. This goes on and on, no finish line in sight, and the death tolls ticks up relentlessly.

What if the AIDS epidemic had started with college students? What if it had been young, straight people dying? We forget this isn’t the first pandemic in recent memory. We forget that 30 years ago HIV was a death sentence.

***

My phone keeps buzzing with messages from people who are losing their shit. It feels like it goes in waves. One week, everyone is fine. The next, the sky is on fire. “How are you doing?” is a fraught question. We are all ok, until we realize that we aren’t, that we haven’t been, that we have no idea if we will be.

***

E— and I talked yesterday for the first time in 6 weeks. I said what I needed to say about how his actions had been hurtful, and he apologized, and then we fell right back into the kind of conversation about everything and nothing that we always have. “Dammit,” I said, “this is why I missed you.”

Because he does fit into my life, without any fuss or finicking, as though he’s always been there. And yet. We do not speak the same love language. It leaves me in a strange place, where I have an unshakeable belief that he loves me and cares about me but feel like it’s rarely expressed in a way I understand.

“Goodnight,” he says, as we hang up the phone. “Sleep tight. Keep breathing. Don’t catch on fire.”

I love you too, I think.

Where’s Neil When You Need Him?

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E— texts yesterday afternoon. Dammit. [Kid] has a fever. I ask if it’s a real fever, or if it’s because it’s ridiculous hot out. It’s a real fever.

We’d been planning a phone call last night. I’d asked a few days before, said I wanted to talk about sex. Specifically, what he thought about adding sex back into our relationship. I’d wanted to feel him out on it when we met up for dinner a few months ago, but we never had the conversation because lockdown.

I read his text, asked if he needed anything, and figured we probably weren’t talking that night. And that was ok.

***

About three weeks ago, Amanda Palmer told her Patrons that Neil Gaiman had left New Zealand, where they’d been in lockdown together, and flown back to to the UK.

“all i can say is that i’m heartbroken, i really am profoundly struggling and i need to call my community to me like never before.‬ i need you. “

It hurt. I don’t know either of them, have never met either of them outside a signing line. And yet. They were supposed to be solid. They were my model for love after divorce, for the possibility of an open, loving, long-term relationship. If Neil Gaiman and AFP can’t make it, what does that say for the rest of us mortals?

***

I have been turning over in my head the conversation that needs to happen next if the answer from E— is a yes.

How do we do this without either of us getting hurt? Without ruining a friendship we both value? How do we reconcile the things about poly that are hard for both of us, that time is limited and children require an immense amount of bandwidth? That healing from trauma is a long process which rarely proceeds in a straight line, and often leaves casualties along the way?

***

Sex at Dawn describes a culture where people live with their extended families and sexual partners are not expected—or allowed—to become part of the family.

“A Mosuo girl has complete autonomy as to who steps through the private door into her babahuago (flower room). The only strict rule is that her guest must be gone by sunrise. She can have a different lover the following night—or later that same night—if she chooses. There is no expectation of commitment, and any child she conceives is raised in her mother’s house, with the help of the girl’s brothers and the rest of the community.”

Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn

Women do not need to rely on their sexual partners for emotional, financial, or any other type of support.

“Sassy and confident, [a Mosuo girl will] grow up cherished in a circle of male and female relativies….When she joins the dances and invites a boy into her flower room, it will be for love, or lust, or whatever people call it when they are operating on hormones and heavy breathing. She will not need that boy—or any other—to have a home, to make a ‘family’ She already knows that she will always have both.”

Cynthia Barnes, China’s Kingdom of Women.

***

I’m in liminal space right now. With the enforced pause on any kind of intimate contact, I have time to think on what I want—what I want, not what cultural norms tell me I ought to.

What if I can have my emotional needs met through my community? What if, when I’m having a rough day, there are 5 or 6 people I could turn to for support instead of only the person I’m having sex with at the time? What if I’m able to take lovers for a night or a season or even a lifetime based on our mutual desire to be with each other rather than our compatibility as nesting or anchor partners?

***

About ten days after the initial post from AFP, she and Neil Gaiman posted a joint statement.

We have been trying to figure out how best to love each other for twelve years.  It is fair to say that this relationship has been the hardest, but also the most rewarding, collaboration of our lives. . . .We will sort out our marriage in private, which is where things like this are best sorted. We’re working together to try and do this better. We care about  each other so much, and we have a small boy we love and delight in, and those are reasons enough to work together to fix things. 

***

E— and I talk in the evening, as he walks home from a Tylenol run. It helps, I think, that we’ve known each other a year now, and have been friends instead of dating for half that. There is a level of trust, of emotional intimacy, that didn’t exist when we were dating. The kind that builds through time and hard conversations and doing the work to stay friends rather than saying goodbye.

We agree, with a fair amount of conspiratorial giggling, that we are both a hell yes to sex. We agree with less giggling and more seriousness that keeping our friendship intact is a priority. That neither of us wants to hurt the other or get hurt.

We put a pin in the rest of the conversation. It’ll keep for a time his kid is not waiting on him to come back in the house with the Tylenol.

And that, too, is ok.

Mother’s Day

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

Z and I were supposed to be camping this weekend. It was her birthday present. We went camping in the backyard instead, in the giant tent my parents bought for us about a week ago.

I got sick about three weeks ago with a persistent low grade temp and a stuffy nose. Z was with her dad, so she stayed there instead of coming to me at the end of the week. My parents freaked out. To be fair, I did too. I talked my mom out of buying a plane ticket at least three times. I think the point that finally did it was that if she came to see me, I wouldn’t be able to see Z for another 28 days.

Three phone appointments with Kaiser and a negative COVID test later, they diagnosed a sinus infection and prescribed antibiotics.

My parents sent a giant, ridiculously expensive tent that probably cost more than the plane ticket would have.

Z stayed with her dad a total of three weeks. We video-chatted about an hour a day. Sometimes more. Sometimes three calls in a day. Each time, she told me to rest up and get better, because she had to be with me for Mother’s Day.

She woke up this morning and ran from the tent to the house to get my present. My parents helped her buy it – she’s been planning this since July, when she asked for their help. I sat in the tent with her and opened the little package that she was oh so proud of. In it was a silver locket, the kind of jewelry I never wear, and it was perfect.

The Art of Letting Go

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

We got home and one of Z’s ribbons was on the floor, half unraveled and tangled in the robot vacuum cleaner.

“Put it in the trash, Z,” I said, trying to simultaneously change out of work clothes and start dinner.

“But I want to keep it,” she whined, dangerously close to tantrum territory.

“Z,” I snapped, “it’s trash. Throw. It. Away.”

“Can we take a picture?” she asked. “So we can keep it.”

“It’s just a ribbon,” I said. “Let it go, baby.”

She came into my room, ribbon clutched into her hand and tears streaming down her face. “Please mommy?”

I’m trying to teach her how to let go. She desperately wants to hold onto every drawing, every treasure she finds. There is not enough room in our small house for this. Sometimes I make her recycle her drawings herself. Mostly I sweep up the artwork and the dried play doh scraps when she leaves each week.

I went to a workshop a few weeks ago. “Practicing non-attachment, find a new partner,” the facilitator said at the end of each exercise.

Yes. It is a practice. I am practicing letting go of my expectations. Of other people, of myself. I am practicing letting go of old loves and new ones. Of the stories I hear at work each day, the rapes, the assaults, the abortions. I cannot hold it all and still have space for myself.

We took a picture of the ribbon, and she threw it away.