Tag: learning to fly

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.

Wings & Glitter

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I go from day to day.  I know where the cupboards are.  I know where the car is parked.  I know he isn’t you.

Tori show last night, the first one I’ve seen since Florida.  I knew she’d be in New York, but wasn’t planning to go.  That part of my life feels long since over, the Florida show I went to with Liz six years ago one last grasp at adolescence.  The theatre released a block of tickets Monday morning, though, and I logged onto Ticketmaster for the hell of it and ended up with a seat five rows from the stage.

The show was epic.  Instead of the band she had a string quartet, and those boys played like they’d bought their instruments from the devil himself.  I sat next to a little fae boy, who had been to the same show at Great Woods in ’99 that I’d been at, and who confessed that he missed seeing all the teenage girls in their wings and their glitter.

We’ve grown up, I told him, put aside the wings in favor of careers and husbands.

I am finding myself, more and more, feeling as though perhaps I made a left turn when I should have gone write.  My husband told me he thought of my writing as a hobby.  I tried to explain it was more, that I need words the way most people need oxygen.  As so often happens when I speak, though, I got it wrong, and the upshot of the conversation was that the student loans get paid off and then we can think about leaving the city.

It frustrates me to be unable to explain why writing is unlike, say, gardening or model aircraft building, but he has something of a point.  I write in my free time, in the extra hour I have when I leave work before 9 pm or on the weekends when he is working.  I write on vacations, and in the odd spaces, but only when I have time for it.  It’s hard to justify switching to something as a career – especially something with no guarantee of earning you a living – when you don’t treat it as such.  And so, instead of spending my Sunday night relaxing on the couch watching TV, I edited.

Remniscent

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It’s been awhile.  In part that’s because I’ve been working crazy hours and spending most of the time I’m not at work trying to finish the novel.  (A post on that to follow, some time next week.  I promise).  In part, it’s because I’ve been making some much needed decisions on where to go with this.

Those of you who’ve been with me since the MySpace days remember what it used to be like, when I blogged about the crazy people I worked with and the boys I met and everything else that happens once you go down the rabbit hole into Florida.  MySpace got old.  I moved onto blogger and into Waitress in Paradise, where I wrote about the crazy people I worked with and the boys who broke my heart and everything else that California promised but didn’t deliver.

Then I went to law school.  Where I quickly figured out that personality was viewed as a negative and indiscretions, no matter how minor, could keep you from being admitted to the bar and therefore render that $150,000 you’d paid in tuition worthless.  So I took down Waitress and started a silly blog about law school that I didn’t bother to update very frequently because, let’s face it, not much happens in law school worth blogging about.

The idea behind MfB was that as the husband and I went out and explored New York and found strange and wonderful places, I would write about them.  A year in, I’m not finding much to write about.  There was the Night Market last year, and a few hours spent in the bowels of the Gramercy Hotel last week (forthcoming post on that, too), but not much between them.  The truth is, most of New York is disappointingly mediocre.  The food, the restaurants, the shows.  I’ve yet to find much magic here, and certainly nothing worth writing about.  Add to that the audience factor, that it’s hard to know if people are reading this or liking it without any kind of comments, and the incentive to put up posts melts away.

Except that one of my favorite people told me, in passing, that he was glad I was blogging again back in October when I put a few posts up.

So.  Expect to see more here in the future.  I’m still not sure what form it’s going to take, but this I do know.  I’m tired of hiding.  I’m tired of the person law school forced me to be.  It’s time I earned those wings.

Arial

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

I don’t remember exactly when I learned to be afraid of heights.  AS a child I was fearless.  My mother tells stories about the time I decided the fastest way down the slide at the playground was to jump off the platform at the top and my father did a running dive to catch me, tucking me into his stomach like a football.  My father tells about the time we were at the playground in Oklahoma, the one with a metal pole about 50 feet high that had a rope netting attached at the top and to the ground, like a big rope teepee.  The kind you would never find on a playground now because of lawsuits and lawyers and liabilities.  Which may be the right call, because at two years old I saw that rope netting and went straight for the top, nevermind that the holes were almost as large as I was.  My father had to rescue me from that one, too.

And then I grew up, and realized I could fall, and stopped racing to the top of every climbable object.  I’d get that odd, swirling feeling in the pit of my stomach when I went up to the top of the hill in a roller coaster or stood near the edge of a roof deck.

It was about the same feeling I had last weekend as I climbed up a rickety ladder to a 25 foot platform and then leaned out over the edge holding onto a metal bar.  As soon as I jumped and started swinging, though, my monkey brain kicked in and remembered we liked swinging through the trees, liked swinging upside down with our knees, liked the weightless fall into the net.  Even better the moment, just an instant, really, of flying through space before being caught, and then the drop back into the net and groundside.

Which is why, despite the soreness that lasted four straight days, I would not be surprised to find myself back there again.