Tag: red flags i missed

That which yields is not always weak

On By BekkiIn Pinned PostsLeave a comment

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.

This Music is the Glue of the World*

On By BekkiIn Pinned Posts, This is FeminismLeave a comment

It’s been a rough year on music. Every time I hear of another death I think that it has to be the last one for the year, that the universe or God or the FSM isn’t cruel enough to let it keep going on. And yet. A friend of my optimistically said that perhaps this leaves room for the talent of our generation to shine brighter.  Continue reading “This Music is the Glue of the World*” →

“Money for Nothing”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings2 Comments

Starting Monday, I’m off from work for two weeks.  So it’s understandable that when I complained about how much I have to get done before my husband and I leave for vacation on Thursday, his response was, “Relax, you’re on vacation.”

To which I replied, “Are you kidding?”

Because while I might be off from Job #1, the job that pays the bills and the health insurance and the mortgage, there’s still Job #2 to think about.  That’s the job that doesn’t earn me any money – yet.  It’s the job I wake up at 6 am every morning for.  The one I do at nights, and on weekends.  The one I am hoping to make into a full-time, paid position.

No, I don’t intern.  I’m a writer.

Writing doesn’t mean I sit down at the computer and type for a few hours and have something magical to share with the rest of the world.  It’s not something I do in my spare time, like knitting or baking.  It is emphatically not a “jobby.”  It is a profession.  A career.  A job.

It hasn’t always been.  For years I fiddled.  Dabbled.  Wrote a few lines here and there.  Did NaNo for a year, then didn’t write anything else for the next twelve months.  It’s different now.  For me, the key is this:

I sit down and write even when I don’t want to.  I sit down and write when I’ve been up late the night before and want to sleep in an extra hour.  I sit down and write when I’ve worked an 80 hour week and want to do nothing more than veg on the couch and watch Gossip Girl.

I’ll leave you with this.

“All This and Heaven Too”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

My husband and I have been married just shy of a year and a half.  Before that, we dated for for years.  Before that, we were coworkers and friends.  I am still learning how to communicate with him.

For me, this is the most challenging, maddening part of marriage.  How is it that this man who I have known for so long, who is the other half of my soul, doesn’t instantly understand what I mean?  How is it that I, writer, poet, mistress of all things written, cannot make myself understood?

We fit together so perfectly that I forget, all too often, what different worlds we come from:  I from a family of bookworms and PBS programming; he from the world of pop culture and fast cars.  I spend my days crafting arguments; he spends his crafting meals.  I speak quickly, in half formed thoughts.  He deliberates, settling on his words with care before saying them out loud.

When we argue, our words fly by each other, meaningless as babble without our own frames of reference.

This too, I am learning: you can choose not to fight.  To say, I am too tired, too hungry, too stressed to have this conversation.  And you can say, yes, ok, we can talk about it later.

It is these small things, I think, on which the marriage is built.

“Doll Parts”

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

A few months ago, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a great article titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”  If you haven’t read it yet, you should.  Go ahead.  I’ll still be here when you’re done.

My reaction to the article was somewhere in between “of course” and “there’s no way that kind of systemic change will ever happen.”  Then I went on with my life.

I’m one of those women who has been told, from Day One, that I can have anything I want as long as I’m willing to work hard enough for it.  So I did.  Husband?  Check.  Career?  Check.  Kids?  Not yet, but on the horizon.  Lately, though, I’ve been feeling stretched over too many places, as if there’s not enough of me to go around.

I feel guilty that I don’t have enough time to spend with my husband, frustrated that I don’t speak another language (or another two or three) fluently enough to work in, stressed because it seems like there’s never time enough in the day to go to the gym or to yoga class.  The only time I feel peaceful is when I’m writing — but that means waking up at early o’clock to claw space out of my day.

I’m fairly sure I’m not the only one who feels this way.  For me, so far, the balance has been in learning what things I can let go.  Getting fluent in Spanish?  Forget it. Nightly workouts at the gym?  Not gonna happen.  Even so, it feels like there should be a way to move to a place, not where we can have it all, but where we don’t have to feel guilty about letting it go.