The knife cuts both Ways

The unbearable pain of being one who escaped when you can't save all the others

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Let me get one thing straight right out of the gate here. Despite having been given ample legitimate reasons to do so in the course of my life, I do not hate men. Despite the fact that I have been in some truly horrible and abusive relationships with them, I do not think men are inherently irredeemable or just bad at the core. In fact there are many men who I love and care for and have relationships with. Men who I treasure. I am the mother of two young men who make me very proud and who oftentimes replenish my faith in the future of humanity. But (and you knew there was a but coming didn't you?) we do need to acknowledge the fact that even the “good” men in this world are shaped by and steeped in a soup of toxic patriarchal dogma and given very few externally sourced reasons to explore and dissect where their attitudes and beliefs about women really come from.

Abuse of women is endemic in this country. Sexual. Physical. Financial. Emotional. Abuse and evil of all kinds proliferates and festers within this patriarchal and capitalistic society. And yes, I am going to stop right here and fully acknowledge that men are abused in this country as well as women. Before I get the obligatory screamer in the comments about that particular bugaboo. I know this. However I'm here to speak today on my own intimate personal knowledge of the abuse I have witnessed and experienced amongst myself and my female friends and acquaintances throughout my entire life. And it is a shamefully plentiful body of knowledge that I have collected indeed, my dear readers.

So let's just say the honest part out loud. Abuse is much much more common than anyone even thinks. I'll tell you exactly why I say that: I was with my first husband from 16 years old to 28 years old. He regularly beat my ass and used all forms of coercive control on me for just about the entire duration of the relationship. But nobody knew. Nobody who could or would have done something about it, at least.

My family and my work associates, with a few rare exceptions, remained completely ignorant to what was happening to me on a regular basis. He slowly isolated me from every single person who could or would advocate for me without me even realizing it. He would press me that my family was “controlling” and that “they didn't understand me” which fact check: yes, true, but the supposed freedom and understanding that Ron was dangling like bait in my face was anything but. Sometimes the devil you know…

When it came to all of my friends, with some, he cunningly seeded small hints of distrust between me and them. If that didn't work, he would just simply create a reason he didn't like them out of thin air, rationale unnecessary. He would say they were a bad influence or they smoked pot and he didn't like that. Or that they fucked everyone they met and he didn't want me to hang out with sluts because they would just want me to be a slut alongside them. That I was going to end up getting arrested hanging out with loser druggies or raped hanging out with women who acted like sluts. Shit like that. And he would then proceed to make it so fucking miserable and impossible to hang out with them that I would eventually just give up or alternatively, they would finally get tired of my declining invitations and refusal to answer phone calls.

I mean, some people fucking knew. They were the ones who turned a blind eye and a deaf ear and smiled in my face after hearing the sounds of my being pinned against the wall by my neck and choked in the next room through those thin walls. Did I mention that when I met him I was 16? Yeah, he was 22. And these “friends” were all his age, sitting around listening to a teenager get beat in the other room between rounds of Twisted Metal or Mortal Kombat on the PlayStation. I don't hold it against them too much I suppose. I have done my own share of turning away.

When I was married to Ron, we lived in a trailer park right nextdoor to a youngish couple with three kids who were obviously desperately poor and strung out. He was an angry, arrogant and jealous drunk who would get loaded up at the tavern after his shift at the lumber mill ended, and he would come home and just beat his poor wife black and blue from the front of their dilapidated trailer to the back. Replete with throwing dishes and punching inanimate objects, which all physical abusers I've ever known are wont to do when frustrated. I never said anything. How the fuck could I? Not when they had heard exactly the same coming from our trailer two nights before that. Who was I to say anything? And just like all of our (his) friends who “didn't” hear the shit happening to me, when I passed her on the way to taking the trash to the dumpster at the end of the short tire rutted gravel lane, I would nod cordially, but never really meet her eyes with my own, opting instead to stare at a point somewhere next to her face instead. I think I was afraid I would see myself looking back at me from those blue ice chip eyes encased in their hollow eye sockets.

The cold and rather sick truth of the matter is that when I would hear them fight, I would not only hate him so much that I wished he would spontaneously combust, but that somewhere inside me in a wounded and trembling place, I hated her just a little bit as well. As if hearing the evidence of her misery amplified my own in some strange way. I think I really just hated myself for staying stuck in my own prison and I just projected it onto her because admitting the truth to myself was more than I could bear at the time.

But I lived that way for so long with almost nobody outside Ron's personally curated friend group having any knowledge of how he treated me. Ron was a sociopath but he wasn't a dummy. He knew how to beat my ass mostly without leaving visible marks, although he did sometimes take it far enough that I would end up having to wear a turtleneck to cover my strangle marks. Thing is though, I actively worked to hide any visible marks and I would have continued to diligently do so regardless of how careless he became. In fact, I put so much effort into covering up his worst crimes against me that it was almost a second job.

A lethal combination of pride and shame converged within me, and I was also just so mind-fucked by his malicious ministrations over the years that I eventually internalized the belief that somehow this shit was my fault. The longer I stayed, the more shame I felt about “allowing myself”to be abused for so long, and the more terrifying became the prospect of revealing the truth. I knew what they would (and they did) say. I knew there would also be those who wouldn't (and they didn't) believe me. My own father, when I told him Ron had been abusing me for years, asked me if I was sure that I wasn't just exaggerating. He was the only one who said it out loud, but not the only one who thought it. So when you ask why someone doesn't leave, please know this shit plays a big part of the dynamic.

And this isn't even just about myself and my unfortunate experiences with different kinds of relationship violence. It's about the toll I've seen it take upon victims other than myself over the years as well. Throughout my entire life I have also had to witness my closest friends along with numerous casual acquaintances endure their own personal hells, their own sadistic bastards and meddling control freaks. Sometimes I would see the shit bubbling just under the surface. Even when it wasn't a known fact to the outside world, I could spot that subtly hidden dysfunction as if it were a blinking neon arrow. My own experiences having opened my eyes to the reality of how domestic abuse often presents to the outside world I am able to clock a controlling abusive motherfucker in a situation long before anyone else. There are tells…

The guy who appears to be constantly on the edge of seething or brooding whenever his partner has company over. That means you're not in his personally curated “safe” list. He either doesn't know you, or he does know you and he knows you won't stay quiet. He behaves himself and usually won't show his whole ass while you're there, but that seething anger you see? That's because he cannot stand her having any connections or outlets that aren't approved by the boss man himself. I am often on the “unsafe” list for abusers these days because my sheer lack of any fucks to give combined with the utter absence of my deference to their delicate male sensibilities immediately marks me out as someone they don't want their woman around. I'm a mouthy opinionated bitch, what can I say?

Another tell? When they always have to go all the way to the other room to talk about anything. Sometimes? Yeah that's perfectly fine and appropriate. But if every time you're around, the seething dude calls her across the house to a closed door bedroom to “talk” several times in a short period of time, there's a good chance it's not just talking.

Other things leap out as near constant signals of hidden abuse, like trying to check her phone while she's out of the room. My friend's abusive asshole boyfriend once actually had the gall to ask me if I knew her sign in password while she was peeing. It did not go as planned. “Unsafe” once again.

If, whenever you're out with a girlfriend, you see that their partner is sending text after text after text after text and she is distracted and uncomfortable seeming, disappears to the bathroom for long periods of time. Yeah, that's him harassing her by text for having the audacity to be somewhere having fun without him. Double bonus spite if she is doing that in the company of someone who holds a place on his personal “unsafe” list. My second husband was famous for that shit. He would intentionally ruin whatever fun thing I wanted to do out of petty ass jealousy and I think also to tell me who the real boss of me was. It certainly wasn't me at the time. I would allow him to bait me with these ridiculous texts and I would react to them exactly as he wanted me to, taking my mind away from whatever I was supposed to be enjoying. It was the whole point. I made a word collage once out of the texts he sent me during a visit at my friend Amber's house. I'll post that at the bottom if I can find it because it is a work of art!

This shit is right at the forefront of my mind right now, I think, because I'm dealing with a real life drama that is all wrapped up in this very topic. My friend Cindy is right now, finally, thank-the-fucking-goddess, leaving her extremely controlling abuser after what has probably been a fifteen year slog being dragged behind a man who isn't even fit to lick dog shit off of her boots. Todd. I fucking hate Todd so much, you guys. He is a loathsome, insecure and deeply inadequate little toad with a Napoleon complex and a mission to prove he's not completely worthless to the world. A mission he has abjectly failed at accomplishing thus far.

When I got back to Oregon, on the traumatic heels of losing everything and still embroiled in my own fucked up relationship dynamic to the second husband I was so happy to reconnect with Cindy. We have known each other from middle school and we are the closest of friends. She is THE ONLY friend I've had that long who has stood the test of time. Truly loyal and trustworthy. A ride or die homegirl like no other. Then I met Todd, who had been her boyfriend of about five years at the time.

Todd and I, we clocked each other right off the bat. I knew him and his whole fucking game within an hour of hanging out and he knew within minutes that he didn't like me. I could see the tension in Cindy and I felt her hesitation to joke around and laugh with me like we always had. I noticed how her eyes would cut towards Todd whenever I made a bawdy joke or was my outspoken self. How it felt desperate when she would try to include him in our conversations, as if she were trying to sell him on the idea of me being à good person. I felt that tentative and awkward weirdness and angst permeating the air, thick like smog and cloying like rot. I knew it immediately for what it was because I had lived it. A waking nightmare I thought I had woken from forever. I tumbled backwards through time in those uncomfortable moments and I could visualize my own past self whenever I was introducing someone to Ron, hoping and praying silently in my head the whole time that they would pass his “safe” test. Knowing all the time they probably never would.

It wasn't long after that initial introduction that Cindy confirmed my suspicions by confiding in me the fact that Todd was controlling every single aspect of her life, up to demanding that she sign over her disability check to him every month and only allowing her to have an “allowance”. He also controlled who she could hang out with and was so paranoid that I wasn't even allowed to drop by to say hello to Cindy if it wasn't cleared by Todd because the property belonged to him, so he set the rules about who was allowed. Shortly after that, she just stopped calling. Stopped answering texts. On the rare occasion when she would call, I could hear that she was trying to speak without being overheard. Echoes of my own past catching up to me yet again. I was devastated but I knew exactly what had happened. I was “unsafe”. He didn't want my friend getting any silly ideas in her head, to be reminded what a bad ass bitch she really truly is. Because his whole sly little game depended upon her forgetting that simple fact. I was a potential disruptor and in Todd's book, that meant I had to go.

So, predictably, he put the squeeze on her and she had to drop away. For her sanity and safety. It hurt, but never for one second have I ever held it against her. I know an influence campaign when I see one, having been at the mercy of one too many times to count over the years. I know there's no use fighting against it until someone decides that they simply cannot live that way any longer. And so I have waited. I have simply gently and fervently hoped that someday she would find her way to me again.

This week that finally happened. Cindy called me and told me she was selling everything in a yard sale over the weekend. That she was packing up to leave for Texas. Ditching this dumpy, loser, chucklefuck, Steve Bannon looking motherfucker who has spent more than a decade and a half grinding her basic self worth into dust, breaking her will, controlling her every move and even alienating her from one of her own daughters who grew up listening to Todd badmouthing her mother and internalized the message that Cindy was worthy of scorn and suspicion.

I'm crying as I write this. I've been crying a lot ever since I heard the good news. Whenever I think about it, it gets me right up in my tits again and I get all sobby. Mostly just out of relief. It was so much blessed relief to find out she was leaving him, like an enormous brick wall inside me shifted and cracked at its very foundations. I hadn't even realized how much tension I had been actually carrying and holding from worrying about my friend Cindy over the years until that very moment. It was like a full body deep breath and exhale but on a cellular level.

There is, however, a much less joyous reason I'm crying. That is simply because, goddammit, Cindy is such an amazing and kind and just simply good person. She deserves so much better than this and I'm just so fucking tired of witnessing this kind of crap destroying the lives of my beautiful vibrant sisters! I'm so fucking sick of seeing my friends, acquaintances and other women that I meet everywhere I wander going through this same exact bullshit. So fucking exhausted of this old played out plotline. And I'm telling you, like I said, once you've been there you know all the signs and then you really become acutely aware of how pervasive it is. It all boils down to the fact that too many men still see women as things that they own or possess instead of their equal in humanity. They feel as though they are entitled to our time, our labor, our very freedom. And if we refuse to give it to them eagerly enough, many men do not have any problems taking what they believe they are entitled to by force or manipulation.

Unfortunately, in an ironic fuck-you plot twist that the universe just had to throw into the situation, that motherfucker Todd might still get one last laugh on me yet. You see, he knows she's leaving, but she knows that's the most dangerous time for a woman. Many abusers ultimately snap when they are finally forced to acknowledge that they have lost what they believe to be their property rights. They would rather destroy a woman than allow her to spurn them. But she would have had nothing unless she could stick around and sell her stuff. So, to do both things successfully, she is engaging in a little misdirection by providing Todd with the incorrect date for the move. In reality, she will be leaving a full week sooner, while he is otherwise occupied, giving her a decent head start and also the element of surprise.

This is actually also part of the calculus involved in why women stay longer than they ever intend to. Leaving can sometimes be more dangerous. Statistics also bear this truth out. So she's been selling her stuff, coordinating with her sisters buying a cargo van and getting her great day of escape all set up, all on the sly. It's fucked if you really consider it taken all together. I mean, fuck yeah! She's escaping! That is amazing! But it's just so fucking sad to me how common it is that a woman has to flee rather than simply leave. Nobody should ever have to flee like this in order to not endanger their lives, but I have personally known countless women who have had to do so.

Her fake out plan for leaving might mean that I can't see her to say goodbye, and that is a hard pill to swallow. We have now been forcibly separated by Todd for almost ten years, separated by geography for nearly ten years before that, and now she's finally free, but I still might not get to hug my closest friend goodbye. During our phone call I asked if she thought she would make it here and I could hear the strain in her voice, could tell that she wanted to say yes but just couldn't promise anything right now. So, I told her that if it meant she was safer and didn't put her in danger I would just prefer that she leave without the goodbye. I mean it too. I mean, it's like a hot blade in my guts. I'm sad, but my joy at her finally escaping the clutches of that fucking monster far outweighs my small personal pain.

This personal life drama juxtaposed against the meltdown of our democracy and the push to further strip women's rights led by religious right-wing fascists has all combined and congealed into a strange combination of hope mixed with existential terror simultaneously. Sure, on one hand it looks like it might be the actual fucking end of the world, but on the other hand, I had pretty much given up all hope that my friend would ever be free from the sawed-off, porcine jowled monument to male mediocrity that was “Todd”. I'll take it for now, I suppose. I guess if the Todds of the world do end up winning the battle as it looks like they might on some long and tedious days here lately, I can at least look back to this week and gain some small measure of comfort remembering how my ride or die found her strength again, how she shed some useless, undeserving dead weight because she finally remembered that she's a fucking queen. Knowing that is enough balm to soothe the pain of missing her yet again. The tides of our lives seem to keep sweeping us to different shores, but a friendship like ours transcends time and distance, so she will always be with me no matter where we wash up. If I close my eyes tightly, I can almost feel her arms around me, almost see her smiling, giving that crooked little wry grin of hers and throwing a jaunty thumb up in the air like she always does before strolling off into that sunset like it weren't no thang. That'll keep me going for a while.

😻 bpnwc

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