Should we share our experiences of abuse?
It’s a challenging question
Back when I was married, I was doing most of the domestic labor even though we both had challenging full-time jobs, which is not an unusual predicament for a woman in America. I’d work hard to make sure he always had a good dinner available, and then I’d be criticized for not doing things to his liking, spending too much money on groceries, or creating too many dishes. (In theory, dishes were his job; in practice, I ended up doing them much of the time.)
I used to think that domestic abuse only happens to mousy women. The mousiness is the effect, not the cause. Actually, feisty and successful women are statistically more likely to be abused. After asking hundreds of times for a more equal sharing of chores — and after months of politely requesting appreciation and seldom getting it — I decided to get more confrontational with my ex-husband.
If I didn’t have time to cook, I would typically pick up something on the way home for both of us to eat. When I went to Whole Foods, I saw that they had lobster bisque on sale: a soup that my ex-husband loved. I was about to buy a cup of soup for each of us as per my usual practice— and then I felt anger about the way he took me for granted.
So I bought one cup of soup, and when I got home, I told him, “I didn’t pick up soup for you, because you never appreciate me when I do. And I know you love lobster bisque. Think about this next time you take me for granted. I’m going to enjoy my soup now.”
My ex-husband’s response to my soup taunting was to walk over, pin my arms to keep me from struggling, put his arm around my throat, and squeeze, not hard enough to injure or hurt — but just hard enough for me to know that he COULD hurt me if he chose. Then he stared at me with a never-before-seen wild look in his eyes, and said, “You need to start being nicer to me.”
It scared the shit out of me. After that, I never complained about being unappreciated again. That’s what I mean about mousiness being the effect instead of the cause. Assertiveness inspires aggression — aggression inspires fear — and fear inspires mousy behavior. No offense to mice.
When I look at my past memories, my reaction to being physically threatened with strangulation was to think, “Oh my gosh, he’s going through a hard time. I really do need to be nicer to him.” It wasn’t until I woke up today that it occurred to me there’s something comical about a person intimidatingly miming strangulation demanding I be “nicer.” Talk about a double standard!
My acceptance of my ex-husband’s version of reality was what allowed the relationship to continue. As long as I wanted the relationship to continue, I had to accept his version of reality to survive.
And you know, there’s still a version of me that exists somewhere inside my head, which would remember the events of the Lobster Bisque Incident and have a totally different interpretation of them. I know that woman perfectly. Shall we meet her?
She’s a nagging bitch who won’t let up, no matter how much her poor husband is suffering — and he’s saint for having such a restrained reaction to her.
Oh, and did I mention that she’s also a little demented? He didn’t threaten strangulation, God forbid. He just lightly placed his hand on her throat or something — he doesn’t quite remember. All he wanted was for her to be a littler nicer! He’d be horrified if he knew how she had misinterpreted his soothing touch on her hysterical body.
Horrified, but not surprised. Misinterpreting the Lobster Bisque Incident — and blogging about it for all her brainwashed little Social Justice Warrior friends to read — that’s just the kind of thing a vengeful bitch like her would do.
You see, this ex-husband of mine is usually a man of impeccable judgment, but somehow his judgment failed him when it came to me. Well, many a man has been seduced by the enchanting wiles of women — seduced into forgetting their own good sense and best judgment. How shocked and betrayed that good man will feel if he ever runs across the bitter, vengeful, pointless rantings of his ex-wife (me) on the Internet.
Oh, this nefarious blog post I am writing: deliberately engineered and designed with the malicious intent of destroying his reputation, causing him shame, dishonoring him before the eyes of his family — perhaps even effecting his employment opportunities (already shaky, given the classist oppression he has endured since dropping out of college.)
Wasn’t it enough that I disrupted his life by marrying him and then vilely betraying him, by daring to have an unrequited secret crush on a friend? Isn’t it just typical of that vengeful bitch (me) to try to cover up the sinfulness of her relentless sexual voracity by developing some cock-and-bull story about abuse?
And look at the quality of her evidence! Pathetic! She abusively withheld soup and then is holding up the hungry man’s protest at her emotional barbs as some form of “abuse?” Only a feminazi would believe this bullshit. Well, thank God none of the noble man’s friends are the gullible sort to be taken in by that kind of nonsense.
After all, he’s the one who was actually abused. The bitch is just trying to cover things up with her counter-accusations. And because we live in the #MeToo world, where women are always believed (and men never are) she’s probably going to succeed at ruining his life. Justice: faugh! What about justice for all the times she sexually harassed him? Good luck getting that in this fucked-up PC world we live in.
A word of explanation: what my ex-husband called “sexual harassment” was me giving him a hug after work when he didn’t feel like being hugged. I stopped doing it when I understood how much it bothered him. He presented it as evidence to me, to prove that “actually, we were both abusers.” I also found out he was telling people that he never slapped me — that I was making that up.
The incident where he mimed strangulation, along with three other similar incidents, are the most terrified I’ve ever been in my entire life. And he did slap me, on several different occasions, usually in private, but one time on the public street, when he disagreed with my choice to jaywalk.
He also called me ugly in front of my friends, said I would never fulfill my dream of being a writer because my talent was too mediocre, and said that all my jokes were horrible and not the least funny, (sometimes while coughing from trying not to laugh at them).
Anything that made me feel better about myself, anything that was part of my ecosystem of self-esteem, he targeted and attacked with the unerring accuracy of a shark sensing blood in the water. And yet he had many wonderful qualities as well: crying sentimentally at Disney movies, going out of his way to help people at work, his deep love for his parents and sibling.
Those endless complaints about how I was ruining his life, failing to measure up to his standard of an ideal wife? I now see those complaints as his attempts to collect the debt that life “owed” him. He had a past of deep suffering, including suicide attempts and hidden marginalized identities. Life did shortchange him in many ways.
No one person could ever make up for the depth of that pain. So when he tried to collect the “debt,” from me, he failed. The debt was too big to pay. Christ could have paid it. But if I had spent myself down to my last drop of my life, there never would have been enough of me to make him feel content.
I still wish I could have made things right for him. I still wake up quite often wanting to kill myself, because the image of myself he constructed within me sometimes feels more real than who I really am.
You see in this blog — her narrative voice is stronger than mine, even now. After all, if I was lovable and good, why would he have treated me that way? His behavior makes so much more sense if it is “that bitch” who is real — not me.
As I fight for life (and don’t worry, my suicidal desires are far from being suicidal intent) I am fighting towards a version of reality that encompasses both compassion for him and compassion for myself. I refuse to give up either. I don’t want to destroy his reputation. I hope I’ve waited long enough to write this that nobody who loves him will ever find it. I’m never going to mention his name, (although I’m sure a determined sleuth could find it, unfortunately.)
And for what am I risking myself, in writing this? What will it accomplish, aside from making me look ugly, feel ugly?
Well-intentioned advice from well-intentioned people can sometimes hurt the most. It goes approximately like this: “My husband and I fight about soup all the time! It’s totally normal for marriage to have its ups and downs. Let me share some awesome communication strategies! You have to understand, you shouldn’t have withheld that lobster bisque from your husband. I learned how to stop doing passive-aggressive things like that a few years into marriage. Oh, you’ve got a lot to work on, sweetie.”
I used to believe that type of advice. Believing it was a lot more pleasant than acknowledging the reality of my own life. (Over time I began to realize that I had tried all their communication strategies over and over with no discernible result, before resorting to the more confrontational ones. The people giving me advice couldn’t even imagine what my life was like, so they assumed my life was more like theirs).
When I spoke honestly about my traumatic experiences with people who loved and cared about us both, I also experienced the shifting sands of reality. One of my friends suggested, “Maybe he just sort of pushed your face aside and you interpreted it as a slap.” My friend was well-intentioned, loving, and still a good friend today. I’m not offended that she tried to make sense of the conflicting stories she was hearing from each of us. I do know that I was slapped though. A gentle push doesn’t make a “smack” sound.
When I injured my back at work, I got worker’s compensation to cover the salary for the time I had to take off. That back injury, which took three months to heal and was inflamed enough to alarm the doctor, was about 5% of the pain I felt from my marriage and divorce to a man who abused me.
Being abused is one of the few forms of disaster in the United States not routinely covered by insurance. My employer ate the costs as my productivity plummeted. They believed I was a valuable employee who would eventually recover — so they chose not to fire me even as my inbox grew to over 500 unanswered emails. Most employers are not so loyal or humane to their employees. I wouldn’t have disagreed with them firing me. I’m grateful they didn’t.
Writing this makes me feel better. It helps me hear the voice inside my head that values me. One could argue publishing this account is unnecessary or destructive or spiteful. If it is, I accept that.
I’m no longer the person who had to earn safety with perfection in all things. If it is true that I am spiteful, I can be spiteful. I no longer need to fear that my spitefulness makes me unworthy to exist. For what error is mine, God has forgiven me.
