Grieving

How tired I am of longing.

Jack’s anxiety is spiraling a little. He needs a therapist, but he hates zoom. Same boy, same. I am feeling the need for CBT myself. But then I think “why bother? til this is over?” For example in the midst of my exhaustion and despair a couple of weeks ago, I sat down and generated a firm schedule for myself which included blocks for rest, meditation, exercise, and 8 hours of work, and also kid time. And then the kids got sent home for virtual learning again, and that schedule was garbage. Please no one helpfully tell me I can still follow that schedule – I cannot. Craig needs so much support and Liam needs close monitoring during the school hours. I have to shift my workday to the evenings and weekends. I will still exercise and try to meditate but my day just shrunk by about five hours, and that fills me with such despair that I need to take a couple days before I can re-marshal all my coping resources and make another schedule. The lag time between my recognition of the need to pivot, and my ability to pivot, is getting longer and longer.

It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, you know?

It all reminds me of the abusive relationship I was in back in my early twenties. (It obviously does because I find myself these days bringing up that old relationship up again and again – I have not seen that man in 20 years but I guess being subject to Donald Trump’s abusive whims have shown how shallowly those ghosts are buried). Back then, I would often have to pivot based on my boyfriend’s moods, in order to follow the “rules” and prevent a beating. The rules changed all the time of course. He suffered a lot of internal pain and confusion after enduring a childhood of beatings from his mother, and so my beatings were his performance of his own pain. The “rules” were there so he could have a “legitimate” excuse for punishing me – they were not designed to be followed. Although it’s not exactly the same, I have that same feeling now of constantly changing rules, and a steadily decreasing capacity to pivot and try to follow them, even though a failure to follow them leads to trouble.

Oh, back when I was 21 and we were together, it felt good and right and familiar to have the build up of tension and fury, the sweet release of a beating, and then the comforting performance of regret and sweet re-connection. These cycles were as familiar to him as breathing and became so for me, over the course of those years. We started with beatings separated by months, months of him apologizing and being kind and attentive, controlling himself . . . But the cycle got tighter and tighter as time went by, and by the end we would go through the whole thing in a day. I had daily beatings, getting fiercer and fiercer and more and more brutal and scary. If it had gone on he would have killed me.

One thing you learn when you are in an abusive relationship is how many barriers there are to you exiting it. The initial barrier -for me anyway – was my own love and kindness. My boyfriend was charming, and really funny, and bright if a bit lazy, and adventurous, and had the most amazing wit, and was a great rugby player. He was handsome – he was a big bearded bear, he had this lovely dark curly hair, and sparkly energetic eyes, big gentle hands. He made every party more fun – he was a cheeky, teasing British bastard, and made everyone laugh. And he was hurting. He was hurting for good reason – he’d been tied up and beaten on numerous occasions by his mother. My boyfriend’s father was a weak-willed man, who would simply leave when these things happened, turn a blind eye so he didn’t have to figure out how to fix it. My boyfriend’s grandmother, if she was able, would come and rescue the children and keep them at her place for days, but I’m sure she had to carefully toe a line so as not to set off her daughter and possibly lose access to the children, and lose them their one escape. Everyone was held in thrall to this woman’s abuse.

So my boyfriend grew up afraid every second of his childhood, afraid of his mother’s moods and her fists. I had – and still have – a tenderness for his pain. Nowadays I understand even more fully how ruinous such a childhood can be. It is hard for me to picture what my sons’ inner lives would be if I was such a tyrant, and their home was so unsafe. If no one ever helped them. Twenty years ago, take my tenderness plus my youth and naivete, and the result is that I was capable of believing that my love and tenderness could fix his broken places. I wanted to replace his mother, as the source of unconditional love – even when he was “bad,” no matter what he did to me I would love him. I would show him the right way to love and be. I could be the one to end generational abuse, through simply enduring it and teaching him a different way to be.

My second barrier was a loss of faith in my own sanity, a topsy turvy world where I could no longer trust my own instinct or intellect. His physical beatings weren’t great but truly I’d rather suffer them than his whispered lies. Gaslighting is a term that has become really popular lately, and it probably means a lot of things to a lot of different people. To me, what it means is someone you trust revealing something to you about yourself that sounds plausible, but isn’t pleasant. Because you are an open-minded person, willing to consider new information and assess it in order to improve, you listen to these comments. Sometimes you reject them as nonsense, and sometimes you admit they are possible, and you use the feedback to work on yourself and your habits. And certain comments that don’t seem quite right to you are repeated again and again, with examples of your behavior as evidence. And it seems like maybe these things are being twisted? And not quite reflecting reality? But maybe they are, because he keeps saying them? And eventually he says them enough times that they become your reality, as implausible as they are, and you start to believe more and more of them. And like the cycle of abuse I described above, there was a real speeding up of the cycle of his comment -> my skepticism -> his repetition -> my eventually folding it into my sense of self as an absolute truth since I heard it so many times.

The third barrier is that all through this, a very distant rational part of me was observing these things and recognizing them as what they were – an increasingly vicious and life-threatening pattern of abuse. This knowledge, emotionless, clinical, was my third barrier (although it eventually became my savior). It became a barrier because even as emotionally I was mired in a situation that was hard to process or manage, rationally I knew it was ridiculous and I should get out. But I didn’t choose to get out, I just kept sticking it out. Which meant I was getting what I deserved. Knowledge + willful denial = SHAME, paralyzing shame that I shrank from.

These three largely emotional barriers are the ones I think you can’t fully grok unless it happens to you. Ultimately, though, the experience of these barriers – and overcoming them – have become a positive for me. I have not lost my tenderness or loving care, but they are tempered now with a recognition of what I am capable of doing, and what I am NOT capable of doing, and the ability to bloodlessly decline to engage in situations I can’t fix. I still believe in the power of love but I also know its limitations. I’m much better at cutting my losses, I’m much better at recognizing the beginnings of an unhealthy relationship and nipping it in the bud. I can usually stare down shame head on. I’m not recommending everyone go through what I did to learn these important lessons, but I was able to fold them into my life’s narrative in a positive way.

It’s the fourth and final barrier, the one external to yourself and your own emotional journey, that I found to be the greatest barrier and also is the one that still haunts me now during this period of unrest. This barrier is the very culture and society we live in, which does not want men to be accused of impropriety by women. Our culture works in ways both overt and subtle to close off the path to safety for women trying to escape abuse. I was able to overcome my own barrier One (that I loved him, and knew this was hurting him as much as me, but that was not enough to stay); and my own barrier Two (his whispers of how embarrassing, ugly, uncouth, unloveable, and ridiculous I was were all lies, and I could and should trust my own perception of reality); and my own barrier Three (he did these things to me, I didn’t do them to myself, and I should neither be ashamed nor convinced I deserved the punishment for being so weak). At this point, when emotionally I became ready to leave, I have a mental picture of myself as a weak, damp new hatchling just out of the shell after an exhausting period of pecking away to escape. And there I stood, with a shy sort of pride that I’d finally seen through everything and decided to end the relationship. I was ready for my ticker tape parade, I guess. Standing there, scales fallen from my eyes but still very exhausted and weak, and ready for people to reach their hands towards me and help me get on my feet, dry out those feathers and nurture me to strength. Haaaaaaaaaaa hahahaha the bitterness I have for how completely opposite it turned out to be.

Everywhere I turned, people echoed his gaslighting and abuse. There is a collective paralysis in response to abusive men engaging in abusive behavior. People turned a very blind eye to his beatings (in public!! They saw with their own eyes!! And just awkwardly turned away!). When I attempted to open discussions about the danger I was in, people would quickly, urgently change the subject, terrified that I would have to ask them to decide on my credibility, to litigate who was being truthful and then figure out what their responsibility was if I did need out. They would bend over backwards to explain away what his obvious crimes against me – trying to overlay a veneer of respectability so they would be absolved of having to step in. I called a domestic violence hotline about an injury I had and they told me they don’t treat injuries I should call a doctor, with no additional support. (A DOMESTIC. VIOLENCE. HOTLINE.) I found and called a doctor and she lambasted me for “allowing this to happen for so long.” I told a friend and she said “are you SURE it was that bad?” I told another friend and she said “I thought you guys were getting married!!”

It’s only when they actually kill us that people will believe that something bad was happening. Everything up to that irreversible step is explained away, excused. We are afraid of overreacting and possibly ruining a good man’s life with false accusations, so we just ignore all accusations.

Eventually, I was only able to get out because he is British. His visitor’s visa expired, he went home, and I promised to follow and then broke up with him on the phone as soon as he arrived home. He threatened to fly back and get me, but never could. Tight immigration policy did what nothing else could – kept my body safe from a man who thought he owned it.

Think now of how, for the entire past four years, people have enabled Trump. Not just the Ted Cruzes and Lindsey Grahams and Kayleigh Mcenanys and the Sarah Sanderses, but also the liberals who so often go along to get along. The news media, which asks questions as if this was all normal and fine. An entire nation in thrall to his abusive whims because our very culture has been structured to let white men do whatever they want, whenever they want. And even when we see them go beyond the pale, we wring our hands about what-so-ever shall we do? Armed insurrectionists storm the Capitol, and if we put them in jail they’ll just get more mad, how-so-ever shall we handle this? The collective national response seems to be concern over how to mollify these abusers, and make everything ok again. With boldness and firm imposition of the laws we currently have on the books, we could make much progress. But instead, we’ll agonize of what, politically, that will do, and our response will be weak-willed. We will do as little as possible, so then we don’t have to litigate who is right and who is wrong. So we don’t have to admit how far its gone, nor feel shame for how we “let” it get this far.

Phew. Well that all just came out. So there you go. I am in a lot of DV survivor groups on social media and we’re all talking right now about how triggered we are. That’s another overused word these days but it suits what I feel right now – I see certain things in the news and it’s like someone has fired a starter pistol, and my autonomous stress response is off to the races. Is it any wonder I’m losing my ability to cope through the pandemic -tough enough without all this baggage and political unrest? I sleep more than I ever have – all this grief and low-level fear is exhausting.

How tired I am of longing.