Category: Abuse

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The Leaving

I remember the leaving more than the being gone.

How my best friend drove us to the airport,

hours after he woke next to my sleepless night. I remember

how I watched him walk around the bed we shared, emotionless,

to kiss me goodbye like he was punching his timecard at the end of his final shift, and

then tossing it over his shoulder into the backseat of his car

as he drove away, never once looking in the rearview mirror. 

I remember feeling so much lighter when I heard his key turn the lock

from the outside, and how our windows faced south and the parking lot was

to the east, so I didn’t have to watch him walk away. All that was left was the leaving,

the packing was finished, and the instantly-grown-up baby, my girl, got to wake up

to Mommy’s kisses, filled with emotion at the start of our big adventure, together

just the two of us. Her brand-new toddler-sized suitcase was packed with her most important

possessions the night before I slept not at all, minus her bed friends — 

Jasmine, the bunny, and her yellow blanket — who got zipped up once she was up. I remember

the suitcase was red, yellow, and green with wheels and a handle she could push, or pull,  

next to me carrying everything else, on our way back east. The two women seated in front of 

our two seats, I remember spoke loudly about how their three-year-olds (40 years ago) 

would never have pushed the seat in front of them, or ever cry for any reason. 

And I remember feeling so much lighter when I drowned out their voices 

to comfort my terrified toddler, whose ears were exploding from too much pressure 

on the inside, and then I remembered how happy I was that my daughter was

using her voice.

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Axis of Power

I never believed or thought anything about my hair except it was long and I liked it that way. Sitting next to my husband of under two years watching the holiday movie, The Family Man, starring Nicholas Cage and Téa Leoni, I was absolutely smitten with Leoni’s entire on-screen vibe, adorably short hair, included. I spoke my affection out loud, “Wow! I love her hair so much” and like whiplash from being hit from behind, my world’s axis was grabbed by its throat, my flailing hands scrambled to pry away the fingers of the perpetrator, too alarmed to admit the only one present and beside me all along, was my husband.

“You can never cut your hair,” was the coolly, leveled-at-me one-line throat punch I didn’t see coming. Assuming he was joking, or playing with me a little bit because of course he liked my hair, but it was my hair, up until that moment that it wasn’t. There had been a transference of power, of ownership, of axis, and I had not known my body was the battlefield and the bounty in one. “What do you mean, ‘I can’t ever cut my hair’?” I bandied back, skipping my words over to him, keeping my lightness and heart holding onto that which I believed to be mine, never not for a moment until this moment now ever considering the possibility I possessed something that could or would be taken from me. He did not skip with me, nor did he hold my hand while I was playing right there next to him; his words sliced with a razor’s edge, “Your hair belongs to me. It’s part of our prenuptial agreement. You can never cut it.”

(We have no such thing and never ever not for a moment of breath coming out of me was spent on my hair’s discussion or to whom it belonged or didn’t belong, over who held the rights to its length, style, design, or its color, all of which were hanging in this unbalanced breathless space between us and next to me here on the sofa, Téa Leoni paused on the screen in front of me, adorably short hair on semi-permanent display).

I didn’t know I could stand my ground, hold my position, resist his infiltration. These were not the lessons taught or the tools, like scissors, I had been shown how to use. I didn’t want to cut my hair, had never wanted to cut my hair, had cried for days in the second grade when my mother traded me a sucker for a haircut (my sister betrayed me, used her words to convince me this was a great idea, a beautiful outcome guaranteed, and when the deed was done and I stood looking at my shorn head in shock, she claimed the sucker as her own even though the hair stolen was mine and had nothing to do with her; she had not grown it, it did not live on her head, no loss was living in her heart) and suddenly not being “allowed” to do so was my body’s axis being forcibly removed, transferred, claimed, pillaged and my hair’s destiny was now someone else’s plunder. And the rapist and pillager was sitting right next to me.

Never to not be right next to me ever again for any and for all visits to the hairdresser who was no longer mine to claim because my hair was no longer mine to have and to hold. Rather, the self-appointed general assumed his power pose with a half smile (reserved for the lesser ranks) on his salon-facing face, orchestrating, visioning, and directing the handling of each lock I had loved. Bound in the black smock of complicity, my neck held, but not supported, in the sink’s cradle, my scalp burned, the flames stretching, reaching, licking the entire circumference of my skull, the shame I felt smoldering inside showing itself only briefly with one tear’s escape down the side of my face not facing his, while my tresses were transformed into his vision of a great idea, of beauty guaranteed, was to me an unrecognizable mass of Barbie. Bleached-blonde. My Self muted in this his strategic coup against my crown. Shame became my shroud, my sense of Self buried deep beneath the public-facing Barbie hair head held by him, proudly parading his trophy (wife) through one multiple of five years, the scalping, like an honor killing, repeated every 3 months, always standing in his power pose over me: bound, held, and burning for his pleasure, in spite of my ever-present pain.

And in the morning of the fifth year I saw my Self in the mirror and She said to me, “I miss you. I love you. You are still here. I see you.” My tears like a raging river washed clean the battlefield of the body (turned bounty) I occupied and I staged my own revolution: my reclamation of Self. And the lessons I had not been taught were instead forged in the fires of my quarterly burnings, branded on my heart, and I brandished my Love of Self like a pair of deftly-wielded scissors and cut my Self out of that five-year fealty, leaving only those Barbie locks — belonging never to me — in my wake, waking in the sovereignty of my own shorn head and the axis of my own power restored.

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I Know Love

It’s easy to preach from the pulpit, to talk at and about what life is and what relationships are not, to suggest knowing a thing — any thing — without being in the thing. Except I have been there, gotten through to the other side by way of fire-walking. That kind of lived experience has a way of leaving permanent marks on feet and hearts and hands that clung to ropes that burned as my hands squeezed tighter, misbelieving the rope was the truth and if I could just maintain my grip it would lead me to the promised land. 

What is it I profess to know? What is it I am preaching from the pulpit of my life path? What truth(s) have I earned the right to know? What stories do the scars imprinted on the bottoms of my feet and the fleshy tables of my heart know to be immutable, regardless of your certain interpretation of me, which opinion is derived only through a lens of your own projections? 

I know Love. I know Love intimately because I have known its opposite: Fear. I have lived with Fear as he raped me of my innocence, tore from me my childlike wonder and assumption that Love was a magical bestowment that like fairy dust just sifts its apportionment onto worthy girls and boys who say, “Yes, I do to, with, and for You.” But the dusting I received wasn’t the light of the fairy realm; it was from a much darker place, replete with doubt, uncertainty, and the questioning of every single truth I had been (force) fed from the time I started consuming solids.  

Fear and I moved in together, where he slept by my side, night after terrifying night, always taking (never asking) that which he told me was (rightfully) his, and what I had been told was no longer mine to hold, to honor, to preserve. My “I do,” was Fear’s free-roaming and irrevocable hall pass. 

Fear was the misidentification of Love, taught, fed, and held up to me as a counterfeit that looked like M-A-R-R-I-A-G-E, the endgame and highest achievement, whose checked box would grant me entrance to a magical kingdom of bliss and being my best self because I would be in service to someone (him) else, and servicing (him) was the exchange asked of my precious Self, along with the additional and usual quid-pro-quo of such an arrangement: the cleaning, cooking, and carrying of babies, etc.

Love spoke to me, reminded me of her actual Truth(s). After years of Fear pounding in my ears, forcing my every move, my heart struggled to hear (to understand) Love. Love was persistent, as Love just is, and never stopped reaching out, reminding me of her presence, her presents, and her path for (as) me. I learned to hear and to listen to Love, as she guided me back to the dusting of light, restored me to that which is the true identification of Love: not M-A-R-R-I-A-G-E, but as Teilhard de Chardin says, “Love is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.” Love unites; Fear divides. 

I know Love. She is soft, gentle, kind, vulnerable, compassionate, forgiving, open, curious, deep, wide, funny, filled with grace, communicative. Love is Me. Your projections have no belonging here inside of the Love I Am, not because I don’t love you, and not because your thoughts and opinions don’t matter, but because these your thoughts and opinions are Fear masquerading counterfeit to Love. And I know Love.  

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Banished

Circe sent her lover to the sea after he touched, took, and filled her with the promises, (stolen) virginity (only once), and empty air he committed to another woman. Her transmogrification and banishment of him became the scourge of seafarers the ocean over, while Circe, herself, was banished by the god of the sun, her father, to an island, where men continued to dock their ships, overstaying their welcome, misbelieving they could touch, take, and fill Circe’s spaciousness. Her mastery of Self coupled with her sacred skill set of creating potions from plants, she transformed those (unwelcome) men into the outer expression of their inner animals, their physical forms finally manifesting their true masculine.

 Lot’s wife was sanctioned to salt the earth, rather than be elevated as its salt, just for looking back, forever labeled a disobedient, one who abandoned her husband, her faith, her god, left behind by the husband beside her, banished by the faith for which she walked away in the first place, punished instantly by the god above her. 

Brothels overflow with women whose life-giving abilities are invaded, stolen, bought and sold (by and for men), while the women who no longer possess the right to say YES are labeled whore, slut, cunt. Being banished to a tent in the wilderness until she is clean from bleeding her monthly dues must seem the balming reprieve of Gilead to every woman who enters therein, only to drape the weight of men’s reach again as she lifts back and walks through the canvas door, feet hot on the sand.

My feet retain scars from the hot sands I have walked. I have had labels hurled at and stuck all over every part of this life-giving body of mine. I have tasted more salt from the runoff of my own tears than I believe one body should be capable of producing. Banishment is the birthright I claimed through the rebirth of my Self. 

An ultrasound declared me the pained mother-to-be of an ovarian cyst, larger than a baseball, filling my womb. Surgery would be required to eliminate this growth, for safety, for preventing complications, for preempting pain. Pretend she’s in the tent: NO sex. So simple. But he was itchy. He needed to scratch. Not ask. Just take. Penetrate. Explosion like the Death Star. Immediate. My abdomen imploded. Shards of ruptured cyst bursting and banging against one another and the hallowed walls of my uterus. Unconscionable Pain. No admission of guilt or responsibility. He swore me to silence: “Tell the doctor it just ruptured on its own. We don’t know why. She said that was a possibility.” 

I have birthed a child. My womb filled with a donation I sought and paid for with my obeisance, obedience, and objectification. My YES lived a life of solitude amongst thousands of NOs accumulating dust over years of disuse. “Wait six weeks before intercourse,” the doctor advised. “Your stitches are extensive and you must have time to heal.” The tent could only provide me sanctuary for four weeks before he came in unannounced and unwanted, throwing back the heavy canvas flap, bleeding and breaking me once more. Who would you be without an all-access pass to my tent? 

“If you loved me you would satisfy me,” he reminded me daily. 

“Don’t make me go somewhere else to have my needs met,” he threatened from inside of me, as if my 3-5 times a day complicity in allowing him in and against my Self wasn’t enough. How do you satiate the insatiable?  

“Don’t make me go Circe on you,” I thought to my Self, knowing I had no power over the animal he already was without any potions or wishes from me. Banishing my shrunken Self from him was the only option for me to exercise. I called on Circe, through whose eyes I could see the truth of who he was. I turned and looked back, just like Lot’s wife, not out of disobedience, but to remind me where I had been is not where I would ever go back to again. The one abandoning was me, not put out, up, or on by any man. The leaving behind of this man, his god, and all their labels was mine to choose and to do. 

Perspective, purpose and power are what I now carry in my womb. My own re-birthing through this my banishment is a banner I proudly wave, welcoming my tribe, the multitude of others just like me. Here, my banner reads: Rest. Revive. Be reborn. There is life after banishment. YES lives here. 

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Rumi’s Field

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
— Rumi

I am standing in the field of which Rumi writes, a field in which wrong and right do not exist and in their place exists something else entirely, perhaps it’s only Love. 

I am standing in the courage of my own conviction, the result of having shed the old patterns of outside authority, of having shakily let go of some others’ (some men) outside of me always knowing what is best and better for me than I know for me. 

Here in this field I am speaking, being, living my own authority. I am the knowing and the deciding and the doing. I see only so far as the headlights’ beams of my inner vision reach and it is far enough to move my Self forward, moving the casting light with me as I step and steer by my own choosing, here in this field of Love. 

The voice which I alone understand, which voice speaks the language of my heart, comes from deep within and I cast a line, hoping to secure my courage here in this field where Love resides and presides. Am I allowed to drop anchor in Love’s Field? Whose permission should I obtain? Is there a he here to tell me?

There are voices on the outside, voices that are not in or from the field, voices that reside in the luxurious judgment seats of wrong and right. They are loud, these declarations and condemnations against and for my comings and goings, my being, and my feeling. 

I remember Rumi promised to meet me “beyond [those] ideas,” and hear his weighted word in the delivery of an idea and then I feel the tug of my anchoring line, a reminder that their declarations are only ideas, theirs and not mine. 

My location in the Field is closer to its edge than I prefer. But I am IN the field and from this vantage point I can still see the inroads of my own Courage intersecting with the deeply-grooved dead-ends dug up over four decades of all the his’s declarations. Is Rumi here to meet me?

I grab my secured line and hold tightly, gently placing hand over heart over hand one beat at a time, one tug and then the next, and slowly pull and navigate my Authoritative Self closer to Center, closer to the Field’s Center, closer to the Great Heart of the Universe, closer to Love. Rumi is not here. He never meant to be.

Here is where She has been waiting all along: only Love is here. 

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Burned To Shine

Is there someplace where it is said, First the burning, then the shining? Maybe that place is only in my head, so I’ll go ahead and claim it as my own unoriginal thought. Viktor Frankl definitely said, “What is to give light must endure burning.” 

I had it all. I mean I really had it all. And I burned it right to the ground. No regrets now but certainly not the case during that 10-year combustion phase.

Burning. My burning. It’s interesting in retrospect. 

What is the all I had and consciously chose to burn? I was given the “keys to the kingdom,” as it were: all the knowledge — the literal knowing — of right versus wrong, good versus bad, purpose versus pleasure. I was handed the script for living (if you consider the accumulation of good marks while living being tallied toward the greater reward to be awarded after dying as living), told which part was mine and memorized my lines long before the director said I needed to be off-script. I’ve always been an overachiever like that. 

The all I had was the idyllic description taken straight from the script — it was scripted perfection, honestly, and I never needed or asked for a line prompt; it’s as if I was born to play my part. Is that type-casting? (Something to look into.) I was a natural; the embodiment of method acting, I read all the books, answered all the questions, studied my mentors’ every moves, and demurred and deferred to every single man just on-cue. I said Yes when my body would have had me say No. 

My relationship and relatedness to all the other players was strictly professional; I kept it that way intentionally and without realizing it. I could not break character for fear of being recast and replaced by someone else willing herself to perfection. I was perfectly obedient. 

Until I wasn’t.

One line at a time, scribbled on and removed from the script, I set a little match. I never burned the entire script; it would have caused too big a flame, would have attracted too much attention. I would have been kicked out of the cast in front of everyone. That burning would have burned me, burned others close to me. I was never an inflictor of wounds, not knowingly. I chose to burn from the inside out instead. My wounds were my own to tend. But their infliction? Whose were those?

I recently read an account of the very young Judy Garland on the set of The Wizard of Oz and I understood how large a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio loomed above and around her in the real-life body of a Mr. Louis B. Mayer managing and controlling her every move, her very voice, touching all aspects of her performance as if it were for him, alone.  

Personal performance notes I took to heart: “No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light” (Luke 13:11). And I understood I was meant to give light, not to hide it under a bushel or under a marquee not of my own making. I slow-burned my all to the ground because my on-demand rote performance wasn’t life or light-giving. First the burning, now the shining.

I’m taking my encore performance: I was burned to shine. 

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Hallelujah

A deep deep inhalation followed by a full-breathed exhale — the all at once kind, looking like the wind emoji and wondering if this is what is meant by life imitating art? My wondering takes me underneath the exhale, curious if I can name it, say out loud the source of this Hallelujah’s inception. I know there is power in a name. I remember that “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19), and if Mary kept her things to herself, should I, too, keep mine? 

My full-breathed exhales are my Hallelujah Collective, a chorus of sorts, and much like Handel in his writing of his own Hallelujah Chorus (much better-known than my own), “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself seated on His throne, with His company of Angels,” I know my exhales are full of the god in me accompanied by my own company of angels surrounding, lifting, and lighting my next breath forward. 

Notable Hallelujah’s:

— Every time his touching of me stopped. Always temporarily, but stopped. In those moments I exhaled.

— 9/11 peace accord with my Self, the confirmation that we two, she and me, would remain standing but on separate ground from him

— He agreeing, without dissertation or discussion of any kind, to my having full custody of our co-creation, my whole heart, my girl

— The signature from a credentialed-stranger, publicly decreeing a legal unbinding on the outside of what would take more years apart than ever together to undo what twisted up and bound my inside beliefs

— A name, my own from birth, restored as patronymic for only a small fee + the paperwork

— Another signature, many times repeated, binding me to a home, a place, a mortgage, my own alone

— Dance recitals, voice performances, graduations, life moments complete with staged photographs to capture forever the unbindable and impossible to capture love for this precious daughter

— Graduate work with my own heart, Spiritual Psychology, reviewing, revisiting, forgiving, reimagining, and reinventing my own breaths and transmuting them one at a time into my own Hallelujah Collective, here to be treasured, acknowledged, shared and seen. By me. By you. For the heavenly seeing of the god in me bowing to the god I was, only always doing the best she could.

And look at her now: breathing.

Hallelujah. 

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The Enemy In Me

The dictionary defines enemy as “a person who feels hatred for, fosters harmful designs against, or engages in antagonistic activities against another; an adversary or opponent” and enemies as “persons, nations, etc., that are hostile to one another.”

Enemy feels so harsh inside of me, the insistence of one’s existence in relation to me a sucker punch directly to my gut and I resist the very thought of identifying anyone I know as one! But hostile? I can relate to that. Hostile is only “opposed in feeling, action, or character; antagonistic: as in hostile criticism.” Hostile is also defined as “not friendly, warm, or generous; not hospitable.” Hostile is gentler on my stomach than a sucker punch; merely the bloated discomfort from overeating combined with inactivity on Thanksgiving. 

Reflecting on the dictionary’s definition of hostile, my insides start to churn, my tummy hurts, my body constricts like the snake coiling around its own centermost point and I know there at my own centermost point I have found the enemy: residing inside of me.

I understand why it feels so harsh, that sucker punch directly to my gut, because my adversary is me. For a lifetime of choices, decisions, actions taken all in the name of forward movement, achievement, and accomplishment on the outside, my inside opponent was running interference and spreading counterintelligence to the very same body that was being given entirely different direction. I am a walking contradiction, living in opposition to and as myself. 

I didn’t know. I didn’t understand or comprehend how stealthily I was working my own subterfuge whose eventual success was my own demise. It’s two opposing forces simultaneously advancing but their meeting halts them both and no one moves ahead. No one wins. 

That upset inside of my gut was my lighthouse in the approaching storm, warning me of impending danger, even death, if I didn’t alter my course. But the course I had set and was navigating on autopilot seemed immovable and perfect in its path. 

Rumi says “The wound is the place where the light enters you,” or if you prefer Leonard Cohen’s version in his Anthem lyrics, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Suffice it to say I cracked; I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize myself. I heeded the light warning me to steer clear of the rocks and by way of that redirection I exposed Rumi’s wound. 

I licked my wound for a long time, and by “long time” I mean YEARS. To be fair, I am not a professional and didn’t know the severity and depth of my wound. I was treating myself for a scrape with a bandaid but had a gaping head wound in need of specific and guided attention. 

My recovery has been slow and not always visible. I have suffered numerous setbacks. I have not always seen a way out or a way forward. I have been often at odds with my enemy within, one or the other of us discounting the voice that wasn’t our own. I have learned to speak a new language and now claim fluency, practicing its use every day. I am still healing. I am friends with me.

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The Right Man

When the one place I’d been taught my entire life to feel the most secure, safe, and certain suddenly became uninhabitable for me, I wanted an exit plan that would ensure the love of those I was inevitably leaving behind remained intact. It’s taken years to navigate, but based on the security, safety and certainty on which I stand today, I feel nothing but gratitude.

I was raised inside of a strictly dogmatic theology: right and wrong, black and white, good and evil were as clearly defined for me as the ten words on my weekly second grade spelling test. And just like the learning of my weekly vocabulary words required writing sentences for a grade to be sure I understood every word’s derivation, pronunciation and correct usage, so, too, did my parents and Sunday School teachers require a regular repetition of concepts, scripture stories, and commandments. 

I was the poster child for GOOD GIRL. I made every decision only through prayer; I participated in service opportunities at Olympic athlete levels; I turned every frown upside down and changed it to a smile; I quoted scriptures as off-handedly as the ABC song; I was a youth leader, showing my peers through my example exactly how easy it was to live righteously; I taught Sunday School for every single age bracket the packed Sunday service schedule could allow; I served a full-time mission. In Russia. I learned Russian to teach the Russian people in their own language everything I was told I know about God and Jesus Christ and the salvation of your soul. I know all about your soul, where it came from, why it’s here, where it’s heading next, and what you can do about it. I baked my own bread, could sew my daughter dresses, married the “right” man, kept a spotless house, served others without ever once thinking of myself, studied my scriptures, taught the 5 year-olds to be like Jesus, taught the 25 year-olds to believe in things unseen, taught the 55 year-olds to be less judgmental. 

The right man I married stopped attending church. No one at church asked why. They all made righteously safe assumptions about his whereabouts — must be at the hospital, obviously making rounds, so studious that one, God bless him. 

The right man I married yelled at me when I spoke to him without invitation, when I entered his (our) office unannounced — the computer and his access to porn lived there in the dark, when my (our) daughter cried (“Make her stop, goddammit!”), when his laundry wasn’t folded to his liking, when I wasn’t to his liking, when I weighed only 90 pounds and couldn’t feed myself or my baby or him but he wasn’t going to take care of me.

Do you hear me?

He wasn’t. 

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Happy Anniversary

I got married 24 years ago today on October 10, 1996. 

Waking up on that Thursday morning for a 10am “I Do” moment could not feel more vastly different from how I felt this October 10, 2020 morning. 

24 years ago I was nervous, second-guessing myself, nauseated, and just this side of a panic attack. I paid NO attention to any of those screaming, waving, jumping out of their seats red flags my body was throwing directly at me. Instead, I dismissed my nervousness as the “cold feet” everyone apparently gets on their wedding day; I ignored entirely my doubts as inconsequential and, while quiet, not a voice that mattered; the nausea was clearly related to my nerves and, therefore, part of my cold feet; and the panic attack that wasn’t — well I wasn’t listening to my own still small voice so why would a flaming panic attack stop me from stepping ahead? 

Self-dismissal on every level: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, was the way I lived my life 24 years ago, bypassing, dismissing and outright ignoring every indicator my body’s life navigational system came equipped with to operate.  

Vehicles (and bodies, I discovered) do not hold up well over time when their messages and indicators for service and attention are ignored by those using them to function. I had already made it abundantly clear to my body that I do not listen, pay attention to, or respect its voice. Every indicator it gave me over the years I ignored. I was definitely not providing regular service, check-ups, check-ins, or care for my Self. 

My body (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual) carried and sustained me for three strenuous years after that 10:00am on the 10th of October “I Do” before no longer giving me the option of a red flag. It was as if my license to drive my Self had been revoked. No questions asked. My physical system just shut itself down in the summer of 1999. While medical doctors determined symptoms, I was something of a conundrum; no one could ever diagnose exactly what would “fix” me on the physical level. 

After two more years of struggle, and for the first time in my life, I was finally hearing the quiet message my body was sharing with me and I understood its meaning. My fix wasn’t going to come through any prescription; if I wanted to heal physically, I would need to heal my relationship with my Self on all levels: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. 

October 2001 — just five years after “I Do,” I said “I Don’t” and embarked on a journey of Self listening, learning, and living. My healing journey has taken me through every level my body has asked me to explore and to align: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Living in integrity with the wholeness of my Self has replaced the unhealthy and unsustainable system of dismissal I used for the first 30+ years of my life. I pay attention to every message my body is no longer screaming at me because I’ve repaired our relationship and slowed down to listen to my Self. 

Today I only ever say “I Do” to that which my whole Self and I agree is in alignment with the truth of who I am.