Erase and Start Over

The resurfacing memories of a woman with PTSD.

Tag Archives: domestic violence


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My Pandora’s Box

Engraving, based on a painting by F.S. Church.

Engraving, based on a painting by F.S. Church.

Spring, 1986 Kansas City, MO

It was a rainy Saturday afternoon. Demi was about 18 months old, and napping soundly in her room. I was trying to find some space in our bedroom closet for extra storage. I ignored the top of the closet, where Dell kept his revolver. I never saw the need for such a thing and was just thankful he kept it out of Demi’s reach. The floor of the closet was a different story. Surely some of those boxes could be emptied or thrown out. Most were filled with books that I’ve had forever, but one of the boxes was filled with paper, kind of like a filing cabinet. I rummaged through it and discovered that it was our financial records, beginning from when we were married in March ’84.

Curious, I pulled out the tax return that Dell had just finished a month ago. He took care of all the bills, the checkbook, and such. I had never done a tax return before, but the form didn’t seem all that complicated. I had no trouble understanding what was on each line, but I was certainly troubled by what I read there.

My husband’s salary was nearly twice mine.

I sat back on my sneakered heels, staring at the paper as if it were a claim that unicorns were real. It couldn’t be true. We were broke. We got our clothes from the Salvation Army. He only gave me $20 a week to spend at the grocery store. We didn’t go to the movies, we didn’t exchange birthday presents with friends or family, our last Christmas was just one present each, and we certainly didn’t go out as a family on a vacation or really anywhere that wasn’t free.

I let my hand fall in my lap, still holding the tax return. It said we would be receiving a $300 refund. My shoulders dropped, and I tilted my head, thinking about new towels. Fluffy, big bath towels to wrap my little curly-top girl in. And clothes. Demi was growing so fast. How great it would be to get her a couple cute summer dresses. I pushed aside the thought that Dell should have told me about his raise, because I was young and optimistic and more than willing to believe in unicorns.

Smiling, I stood up to go look for Dell. He was coming out of the garage, covered in dirt and grease, just as I got to the kitchen.

“Whatcha got there?” he asked, wiping his hands on an old rag.

“The tax return. Dell, I’m so glad we’re getting a refund! Demi needs some clothes, and can we get some new towels?”

He went still, and I sensed he was upset. His eyes narrowed, and he said warily, “We can think about it.”

This was not the reaction I was expecting. That niggling feeling that he should have told me the truth came back in full force. His shuttered face was watching me in the brightness of that small kitchen. There was no sound except for the light pink-pinks of drizzling rain at the windows, but there could have been a tornado roaring outside and I wouldn’t have heard it. I stood there, struggling to get past the idea that he’d never intended I should ever know how much money was coming in the house. He never lied to me, but he purposely led me to believe that he was making about $15,000 a year just like me. He’d even apologized to me for not being able to take me out for my 21st birthday last month because we were so broke. He had brought home a bottle of whiskey and a pack of Coca-Colas for us to share. I didn’t like it much, but with enough Coke in the glass, it wasn’t bad. I had thanked him for trying to be thoughtful. My fingers curled tightly around the tax return. I had actually thanked him for remembering my birthday with his favorite drink.

Still unmoving, he waited, watching the realization growing in my face. I thought about his beat-up old MG on the side of the house. He drove a silver Toyota minivan, and dropped me off at work every day. That was our car, but the unpainted shell of an MG was his alone. Every weekend, he kept rummaging in junkyards for parts, sure that he could rebuild it. He was a bill collector, sitting on a phone behind a desk all day, not an auto mechanic, but that MG was his baby. In that moment, I was sure all our money was being poured into that old thing, with nothing left to take his wife out for her 21st birthday. With nothing to make sure his wife and child could eat something that didn’t come out of a can. Except for hamburger, even our meat came out of a can. Tuna. Spam. Once, our church pastor had invited us to his home for dinner one Friday night, and I remembered asking his wife if she’d cut the corn fresh from the cob to serve. I had never tasted anything so fresh and delicious since the corn-on-the-cob my mom always made. She looked at me funny and said no, that it just came out of a bag of frozen corn. We never bought frozen foods because canned was cheaper.

I could feel my own eyes narrowing as I looked at Dell, wondering how he could prefer car parts over frozen corn. “When did you start making $30,000 a year?”

“That’s none of your business.” I felt his words like a slap.

“I give you my paycheck every month, and I don’t see hardly any of it being spent on this family. If your money is your business, then my money is my business. Where’s my money going, Dell?”

He snorted and folded his arms across his chest. “Your money is my money. That’s how marriage works, babe. Everything here is mine. Your clothes, that dining room table, that highchair, this whole house and everything in it. Mine.” He gave me that familiar blue wink and grin. “As long as you keep it clean, you’re welcome to stay.”

I was speechless, torn between wanting to wipe that smirk off his face and wanting to stomp out of the room. This was not the man I married. This was not the vulnerable, nobody-understands-me guy who winked at me when I ironed his jeans just the way he liked them. Who ate my bad cooking without complaining, and had no problem leaving the dishes to me.

This man stood there exuding confidence and control as if he’d had it all along. I felt manipulated. Betrayed. And very angry. “Well,” I spluttered, my hands now on my hips and the tax return fluttering to the floor, “well, if I leave, I’m taking my paycheck with me. And for that matter, you’re the one who’ll have to leave, because my name is on the mortgage, and you can’t sell this house without me. So, you are the one who’s welcome to stay, if you can learn to start spending money on your family and not those stupid car parts.”

I had succeeded in wiping the smirk off his face, but I immediately wished it was back. I had never seen a look like that on anyone before, not even my mother at her worst. His face was like marble, a menacing stone gargoyle that only had to take a very slight step toward me to make me stumble and back into the fridge. He stared me down for a moment, then turned purposefully toward the garage.

Frightened, I followed him, unsure of what he was going to do, but very sure that I had to stop him, whatever it was. I stood in the kitchen doorway leading to the garage as he silently reached for something hanging on the wall above the worktable. “Dell, I’m sorry,” I whispered. I cleared my throat and spoke louder. “Dell. Dell, I’m sorry.”

He took the sledgehammer down and cradled it for a minute, looking at me. I backed up.

“Dell, Demi is in the house. Let me just get Demi and we’ll go. Okay?”

He took a step toward me. I took another step back. He stepped, and I stepped, a slow, torturous dance that I knew was not going to end well. I couldn’t read his face – it was completely frozen in that cold stare. I didn’t know who this man was, but I was terrified right down to my bones. I turned and ran across the kitchen, could hear his footsteps pounding behind me, and made it across the house into Demi’s bedroom. I quickly shut the door and leaned my body against it, my eyes running hurriedly over Demi’s room, looking for a way to grab her out of the crib and escape, but there was no time and nowhere to go.

His footsteps stopped on the other side of the door. I could feel the pressure under the wood of his body leaning on the other side of it. My heart was in my throat. I didn’t have the strength to keep him from opening that door. “This is my house,” he growled through the thin wood. The pressure was suddenly gone and I suddenly remembered the gun. What if he was going to get his gun?! The panic tasted like rust in my mouth, and I strained to hear his movements. It sounded like he was in the dining room.

“Don’t believe me?” he called loudly from there. “I’ll prove it.”

The next thing I heard was a loud crack followed by a crash of splintering wood. He had taken the sledgehammer to one of the walls. There was a squeak of metal dragging on wood, as if he had to pull the thing back out of the wall, and the crash repeated. It repeated three more times before he was  back, panting at the door.

“Talk back again, and next time it’ll be you.” Then he walked away.

My body was trembling against that door. I looked at Demi, still asleep on her belly, her little back softly rising up and down with each baby’s breath. What kind of father had I given her? My knees couldn’t support me anymore, and I slid to the floor, keeping my back against the door just in case. My fingernails dug into the hardwood floor, and I took in great gulps of air. My face was burning hot, and my eyes felt heavy and wet. That stupid box. I should have just left that stupid box alone.

I could hear the Toyota fire up. I held my breath. Yes, the tires were crunching in the wet gravel. He was leaving. I glanced around the room again. We were going to leave now, too.


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Knock, Knock, Knocking on …

TRIGGER WARNING

Looking back on that Sunday, June 1st, I don’t remember much, but I know the overwhelm took me. I didn’t give in to it – I know what giving in feels like. Giving in is when you come home with drive-thru nachos and microwavable kettle corn, turn on Netflix and binge watch for eight hours. Giving in is my mother with red wine swirling in her morning orange juice. Giving in to overwhelm is a conscious decision to put the world on hold and self-medicate for awhile. It’s a miracle that I prefer salt over alcohol in my worst state. I tell myself that whenever I take my blood pressure medicine. It could be worse.

No, on that particular Sunday the overwhelm took me, without my permission.

My girls say it seemed as though I had the flu pretty bad that day. My walk was unsteady whenever I got up for the bathroom or water, I had no appetite, I was alternating freezing cold and sweating hot, and I mostly slept.

I remember there were nightmares. I think I cycled through just about every recurring nightmare I’ve ever had and then some. My first husband’s fingers around my throat. My sisters screaming. Running and running but not able to get anywhere.

My waking moments were all memories:

Me, falling out of bed and getting my lip split on the corner of the nightstand. Getting stitches. I was 3.

Mom, sitting dejectedly on the end of the couch, cigarette smoke making rings around her tousled hair, her make-up-smeared eyes red and bleary. I had stayed home from school to make sure she didn’t carry out her threat to kill herself that day. I was 16.

Walking stiffly for a drink at the water fountain in the police station, my uniformed escort asking me why I was so formal, and me telling him I was not going to cry. I was 25.

Being slammed into the bathroom wall of the Pink Garter, a stranger’s lips forcibly taking mine. She had followed me in and had me pinned, her whole big, muscular body crushing me against the wall. I struggled and fought and was thankfully released to run when someone else walked in. I never thought a woman would ever do such a thing. I was 18.

Mom, kicking me as I lay curled up in a sleeping bag on the floor in my room. Kicking me again and again, screaming horrible insults at me. I was 15.

A door being slammed in my face. More stitches. I was 7.

Carrying a ringed pillow from class to class in junior high, telling everyone I had chipped my tailbone from a fall off my roller skates. I was 13.

Daddy #3’s finger in my face, threatening me literally into a corner, and Mom behind him telling me to just say yes, daddy. I was 17.

The videographer who offered to drive me home from an evening SCA event, pulling into the back of a grocery store and telling me he was in pain and only I could help him. He unzipped his pants. I convinced him that I was on my period. He said that’s okay, I could still help him and I wasn’t going home until I did. It was him or face a metal cooking spoon for missing my curfew. I was 14.

Walking six miles in the middle of the night, jumping into shadows any time a car came by, not knowing if my parents were after me. I carried a small bag of clothes and was headed to an older friend’s apartment. I didn’t know where I would go from there, but I was never, ever, going home again, not until I had made enough money to rescue my sisters. I was 17.

My sisters and I, all neatly dressed and sitting on the couch facing the CPS investigator. We told her we were fine, happy, that there was nothing wrong. No way were we going to let this stranger separate us girls from each other. I was 15.

Being slammed into the coat closet door and then rocked onto the living room carpet. Being straddled with his hips on my thighs and his knees on my hands and his hands around my throat, squeezing and squeezing until the black cloud came and I knew I was dying, knew I would never see my little girl or my sisters again. I was 25.

That’s but a handful of the memories I cycled through that day. And now I had four new memories:

1. Me in the pool, looking up at my naked, nine-year-old sister on the diving board.

2. Me, ten, running from the pool, tripping, hearing men’s laughter.

3. Mom, sitting in a pale pink wrap in the patio set by the pool, smoking and saying “just say yes daddy” over and over.

4. A man standing by the pool, between the diving board and the patio set. But that’s for tomorrow’s post.

One night, when I was 15, I knelt before my bedroom window, looking up at a full moon. The house was quiet. My youngest sister, Beth, silent in the next room. They had beat her hard that night. Her screams and sobs still rang in my ears today, but all was quiet and the house was dark at that moment in my memory. I remember kneeling there with my hands folded in prayer, appealing to the distant, peaceful orb that hung in the night as if that were God’s face, blurred by my powerless tears, and not the man in the moon.

Please, God. Please don’t let me wake up tomorrow. Please, take me to heaven tonight. Please. I can’t do this anymore.

That’s how I felt on June 1st, 2014. But in my despair that overwhelming Sunday, I knew then what I didn’t know for sure at 15. The morning was coming, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was going to wake up.


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Hanging On by a Thread

TRIGGER WARNING

Friday, May 30, 2014

Beth’s flight was delayed, which would have put her behind for work, so she and I drove back up the East coast together. I was working on about four hours of sleep after hearing what Meg had to say, and by this point, Meg had told Beth. As you can imagine, it was part of the conversation on our way home.

We told each other that we didn’t remember it ever happening to us in childhood, but shared stories of incidents that had happened in our teenage years. One thing that has often puzzled me, is the question – is it rape if it doesn’t physically hurt?

My second year of marriage, my husband and I had a pretty strained relationship. He had put a sledgehammer into the dining room walls and told me that if I ever disobeyed him again, I would be next. I had left him the next day when that happened, but as a young mom with an infant, I had nowhere to go and very little money, so I went back to him.

Anyway, I was pretty scared of him and terrified of sleeping in the same bed, but equally terrified not to. Every morning, he would have sex with me, and I would lay there pretending to be asleep. I’d be laying on my side, facing the wall, keeping my eyes closed and my breathing as even as possible while he did what he needed to do. Then he got up to take a shower, and I cried quietly.

It didn’t hurt. I don’t know if it was because I had a baby by then and I was bigger than before, or if it was because he was a fairly small man, as those things go (I have no idea why I’m trying to be delicate, habit I suppose), but whatever the case, the only thing that hurt was my heart. I was 20 years old and felt completely powerless, too scared to say no, and feeling I had no right to say no even if I could say it out loud.

If he had tried to wake me up, whispered my name or shook me or something, I would have pretended to wake up and pretended to enjoy it. I learned at a very early age how to tell what someone else was feeling or what they wanted, and to respond in kind so as to appease. Appeasing people is the best way to avoid pain. I know different now, but back then, obedience and a believable smile was my M.O. for survival.

Anyway, on the drive home from North Carolina, Beth tactfully told me she thought what he had done was certainly a violation. (Guess where she learned tact? From the same metal cooking spoon that I did.) We shared other stories of rape and molestation that had happened to us at various ages (statistically, it’s not uncommon for women to be assaulted more than once in a lifetime – no, it doesn’t just happen in crime-ridden urban streets or third-world countries).

And, we talked about Mom. Imagine a 12-year-old girl in the mid-1950’s living in rural Spokane, her mother was in and out of the hospital with who knows what, and her father could only visit her once a week. I have no idea why. I never met my mother’s parents. I don’t even know their names, and I don’t even know if they are alive. Mom doesn’t know either, although in 2014, it’s pretty sure they aren’t alive now. Anyway, this girl was raised by her grandmother, a strict Victorian-like woman who believed children should be seen and not heard. Who made Mom go out to the backyard and pick the branch that she would be beaten with. Who turned a blind eye whenever her son would come for a visit and spend time alone with his little girl sitting on his lap.

(At least, this is what we think happened to her, based on bits and pieces she’s said to us over the years. Not everything she said matched with what she said at different times to each of us, but so far this much seems to be true. We don’t know enough family on her side to know for sure what happened. She didn’t like us to be in touch with anyone on her side of the family.)

I have no problem feeling compassion for my mother. Even if her story isn’t true, I know enough about human nature to know that something terrible happened to her. No way could she be like this and have had a loving, safe, childhood. No way. I completely understand why she spent the rest of her life self-medicating with alcohol and feeling less than whole without a man. I even understand why she beat her children. Given all that, my sisters don’t understand why I struggle to forgive her. With the new information that she stood by and allowed a man to rape Meg made me even more angry with her, and less inclined to forgive her – ever. And Beth and I spoke a lot about that on the way home.

I can’t do it because her life got better, and she did nothing to heal. Her fourth marriage was comfortable. No children, a good middle-class income, travel, a garden, great health care, and no worries. Plenty of time to get counseling, join AA, get to know her children as the bright, successful women they turned out to be.

She didn’t do any of that. She wallowed in self-pity. She snapped and criticized her girls, and criticized the way we raised our own children. She would be drunk by noon, making it pointless to call her because she wouldn’t remember the conversation anyway. My sisters and I led this horse to water time and again for decades, and she refused to drink it. She prefers to believe she never beat us, she never caused us any harm, she doesn’t have a drinking problem, and her life is just fine, thank you very much, and we should butt out.

Three of us girls have children, and we have never left our children alone with this woman. No way. And, we have never beaten our children. We don’t even spank them. And guess what? The kids – most of them are adults now – are really great people who do good in the world. Spare the rod and spoil the child? You bet. If providing a loving, safe, encouraging, filled-with-laughter home is spoiling a child, you bet. We did it, and we’d do it again. Yes, I hold Mom to my standard. I grew up in violence, too, but I didn’t take it out on my kids.

My mother belongs in jail, and I said as much to Beth. I believe what she did to us was criminal. And if the only way I can hold her accountable is to insist that she speak to me with respect or not speak to me at all, then so be it. If I decided to cut her off from her grandchildren because her drinking is inappropriate, so be it. My sisters disagree and believe that her tragedies grant her compassion and leeway. I grant her the compassion, but not the leeway.

I dropped Beth off at her car at the airport, and pulled into a nearby restaurant to sit quietly and think.  I thought about Meg and the diving board. I thought about Mom. I thought about my two marriages. I thought about my conversation with Beth and her reaction. My mind chased thought after thought, as if there was some kind of answer in the muddle, but the clouds just got thicker, darker. There was a hot, angry storm on the horizon, but I kept averting my eyes, holding onto the numb cold.

After about an hour of staring at the menu and nibbling on french fries, I got back in the car and drove the rest of the three hours home. I walked in the door, was hugged by my daughters, and burst into tears. And it wasn’t because of the 14-hour drive, lack of sleep, or the funeral. I was safe, loved, not required to be responsible for anything, and my mind and body knew it. Now I could collapse.