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You never realize all the things that you’ll lose when you
leave.
There are the obvious things- your home, your marriage,
companionship, your fairy tale.
You don’t think about your peace of mind, the next 2 years
of your life, and every single friend you have.
Every time I come around a dark corner, I still see him
pointing his .38 caliber semi-automatic right between my eyes. My heart stops
when I see a red Nissan Sentra in my rearview mirror. I’ve done so much just
trying to get healthy; individual therapy, support groups, safety plans, even
buying my own gun. I have a shot-up target, my perfect grouping right in the
bulls-eye, hung prominently in my living room where every delivery man can see
it.
After 2 years, I just started being social again. But I have
to prepare each time, a mental exercise. Last week I made it through my first
post-divorce bridal shower without tears.
I lost my child. I made it easy for him to make me kill my
child. I gave him a choice, knowing full well what choice he would make. I knew
he would have me choose between my marriage or my baby, and I was so wrapped up
in saving my fairy tale that I chose my marriage. I also knew deep down in my
secret place that I was choosing not to have a baby that would be hurt by him.
He went with me to the clinic to get the RU-486, but stole my prescribed
Vicodin and locked himself in his office for the next 2 days while I labored. I
had met a girl the week prior at his drug dealer’s house. She came over and sat
with me. I’ve cried a little every day since then.
I lost my health. The pain that wracked my body with every
hour of my marriage I never associated with him, but with a minor work injury
that truly had healed. Physical pain was caused by the man I so deeply loved who
stormed through the front door each night in a cloud, slammed the door to his
office, and started dry firing his gun for hours. He would pace the house with
his firearm, not saying a word to me until hours after he got home from work.
This was when he could still maintain employment, before the drinking got out
of control. This pain resonated through my whole body, and he wasn’t touching
me to cause the pain. His energy and hatred harmed me. I kept going to doctors
who told me I was crazy or that I had fibromyalgia. They said that it could be
a side effect from the very real physical problem caused by my thrice broken
nose, courtesy of my loving husband. All three breaks were accidental, in his
opinion.
The loss of friendships, above all, hurt the worst. My two
very best friends are now people that are not safe for me, for very different
reasons. One of them is too naïve to realize that he is manipulating her. I was
lucky- I got away from him. He stalked me for 2 years, but he is a lazy
alcoholic drug-addicted stalker. I moved 2 states away. If I had not taken such
extreme measures I may not have escaped unscathed. This friend does not
understand the importance of keeping all of my personal information, even
things as trivial as where I go to school, private. She believes that I am
being spiritually unenlightened for being unable to forgive him. She does not
understand that the only reason that he contacts her is because he is trying to
find out information about me. He never contacted her for the entire 7 years we
were together. Recently he lost track of me and suddenly he has taken an
interest in getting to know my best friend? Even more hurtful is that she feels
the need to have him in her life. I have known her for almost 20 years and she
doesn’t have the loyalty to tell him to go to hell.
The other friendship that I lost snowballed into my entire
social circle. I moved back to my hometown when I left him, ready to enter back
into the network of friends that I had remembered so fondly from college. One
good friend was a part of this circle. All four of them had been married within
2 years so were still in newlywed bliss. It turns out that married people don’t
want to talk about domestic violence. Regardless of the fact that you have been
friends since you were in college, lived together in the past, ate three meals
a day together for 4 years, cleaned up each other’s puke- these things do not
matter when you enter the taboo subject of wife beating. When I arrived back
home, they accepted me readily into their schedule of potlucks and cocktail
gatherings- but expected me to act as if all were right with the world.
Whenever I wanted to have a chat about my very tumultuous week, the subject
would get changed to the weather or a favorite recipe. Nobody would listen to
me or let me even tell my story one time so that I could get it off my chest
and then move on to my favorite recipe. I asked my good friend about it, and
she told me that I was always too negative. I tried to explain to her that I
was just going through a hard time, and if she would just listen to my story
then I could quit trying to tell it. I also reminded her that for the past two
weeks I had really good news to report, I had gotten a job and had started
graduate school and was really starting to rebuild my life. I didn’t understand
how anyone could interpret these things as negative. To me they were positive
steps and rays of hope for my future without him. Her denial of my story was so
great, that at this point she told me that back in college, I had really just
been a friend of proximity- only a friend of hers because we lived near each
other in the dorm. She said that everyone else felt that same way. So for the
past 6 months I had been attending weekly dinners with people who disliked me,
and that 4 of them from college had never really chosen to be my friend to
begin with. These were the people I had counted on to love and support me, and
who were now turning their backs on me.
These things I lost. I have gained myself. I’m not sure if
the trade off was equal. I struggle every day to look around at my life and
appreciate my independence, my solitude, and my safety. I give thanks for the
things that most women take for granted. I give thanks for my life, and I pray
for the child I once carried in my womb. I pray that it has moved onto a life
that will provide it with health and safety, a life that I was unable to
provide. I give thanks that I can now provide safety for myself, and beat down
the fear that it will somehow be taken from me once again. Though I have lost
my peace of mind, 2 years of my life, and every single friend- I have gained
strength that most women will never know.
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