Cherry Hill, NJ 2:30 AM
Cherry Hill, NJ 2:30 AM.
(In honor of National Domestic Violence month)
It’s cliche to say, but it wasn’t the physical pain that was most damaging. Women are pretty resilient. Lifetimes dealing with the short stick of genetic fortune left us dealing with minor inconveniences like childbirth and ruptured ovarian cysts. Mothers that are conditioned to hide behind their own pain in order to administer medicine to ailing children and complaining husbands. Quietly our breakfasts become two aspirin daily with a cup of coffee while we pack wholesome lunches for the kids and remember to smile and give words of encouragement to everyone in the household. Even the dog. Ourselves last, always. We know how to hide pain expertly.
The bruises on my neck from being choked healed within a week. The court case dragged on for another six weeks. I could be dramatic and say that the emotional damage will never heal, but that’s only partially true. The first time I was physically assaulted by a man was when I was 20. It was much more violent than this time, much scarier, but I’d pretty much pushed it out of my head. Until this happened. Memory is such a weird neurological function. I imagine there’s this small angry man walking around my head with a box of dynamite. For years he’s undisturbed, minding his business, and then one day something happens and BAM! The box explodes and in it, all of the memories that angry man had been carrying around violently spreads through your brain, clouding and infecting all of the good, all of the happy. So, emotional damage doesn’t really heal, it just kind of hides out until somebody wakes it up.
The first time this happened ah man how easy it was to be the victim. The story got more and more romanticized each time it played out in my head. Me, locked in my own bathroom, on the phone with 9-1-1. Him, enraged with no less than the devil himself in his eyes, trying to break the door down. The subsequent calls to friends to help pack up my things with a police escort. I laugh at people who swear by Marie Kondo. You want to know how to really know what to keep or toss? Joy has nothing to do with it. Pack up your whole life into two boxes while two armed NYPD officers stand over you, listening to your boyfriend call you a whore and a slut and worthless trash. You quickly decide what you have to bring with you and what you will leave behind. Marching down the dilapidated stairs of the BedStuy walk up that hilariously is probably now out of your price range. Watching as the neighbors grab the stuff that fell out of your boxes onto the street (George Forman grill, you served me well). The lovely Jamaican couple that rented you the apartment accusing you of being just another white woman bringing the police into private affairs. At the time it made me angry and I dismissed them of being ignorant but it’s actually a sentiment that would echo in later years from more than one person I thought I respected. That I had brought this upon myself. That I am the evil that needed to leave. The first time this happened I ran home to my parents. They changed their phone number to stop the harassing phone calls. They helped me unpack my things. They shared in my anger and hurt.
19 years have gone by since that first time. There have been small incidents here and there and with each one, I became more desensitized. It became a normal reaction to something I had done. It became ordinary to feel that I will always be subjected to this. Even pregnancy couldn’t shield me from what boils down to the physical overpowering of a woman by a man. I mean, this is the reason why women love men right? Their strength. Their power. How small and vulnerable you feel in their arms. This was just the other side of that double edge sword. I accepted it as part of the bargain.
This time I could not run home to my parents. I am a mother myself. I could not play the victim. It started with a strong choke hold around my neck. I don’t know how people walk around all day without realizing how vulnerable their bodies are. Why are our necks so thin and frail? Why is it so easy to block someone’s ability to breathe? I have questions for Darwin. Nevertheless, I hit him back to get him off. Which set off a chain of events leading to a full on punching/grabbing/slapping match which was embarrassingly dramatic. I gave multiple warnings that I would call the police if he didn’t stop. He didn’t stop. He dared me to call the police. The ego and cockiness in his eyes made me physically ill. I was drunk and high. I was scared in a way that only someone in a life threatening way could be scared. I had a quick vision of the car hitting a tree, my head bleeding on the dashboard. Another quick vision of my daughter at my funeral, hating me, hating him, hating life. Another quick vision of our wedding and the white dress I will never wear. I saw everything and nothing at the same time. And then I kept seeing my daughter. I kept seeing her crying. Something in my head told me if I didn’t call the police, I would never see her again. So I called.
When they arrived he casually joked around with them. I saw them laughing. I was sitting on the corner of the road, pulling blades of grass out of the ground in some kind of nervous trance. I couldn’t stop crying. I’d called a mutual friend to witness the arrest because I was acutely aware of the possibility that the police might hurt him. After spending the entire summer marching for justice against police brutality, the irony of me crying into the arms of a white police officer was not lost on me. The detective took photographs of my face and neck. He asked me questions I’d already answered several times before. I just wanted to go home. I immediately regretted calling the police. I didn’t want any of this. I just wanted to be safe. I just wanted to go to sleep. But sleep never came.
I stayed up nightly, obsessively searching the internet for ways I could drop the charges. For ways that I could get him out of jail. How I could remove the imposed restraining order. I advocated on his behalf, I reached out to lawyers and to the prosecutor. I became a one-woman crusader for freedom. All I wanted was him to come back home. I wanted to go back in time and pretend this never happened.
My own daughter had a much healthier response. Emboldened by the type of righteousness and self-confidence only teenagers could have, she hoped he would be jailed. Life has not yet skewed her moral compass. She still sees her mothers tears as being the ultimate pain deserving of the ultimate punishment. She doesn’t care about the ability for felons to get jobs. She doesn’t care about the states profiting off of the incarceration of black men. She doesn’t care about the mental and physical distress being arrested and jailed causes a human being. She has the purest sense of universal justice. An eye for an eye. A religious, phenatical defense of the one who gave birth to her.
I do not have that same need for justice for myself. I don’t want society to punish the man that hurt me because I know that the universe will. I have faith in the human spirit and I know that anyone so degenerate as to harm the person who loves them, will have bigger consequences to pay for in life that no Camden County judge could ever impose.
After a few days of not sleeping, I contacted a domestic violence hotline. I want to stress how crucial this resource is. I spoke with a woman for about an hour. I’d realized that, like with most women, the emotional abuse started long before. Things that I thought of as “normal” were in fact, not. I’ll always remember that she told me the reason why domestic violence, out of all violent acts, was so traumatizing. It’s because it’s at the hands of a person that is supposed to protect you. Your psyche can more easily imagine a stranger causing you danger, than a person sleeping next to you in your bed. A person that sees you literally and metaphorically naked on a daily basis. I cried until there were no more tears left. And then I enrolled in a counseling program (free from the state). I slowly started to turn this into some kind of “a ha!” moment, as Oprah would gloriously shout. I was determined to move forward and never look back.
I dropped the charges and everyone accepted that I was doing so of sound mind and rational thought. And that night, he and his family had a dinner celebrating his freedom.
And I have the whole rest of my life to celebrate mine.