I will preface this by telling you all that writing this has brought on many tears and has taken quite an emotional toll. I apologize for its length and grammatical errors.
I feel that spousal abuse is one of the most misunderstood atrocities of our time. We mistakenly focus on the physical abuse because it is the most obvious. The physical abuse, however, is a by product of the entire entity. Although totally unacceptable, the physical abuse is minor compared to other factors. We focus on the physical abuse, I feel, because people get bruised, broken, bloodied, and sometimes killed. That in itself is a major problem, but not the biggest part of the whole picture.
Normally the first recognizable sign of spousal abuse is a single sudden, unexpected physical slap in the face during a minor disagreement or even a mere discussion. It is such a shock that we don't know what happened or why. The one doing the slapping is normally so incredibly apologetic about it, often to the point of tears. We, the abused, feel such sympathy for the other person that we forget all about the actual slap and begin to focus on the pain the abuser is obviously feeling. The funny part of this is that the pain he (or she) is feeling from doling out the slap is very real, not at all a ploy of any kind. We feel it was a one-time fluke. We begin to do all we can to make this other person's life better. We don't think about what we're doing, we just do it naturally because we love the other person and don't want him (her) to be in pain. The sting of the slap dissipates quickly, and our own pain flies out the window. We put ourselves last.
Slowly the abuser begins to alienate the abused from family and friends by needing us more than anyone else on the face of the earth. We allow him (her) to manipulate our minds into believing he (she) feels we are the most important person in the world to them. Our friends and family don't need us the way he (she) does. We begin to feel quite good about ourselves because we are able to help our loved one with his (her) overall happiness.
In my own life, the alienation and control started when he decided that the dresses I wore daily were a bit too feminine and made other men look at me in a sexual fashion, as if I were unintentionally tempting other men with my femininity. For my personal protection, he demanded that I change my style of dress. After all, he didn't want me to be put in a frightening position that would possibly lead to rape. Although he never said the exact words, he, very slowly and in the background, led me to believe that men had a problem controlling themselves period, especially sexually, and that even the nicest of men could become animals that were out of control. That explained the initial slap in the face! It all began to make sense, very slowly. My understanding was beginning to come together. I still disagreed about the dresses being too tempting to men and refused to wear anything but dresses. I hated pants with a passion. They were uncomfortable to me, a woman who was raised wearing dresses. They were foreign to me, and were to be worn only when doing physical outdoor labor. Men wore pants and women wore dresses, which was a simple concept to me. Women wore makeup and fixed their hair, while men shaved daily and got regular haircuts. He eventually got adamant about my not wearing dresses, and started an argument about it. During the argument he ripped the dress I was wearing right off my body, went into my closet and took out every dress, skirt, and blouse I owned, took them outside to the driveway, put them in a pile, poured gasoline on them, and set them afire. I cried, of course, at having my clothes ripped from my body and burned. I tried to stop him from burning them, only to be physically tossed aside on the ground, wearing nothing but my bra and panties. By the way, we lived 3 ½ miles in the country with the nearest neighbor being a mile away, and my children were in school.
From then on I was forced to wear pants. Occasionally I would buy a dress for a special occasion, only to have it cut to shreds before I could wear it. Eventually I stopped wasting the money on dresses altogether. Money didn't grow on trees, after all, and I didn't want to take away from the family by being selfish.
Slowly it got worse. We argued a lot about simple things. Normally it was caused by his having a bad day at work or someone said something to him that angered him. Loving partners should be able to share their problems with their significant other. By this time I believed that was all he was doing... venting. Keep in mind my words about his causing me to believe that men had problems with self control in general. All arguments weren't physical at all. In fact, in the beginning, the physical abuses were few and far between.
He convinced me that makeup was an unnecessary luxury and that I was being extremely selfish by buying and using it. He made me realize that by buying makeup I was causing the kids to not be able to have the necessities of life: shoes, clothes, school supplies, etc. That money could and should be spent on the kids, not on myself. I realized, wrongly, that I was a selfish bitch, was hurting my children, and had allowed myself to be a victim of advertising. I had been brainwashed by society into believing certain things, like makeup and decent clothing for myself, were important. How stupid of me! Thank God he pointed these things out to me, or I would have continued in this destructive manner! I certainly was fortunate, I believed, to have such a caring husband. I must do all I could to make his and the kids' lives the best they could be... in that order. That was my job and my duty as a wife and mother, again in that order. I was so happy that I had finally, after all those selfish years, begun to see the light!
Since my family all lived in other states, with me and my immediate family living in Illinois, it was quite easy for him to alienate me from them. He started, during arguments, by making me believe I had tricked him into marrying me by pretending to be someone I wasn't. He convinced me that I had pretended to be intelligent, pretty, and self confident. I was, according to him, stupid, ugly, and incompetent in every way. No wonder my mother and dad didn't come to see me! They couldn't stand me, either. No one could stand me. I was a disgusting excuse of a human being in every way. I was so lucky to have him. No one but he would want me around them. I had three kids from my first marriage. I couldn't even hang on to the first husband. Out of the kindness of his heart, he took in me and my kids. Without him I couldn't survive. No one else would ever put up with a disgusting person such as myself. How I was ever able to feel good about myself in the past became a mystery. I must have been totally blind to reality. What an idiot I was before he took me into his life and made me become a real woman! I was so ashamed.
Once he had accomplished distorting my thinking, he was home free. I was his and would put up with anything he dished out. I had no choice in the matter. Taking care of him and his needs was what I was put on this earth for. He was the reason I was alive.
This is when the real beatings began. At first they weren't often, but that changed in short order. The beatings eventually became a daily ritual, sometimes multiple bouts in a single 24-hour period. Initially the beatings took place after the children were in bed asleep. He didn't want the kids to know their mother was a bad person. He had to protect them from me. He would often wake me in the middle of the night after we had both gone to sleep. Sometimes he would simply reach out with his foot and kick me out of the bed, then get up and drag me off the floor and commence hitting, only saying, under his breath, “You fucking bitch! I'd ought to kill you.” I couldn't understand what had caused this treatment. I was caught totally unaware of what and why any of this was happening. After he tired he would cry and hold me in his arms. He would tell me how sorry he was for losing his control, but that I had done something that had infuriated him earlier in the day. Most of the time it was something stupid like his dinner had cooled too much to suit him. Good Lord, I couldn't even cook right! I should be able to keep his dinner piping hot and fresh no matter what time he came home to eat it.
One of the worst times was because I had allowed my 5-year-old son to sit on my lap while we watched a movie on TV. He accused me of unconsciously trying to sexually arouse my young son by allowing him to lean against my breasts. From that point on my son was never again allowed to sit on my lap. I was forced to realize that I must keep my distance from my children or I could turn them into perverted adults. He became the one they had to be able to go to for everything. He was the one who cared about my children, not me! I was just a baby factory, not a mother. How kind that he helped me to realize that.
Things got much worse before I began to dream of ways to kill him and not have to go to jail. I began to dream these dreams after years of his telling me that he could kill me in a heartbeat because I was such a nasty wreck, and no one would care. He'd be doing the world a favor if he did. People would thank him. He wouldn't have to go to jail for killing me because he could dispose of my body in a way that nothing, not even a piece of bone, would ever be found. He would toss me to the pigs after he had killed me. They would eat and pulverize my body parts, which he would have cut up into pieces first. He could just tell people I flaked out and left him and the kids, and everyone would believe it. After all, I was a horrible person, and everyone knew it. No one would ever doubt that I just up and flew the coop.
My point in telling you all this, with much sarcasm in the story, is that the physical abuse is not the killing factor. The emotional scars are the most damaging. I will never be able to be the person I was before I endured this brainwashing and abuse. I will forever fight to try to regain all the good feelings my parents had instilled in me as they raised me. A large part of me is forever lost.
Sometimes I feel very fortunate that I survived this trauma; other times I remember feeling that death would have been such a blessing. I used to pray to God to let me die. I couldn't understand why God would allow such a horrible person as myself to be a part of the world. Why would He subject others to a person like myself? Why was He punishing the people of the world by putting me in their midst? I had stopped taking my children to church early up, after the dresses were all burned. He refused to allow a Bible in his house. I was beaten when my children, at different times, would ask about God.
When he began beating me in front of the children, he would later take them aside and explain to them what a horrible person I was and that he was merely trying to make me see the errors of my ways, and that I was so stubborn that I pushed him to having to do physical things to me because I was so stupid and couldn't understand. The children eventually understood that their mother was a bad person... or so they led him to believe. They would talk to me when he was gone and tell me things he had told them about me, and that they told him he was right so that he would be quiet and leave them (and me) alone, to pacify him. They told me they loved me, and they knew I was good, no matter what he said or did, and that I wasn't doing anything wrong, and that I deserved a better life. These were little children, the oldest being 12.
My kids were and are amazing people despite their early days with my ex husband and myself.
We who are truly abused don't tell other people. We hide it. It's our job. My parents never knew. My friends never knew. My in-laws never knew. No one knew. Just us. No one ever told me to get out of that situation because they never knew there was a situation. To the outside world we were a happy couple with a great and growing family. Life was good, they thought.
My daughter would never have told about Josh beating her. It just happens that Josh's younger sister had been at their house minutes before the beating. Reaching her car, the sister realized that she had forgotten her cell phone and went back into the house to retrieve it. She walked in to see the beating. She called the cops immediately and pulled Josh off of Kristina. Kristina was forced to file a restraining order against Josh. I have no idea what is going on right now.
I think I will print this out and mail it to my daughter. She's a good person, and she deserves a much better life than the one she will have with Josh. I don't want her to become me.
We'll see. I will ask her to call me.
