Healing; Work in Progress
It is hard to bring myself to that place of honest reflection. My mind runs in circles trying to escape it, it dreams up fantasies and make-believes so that I don’t have to admit it ever actually happened. Most days I fight real hard to forget it, fight to the point of exhaustion. Other days I think it wasn’t so bad; I’ll minimize it, brush it off or shove it down deep inside. Despite my efforts to evade the truth, eventually, I’m confronted with reality because the truth always has a way of rising to the surface. Memories can be haunting and violence is devastating, I’ve experienced it’s trauma first hand, I walk with the deeper pain of knowing that I settled for a life that was grounded in fear, shame and inadequacy rather than that of self-love and dignity. I know that I will spend this lifetime and the next trying to heal from my wounded past.
Every man in my life has violated me. My father left before I was born, his best friend moved in on me and so did the next guy. My first love got his next door neighbor pregnant and my true love tore me down and left me broken, in a million shared pieces. I want to say that love has done me wrong. I’d love to place sole blame on my abusers for the role they played in our dysfunction, but I must take responsibility for my active participation – in efforts to move forward in a light that repairs the damage caused by my deep yearning to experience a love never had. In reflecting I’m forced to return to self and only today, can I do so from a place of personal accountability rather than blame. I’ve always been quick to tell myself that I should have done more, and sooner. I should have been smarter or stronger. As I play back the eight years spent with my son’s father I’m bombarded by my own shortcomings, often so intensely that honest reflection is stunted, failing to truly exist. Though I know the terror, manipulation and violence that took place in our relationship could never lay on my shoulders solely, these questions must be answered: how did I let a man beat me, how did I let him choke me until my nose bled, rip me out of the bed by my hair and pull me across the room or push me down a flight of stairs while I was carrying his child? This man, who claimed to love and protect me, used intimidation and beratement to mask the pain of an unresolved childhood and I often used that as an excuse for staying, allowing it to justify his reasons for keeping me awake all night with absurd questions and interrogations, or shaming me in public, controlling my wardrobe, friends and where-abouts. I stayed, obeyed and ultimately betrayed myself in the process in attempts to hold on to a warped and wounded co-dependency disguised as love.
These questions are difficult to ask myself, largely in part because they are so difficult to answer. I don’t know how I allowed our relationship to get this out of control or how my definition of love got so distorted. For eight years I stayed with my son’s father, hoping that the circumstances of our relationship would change and that he would magically realize the gift he had in me. We met in middle school and fell in love during our senior year of high school. He was brilliant, charming, future focused and different then the other boys I had known. I thought I found a love in him that I had been searching for and needing my entire life. Today I see that it was dependency and finally, am blessed to know it is the gift in my self I must realize, before ever expecting someone else to see the beauty I possess.
My community has always seen me as a strong woman but I’ve been fighting fear and inadequacy for a lifetime. As I reflect on my childhood I see that I was a prime target for a relationship riddled with disappointment, pain and inadequacies. It’s safe to say that it started with my father; he has never hit me but he sure has hurt me. Until this day I’m searching for his love – he says he’s there but I’ve only felt him from a distance. Through my relationship with my father, I have developed expectations from a partner that are minimal, expectations that have always set me as the lowest priority despite the energy I contribute. In my defense, my son’s father’s anger snuck up on me; his manipulation had me in denial. Leaving that situation was difficult but the most empowering step I have ever taken.
Like an addict, I accept that the first step in recovery is acknowledging there is a problem, but it’s harder to do than you think. It took everything I had to leave that man. Three years later I found myself pushing up against the same situations with the next man. We’d been through a lot, seen some really good times and made it out the fire, so I thought. Then it started to happen, all over again and just like before. This time it took me 4 years to catch wind of his game, not eight like the last. I put my foot down and left but not out of love for myself, I left out of love for my child. I refuse to subject my little one to the terror, helplessness and pain of witnessing domestic violence, though I fear the damage has already been done. As he steps out of the door, he is saturated in violence, he knows it is a reality but I will be damned if I continue to teach him it is acceptable or something he has to live with in his own home. As I raise my little man to walk this world in a direction different than his father, I must peel away my own layers of denial and look closely at the core issues which allowed me to subject both of us to that pain and I must do it in a manner that imparts upon him, my lessons learned. I am finding this to be an extremely difficult task largely due to the fact that his relationship with his father is crucial in forming his own identity as a man, son, friend, lover, partner and agent of change.
The probability that my own son will grow up with experiences similar to mine is likely, if not guaranteed. It is true that I have held a gun. I have buried friends. I have watched girls and guys get beat down in front of me. I’ve seen the body of a nineteen year-old boy covered in yellow tarp, feet poking out, saturated in a pool of blood.
I’ve also fought against oppressive violence inflicted upon my people. I’ve organized against injustice. I’ve walked out of school. I’ve rallied with thousands, taken over buildings and marched against wars, against unjust killings of the innocent and silenced. I am an educator. My work is an act of resistance and there is no way I can fully embrace this work without transferring the same dedication and commitment to my personal life and the standards I set for my own existence.
Violence is real, it is pounding out our eardrums and falling against our feet. Violence is everywhere and I have experienced it in some of the worst ways. When reflecting upon my life, the most difficult to swallow is coming to terms with the violence I have inflicted upon myself. I am forced to realize the role I played in allowing violence to seep through the cracks of my own life and settle there for years.
Healing is on the Horizon. Healing means turning off the voices that tell me I’m not good enough, the voices that wish for a prettier face and a body free from excess weight, the voices that convince me I am worth less and should settle for it. This is my journey and I am committed to liberation.