Hitting Women.

I don’t remember how old I was the first time I witnessed domestic violence. I was very young, maybe around six. My younger brother had just been born and we were in California visiting family and seeing the baby for the first time. My grandmother and grandfather went on a second honeymoon of sorts and I was stayed with my aunt and uncle. I hated it. My uncle was very controlling and ran his house like a military base, with the only civilian being himself. He snapped his fingers at his wife when he wanted his glass filled, and forced his children to eat oatmeal every morning while he enjoyed Frosted Flakes. He didn’t like oatmeal. Neither did his children.

I begged my grandparents every day I saw them or spoke to them to let me stay at their hotel with them, but everyone refused. I complained about not being able to eat what I want, about my uncle threatening to spank me for being disrespectful, about my cousins being mean to me. I didn’t complain of having to listen to my aunt’s screams and uncle’s yells coming from their bedroom everyday, or of the bumps and bangs of her body hitting the walls and floor. I remember that I sat on the floor playing puzzles with my younger cousin during one particularly long fight. I couldn’t concentrate on what I was doing, every sound from upstairs made me jump, but not my cousin. She assembled her puzzle, seemingly unaffected by any of it. It was normal for her. During that fight, I learned to ignore it as well. Pretty soon, my puzzle was finished and it wasn’t until I’d stuck in the last piece that I realized that the violence was still going on. When my aunt came downstairs, her face was dry but her eyes were red. She didn’t have a scratch on her that I could see, but when she reached up to get something, she whimpered and clutched her side.

My aunt and uncle are still together.  He has spoken to me in contrition of the way he treated his wife in the past, during our discussions of my own marriage, but I don’t know if he changed.I have no idea if he still beats her, but he still keeps her under his thumb. You would never know it; from the outside in they seem like a fine couple. They joke and laugh and talk and it’s only in family settings or if you pay close attention that you’ll see the signs. He still snaps his fingers at her.

Another time, I think I was 9, and I was in California again, this time on summer vacation. My grandmother was forcing me to spend time with my mother, which I didn’t want to do. My mother was still with my younger brother’s father, and they fought like cats and dogs. It had been just arguments, until one night. I sat on a futon watching, listening, as they yelled at each other, and my brother’s father kicked my mom in the back when she turned to walk away. Hard. She fell, but jumped right back up, and he knew what he was in for, and ran out of the door. She didn’t chase him, but later on that night he yelled at her from outside as he was slicing her car tires and she ran out of the house with a crow bar or tire iron or some other sort of long metal rod. I couldn’t see what happened in the parking lot, but she came back unharmed. Seething, but unharmed.

When I was 12, my younger sister was born, and I moved to New York with my mother. I don’t remember exactly why. My sister’s father was abusive and a drug addict. During my mother’s pregnancy, he  sold all of her furniture and robbed her of everything else so she had to move in with relatives. As soon as she had her home back in order, she let him come back. My sister’s father treated my brother, who was then 6 years old, awfully. He called him names and bossed him around, he made it well known that he didn’t like the boy. My mother ignored it, other than reminding him to call her boyfriend daddy, rather than by his first name. Her boyfriend tried to puff up his chest at me, but it never worked. I was always a tough, stubborn little fuck, and he would have had to break me into pieces before he could have broken my spirit. He left me alone after a while, and that was to his own benefit, because I’d decided pretty shortly after meeting him that if he put his hands on me I would slice his throat in his sleep.

I moved back home after a while, leaving my brother and sister and mother behind, gladly. A short while later, my mother moved down to North Carolina with us, nursing a broken wrist. Her boyfriend had pulled back to punch her in the face, she blocked it with her arm, and his fist hit her  wrist so hard that it broke. I remember asking her about it and her telling me “well he was going for my face, imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t put my arm up?” with a laugh. And it wasn’t a compensating laugh, it was a real laugh. She enjoyed the fights – she started many of them.

He followed her down to North Carolina  and I lived with them again, off and on, during my early teenage years. It wasn’t so bad, they were pretty tame, save for the one time my mom asked me to call the police because she was losing this battle, pretty badly, but I couldn’t because her boyfriend had ripped all of the phones out of the walls. She hit him with the car that night when he was trying to leave on a bicycle. I was used to the fighting after awhile. I chose sides; I yelled at them both to stop it when it dragged on particularly long and I was trying to get some sleep; I distracted my younger siblings.  It became normal to me too – it’s actually more odd now that they are finally broken up for good.

I set the precedence for abuse in my relationship with my now ex-husband. I threw the first punch, and I kept punching, for months, until he finally hit me back. There was something…cathartic in the first time he slapped me. I can’t explain what was going on, but it was much more satisfying when he hit me back rather than pushed me away or held me down. After a while, when I’d gotten over whatever it was that was driving me towards the physical violence, I’d awakened something in him that craved it. So he hit me. I hit back. I left sometimes, I came back every time. He tired of it too and eventually the abuse was purely verbal from both of us. I threw the last punch as well.

Most of my life was lived in the home of my grandparents, who now, married for 50 years, have never fought in front of me: not even an altercation. They are the perfect couple, a model for anyone; the uncle of mine that was violently murdered due to his lifestyle when I was very young; the uncle mentioned above who beat(s) his wife; my mother, who gravitated to men that beat her; myself, whose first real relationship paralleled my mother’s. Maybe the violence is nature – my sweet and docile grandmother set a girl’s dress on fire in school when she was a child after the girl had spit on her. She hit her sister over the head with a sledgehammer another time, over something or other. You’d never know it now, never suspect her of being capable of such a thing. It’s funny, the only one of her children that hasn’t lived a life affected by violence is my eldest uncle, who is not her child, but my grandfather’s from a prior relationship. I don’t deny that it could be nurture, picked up from my environment as I grew, but I don’t know.

In my opinion: My aunt was an abused woman. It’s possible that she could have left, but she had nothing and no one to help her, and I believe that she feared for her life, and rightfully so. I think my uncle would have killed her had she left, maybe even harmed their children. My mother was not an abused woman. She could have left, and she did but always went back. She wasn’t in fear for her life. She started as many fights as she didn’t. I was not an abused woman, I started it and finished it. I left, and I returned. I never felt forced into doing anything, I made decisions of my volition. I don’t feel sorry for my mother, or myself. I feel sorry for my aunt, and for my cousins. I feel sorry for my younger brother who is now, as an adult, torn and scarred by what he experienced – he never had the safe haven from it that I did, with my grandparents.

My view on domestic violence is the same as everyone else – it is incredibly wrong, it should never happen, and it must stop. But, beyond that, my view is slightly askew from the majority -  it takes much more than a bruise for me to consider someone a victim. My sympathies are reserved for those that experience it and can’t do much to change their situation – like my aunt. Not like myself, or my mother, or those that may not hit back but still do not leave although they are able to, without fearing for their life or how they’ll survive because they have nothing and no one. If they can leave, but they choose not to, why should I feel exceptionally sorry for them? Are they not a adults, capable of making what they want out of their life? I will not absolve anyone of their responsibility to take control of their own life. I cannot. It may seem cold, but I don’t think so. I understand that in actuality, everyone that experiences violence is a victim, but my heartstrings are usually only pulled for those that are in nearly impossible situations, and for the children of any situation because they are truly helpless.

Domestic violence scars, it hurts, it kills. It destroys pieces of people, both the abuser and the abused, and those around them. It should never be accepted, or tolerated.  I would do anything I could to protect those that I love  – and strangers as well – from anyone who wanted to harm them in such a situation. I think one of the best uses of the internet, ever, is Violence Unsilenced. It is a basic human right that we are entitled to at birth to be able to live a life unmarred by it. It’s that cut and dry, of course. It’s the other aspects – the situational ones – that aren’t so simple to me.

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Tagged as: domestic violence, elucidating, opinions, violence