People often times ask me how I didn't see it coming. From the outside, they could see it so easily. I pushed away the concerns, the warnings, because they never saw what I saw and I never saw what they saw. To get them to stop accusing me, I just tell them that I couldn't see, because that's not directly untruthful. In reality, I can explain it more by starting from the very beginning.
I can explain it, but I cannot explain how it felt, I cannot explain how it has changed me. The direct outcomes and changes cannot be explained, they must be experienced firsthand to understand, but I would not wish the situation upon my worst enemy.
So, for lack of a better explanation, it was as if there were a glass of denial and infatuation that blocked my sight into reality. I can only say that my judgement, rather than my perception, was blurred. I can only say that I did not see the reality that I was pushed into because he never allowed me to see that far, until it was too late for me to escape.
...
When I first met him, he was a freshman in college and I was a senior in high school. I was already taking college classes through our community college during my 6th and 7th hour blocks, so we were in a class together. I was young and he was a friend in a new territory, and even though I hadn't ever seen him as anything other than a friend, he had insisted later that we had something undeniably special.
Initially, he wasn't what would have normally struck me as someone I would go out with. He was attractive enough, but I was interested in more than that. We didn't agree on many things, most of them simply revolving around the fact that he was very extroverted and I was very introverted. I liked to blend into the crowd, and he picked me out of the background and we became friends because I needed one. He was loud and opinionated, firm in his beliefs and condescending towards any others that defy them. He wasn't one to take no for an answer, which I mistook for perseverance rather than entitlement.
When he asked me to a date, as was to be expected, he would not accept no for an answer. We ate dinner, and that weaved into my going to his house several times to study after school. Our friendship grew, and even though most of my other friends had expressed their concerns for his antisocial and rude behavior towards them, he was never anything but nice to me. I'll admit fault in the fact that I was selfish enough to ignore the only people who could truly care for me at that time, and it is something I will never forgive myself for, but that's more or less getting away from the point. I was from a large, conservative family, and I knew nothing of the real world. Though I was very smart in school, I had little real-world experience, and I was consequently and extremely naiive. I didn't believe them because, at the time, I couldn't.
When he asked me to be his girlfriend, I was elated. Relieved, almost. It made me feel important, to know that someone so cynical and picky found beauty in someone like me. He made me feel special, full of worth, beautiful, and he told me that I was on the daily. Near the end of senior year, we attended my high school prom together, and soon after then I began to see him almost every day. Our relationship was moving very, almost recklessly, quickly at that point. I thought we were the perfect couple.
I was so childish, but I will defend that I was still a child. I was seventeen and he was almost twenty, and it was only enough of a difference to make my mother and friends concerned. I was a bit frustrated that they would question us, as he made me so happy when I had struggled with self-image and depression for most of my teenage life. He made me happy, and I thought I was mature for my age, and age was only a number anyways, and there was nothing they were going to tell me to make me feel differently. I was young, stubborn, and naiive, all while dating a man that wanted nothing more than to keep me as such.
In a few weeks after graduation, my friends began to see me less, while I spent more and more time with my boyfriend. I became annoyed and distant from them, as every time I saw them they would express their concern-if only briefly-for my boyfriend's intentions. Looking back, he was clearly and exclusively hostile to anyone who tried to spend any time with me, even his own parents. He wanted me alone and vulnerable, closed off from everyone else. The only reason why I am no longer with him is because of the strong and loyal hearts of my angel-like friends.
My family was fairly poor, while his family was fairly rich, and so he already had his own apartment at the college outside of my home town. I was destined to go there anyways, since I could afford nothing else, so it seemed only necessary that I move in with him. He began to be a caretaker of sorts, and he began to use his age as a way to control me. I no longer felt mature for my age. If anything, I felt like more of a child than I was in high school.
He would not allow me to take a job, much to my and my family's dismay. He offered to care for my expenses and for my school, which I took for the generosity of love. It began to get worse, and my self-image hit rock bottom. I did what I could to clean and help him out, and I reimbursed him with love, affection, house-work, and sex. I cooked for him and cleaned for him, all while balancing my school work. I felt like I was feeding off of him, which was something I never wanted to do. I felt, ironically enough, as though I was using him and exploiting his money, no matter how many times he had insisted that he did it because he loved me and wanted me to be happy.
So for a long time, I was happy, and so he was happy. The guilt and self-loathing that I felt was only lightened when he told me how he loved me, and my self-esteem was completely and utterly dependent on how he viewed me. Unfortunately, the honeymoon era ended once my four-year charade at college ended, and we both moved into a house. My mother yelled at me, long and angry, about how she didn't want me staying with him anymore. I came to him, crying, and he forbade me from seeing her. Not just her, though, from anyone. I became his, and only his.
In a few months, everything turned upside down. I hadn't seen my friends since I had graduated a little less than a year back. I hadn't seen my parents in more than that much. His friends became my friends, and they made me very uncomfortable. They treated me like I was his property, a toy for him, even while I was around. When they were with him, he played along, but when we were alone, he promised me he would talk to them about it. He made a lot of empty promises.
He promised me I would be allowed to work soon, but he never let me. He kept me dependent and unable to pay for myself, and subsequently he kept me constantly guilty. I was isolated from the people that I loved, and I was lonely, but he assured me that no one loved me more than him. And I believed him, why shouldn't I have? He was always there, whereas my friends never called or texted. It had never crossed my mind that the two may have been correlated.
I remember the first day that I expressed my loneliness. I wanted to see my parents, as I hadn't heard from them in over a year. I wanted to go home, to take a break for a while. He reacted very aggressively. How dare I ask to go away, after all he had done, after all he had given me. Hoe dare I ask to leave him when he was my everything, when he had only ever loved me more than anyone else would. He insisted that if I left, I would never be allowed back, and that no one else in the world would love me like he did. And I believed him. And I cried.
He had shoved me into a wall and pushed me around a bit, and I had run into the bathroom, crying. He let me cry for about a half an hour, and then he came in, saying how sorry he was.
He held me as I cried and he apologized and told me he loved me. He even offered to let me call my parents, but I refused, not wanting to make him any more upset. He kissed me, and we had sex, and I forgave him. I simply, forgot, if it were possible to forget. But eventually, it had become even worse. I thought I had hit rock bottom, but he had brought his pickaxe and he was ready to dig.
The fights became more frequent, more traceable. I began to feel stuck, and I wanted to believe that he loved me. Hadn't he always told me he loved me, hadn't he promised me. His words were like a vice that represented everything that his actions could not live up to. Whenever he got angry, he made up with it afterwards, and reminded me of the man that I loved.
Beatings became more frequent. I forgot to get his favorite soup while shopping? I must have hated him. I had spilled some coffee on the rug? I was a klutz and a mistake. I wanted to get a job, or to see my friends, or to go out? I must have thought he wasn't good enough. Soon enough, the man that had once propped up my self-esteem had now destroyed it. I became suicidal and depressed, and the only cure was a kiss or a hug from the only person in the world who I believed would love me. I began to see him loving me, accepting me, as a gift from him that I must have not deserved, because obviously no one would actually love me and I must have been so lucky to have him.
When I went to the doctor's office, it was revealed that I was pregnant. I cried on the car ride home, not understanding. I had been on birth control, hadn't I? No, he had switched the pills with caffeine pills, and not told me. Raised in the conservative family that I was, abortion was not an option. I felt sick, I felt angry, and I felt so strongly then that I had to get away.
When I got home, I shared with him the news. It was obvious that he was getting excited as I spoke, and so I began to yell. I yelled and screamed and cried, pulling at my skin on my stomach, tearing my hair out, knowing that my life was going to be hell and there was nothing I could do. Nothing I could do. Nothing...well, there was something.
I told him that I was leaving, and he grabbed my arms, holding me against him, forcing me to stay. He threw me to the floor and kicked me. In the face, in the ribs, but avoiding my stomach. He knew that, as long as he had my child, he had me too. This time, however, he did not comfort me afterwards. I had black eyes and bruised ribs, torn skin and a torn hope. He did not comfort me. My self-esteem was at an all time low. I cried myself to sleep on the kitchen floor, unable to move out of fear that I would break. When I awoke in the morning, he was not there.
I cooked myself some soup, my favorite chicken noodle, and poured half a gallon of bleach into the finished product. I drank the entire pot, filling my stomach to the point of feeling nauseous. It burned my throat on the way down, and I wept, but not for myself and rather for my unborn child that would never be. I laid on the floor, the world slowly hazing in and out of focus and my tears turned to laughter. I was getting away, one way or another.
Until I wasn't. Until, unfortunately, I woke up in a hospital bed, all LED lights and ominous clicks and beeps. My head ached and my limbs felt like stones. I saw not doctors, but my boyfriend, as the first person to greet me. He was my only emergency contact, no one else even knew. Of course, he would never tell them. He hugged me and comforted me and I cried, and I apologized for even daring to harm his beloved object.
But the baby had not been harmed. He was overjoyed, while I felt the sickness settling in my stomach once again. He went babbling on about how much he loved me, for days, until I was released. Upon arrival to his apartment, he threw me a tiny party for two, and took care of me for a few days. Not only taking care, but also keeping a close eye, making sure that the suicidal impulses had run their course. And they hadn't, not completely, but they had enough so that I would not attempt again, if I had the chance to anyways.
A few months later, he asked for my hand in marriage, and of course, I accepted his offer. He loved me, I loved him, and we both loved our baby. We never had a wedding, we simply went to the secretary of state and got the papers signed. There was a brief honeymoon period, before he began to get aggressive again. He didn't hurt me, however, until I had the baby.
Once I had the baby, I became a full-time mother and wife. He began to beat me again, and the pattern continued. It got to the point where he allowed me to see my parents again, if only because I was standing in my bedroom with a gun to my head, loaded and hand on the trigger. I realized that, ironically, he would do anything if i threatened to kill myself. He would let me have anything if I were to die instead. He wanted me complacent, pliable, silent, and submissive, even if it took beatings. He did not care how much pain I was in, but he cared that I was alive to feel it.
I saw my parents, and they cried, and begged me to come home. They knew he was beating me, and we all got into a screaming fight until he chased them from our home, and then he hurt me. He hurt me and raped me almost on the daily at that point, pushing out all of his violent impulses and stresses onto me.
I no longer cared about anything, or so I thought. I was completely complacent to sit at home and be slowly beaten to death everyday, because it was all I had ever known in my adult life. The only thing keeping me going was my baby girl, who I kept shielded from the secrets of her father. But I began to worry. She was nearing three, and speaking almost in full sentences, and walking. I knew that she saw my pain, though she did not understand any of it. I fed her lies while I fed myself guilt, and then my husband would come home to fuel my self-esteem and worth with his toxic words.
After all, he loved me, did he not? Was he not the only person in the world who loved me?
Then it happened. He hit my daughter. Well, not hit. She was standing in his way, so he kicked her over. Her just kicked her, indifference in his eyes. It's like he didn't even register what he did. He was so accustomed to it.
And that was when everything fell apart. I grabbed my daughter, who was scream-crying only lesser than I was. I threw chairs and tables and vases and anything that I could find to keep him away from me. I broke his television and several windows, and I threw glass and pulled knives and screamed my way out of the house, daughter in my arms. I was bloody and bruised, emotionally spent, just holding my daughter close to my chest and screaming. I wanted nothing more than to collapse, angry at myself for allowing it to happen, but I knew that now that I was out, there was only a short time before he would follow and force me back.
I had to get away. I went about it much like I would a police chase, running through the forest behind our apartments, taking the long way back to my childhood home. I clutched my crying, confused child to my chest, eyes darting around in paranoia and disbelief. Something had snapped in me, seeing him treat her like that. Something just broke and I know it will never be fixed but I had to stop it from breaking more. I had never so wanted to kill anyone in my entire life, not even myself, as I did my husband in that moment.
It took me a few hours to get back home, weaving around. I allowed myself to hitchhike a bit of the way, but only with a kind looking woman with a van and a few children of her own. I explained to her what happened, and she gave me her phone and insisted that I call the police. I did, and I gave them all of my husband's information, and they put him on their wanted list. It was that easy, so easy, and I hate myself even now for not doing it earlier.
When I got home, I found that my parents had moved, so I went to my previously- best-friend's house. I threw myself at her feet, crying and pleading for her to forgive me, to help me and my daughter. I begged her to help me, and I just cried and begged until I felt shaky arms hoisting me to my feet in her doorway. She was crying as she lifted my frail body into her arms and hugged me more desperately than anyone had ever hugged me in my entire life. I grasped her like a lifeline, one hand squeezing the hand of my daughter next to me, and in a few long moments we had moved into the house.
She called my parents, and their reaction was much like hers. A lot of crying, a lot of hugging, and a lot of broken apologies that seemed to go through all of us. I could not stop crying, I could not stop shaking. I kept darting my eyes around anxiously as if I knew my husband would come in suddenly and hurt me. I just wanted to stop hurting, and I looked into my father's eyes and saw not sadness but rage. I thought he was angry with me, as he walked over and sat next to me. But he wasn't, he simply told me that he loved me, and pulled his grand-daughter into his lap, wrapping his arms around her.
My friend had brought me a cup of tea, with a spoon of honey and two shots of milk, the way I used to drink it when we were young and studying late at night. It burned my mouth and my hands, slowly bringing me down from my hysteria and grounding my senses. She sat too close to me, almost on my lap, her legs tied with mine and her arm around my shoulders. She held me as if I were going to leave. I could see both the pain and the relief in her eyes, and the incredulous confusion as I began to apologize again.
The apologies just would not stop coming. I was pouring the guilt from my lungs and the angry from my bones, and I couldn't stop. She just shook her head, and told me it was okay, it was all okay, I was okay. And for the first time in a long time, I was.
They told me they loved me, which was the hardest part. For so long I had felt as though they didn't want me, as though no one would ever love me except for...him. But as we sat there, my mother at my feet, my father at my side with my daughter on his lap, and my best friend curled up next to me, I felt more love than I ever had felt in my entire life. I never actually knew what love was, I had never felt it like I did this way. This was a strong, familiar, comfortable love.
This was a love that was unconditional, unrestricted. This was a love that was not manipulative or tied to regulations, and it expected nothing in return. This was not a love that had to be balanced with hate, or with pain. This was a no-matter-what, this was a love that would be going strong even when I had defied it for years at everyone's expense. This was a love that was going to be there whether I deserved it or not
This was a love that was true. This was actually love.
I fell asleep crying, wrapped up around people who love me, on an old, torn up couch.
...
It's been years. Surprisingly enough, the adjustment wasn't hard. I lived with my parents for a while, before moving into a small house with four of my friends. I am 33, unmarried, with an 8 year old daughter who deserves so much more than I can currently give her.
However, my daughter has a family of people who love her, and mother that can keep her safe. I have a potential for a masters degree, and I'm teaching at a local elementary school during the day, while being a mom during the afternoons. My daughter lives with me and my four friends, who all love her and keep her company and would never dream of laying a hand on her.
I have people who love me and people who I love, and even when I wake everyone up with my nightmares and night terrors, they come to my aid, ready to help me through anything. I am not only loved, but protected from both the outsiders and from myself. My ex-husband has attempted to call me from prison several times, and though I was weak at first, I never gave in. My friends helped me get a restraining order.
It shocks me how different everything is, how easy everything is. I am happy, actually happy, which is such a foreign and odd feeling. I no longer ache constantly, and I no longer rely on anyone for my self-esteem. Things are so normal, yet so different to what I lived through for years. Normal is so subjective now. I'd rather just define it as safe, comfortable, okay.
I have changed so much. I am both stronger and more damaged. But this time, when people come to comfort me, they are genuine. I not only see the way my friends seethe with rage when I wake up screaming and crying, or have panic attacks, but I understand it. I understand a differentiate between anger and violence, and between protective actions and manipulative ones. It's been hard, but I've adjusted, and every time I've wanted to go back I have only to hug my daughter to realize that I cannot.
I love so deeply, and feel so much love, that I don't need anything else. I don't think I will ever date, or marry. I don't think that I can. But additionally, I don't think I need to.
I understand now, I understand everything. And I know now, that if my daughter ever winds up in a similar situation, I will not hesitate to retaliate against any man or woman who hurts her. I will tolerate it no longer, for me or for her or for anyone. Because I understand that the convoluted, manipulative pain he fed me under the guise of love will never be anything but evil.
This is a love that is ordinary, but at the same time,
This is a love that is one of a kind.
This is a love that is safe, comfortable, unconditional.
This is a love that is true.
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