That Which Does Not Kill Us . . .

I was born April 22, 1961, a time when children were seen but not heard, when you knew better than to speak unless spoken to, and sparing the rod meant spoiling the child; a long ago time, before child abuse had a name.

As a child, I didn’t know that getting slapped across the face, knocked down, pushed around, or beaten with the belt was called physical abuse. Little did I know that when my mother screamed, “Get out of my face, I can’t stand the sight of you,” or my father yelled, “You’re nothing but trouble; you’ve been nothing but trouble since the day you were born,” it was called emotional abuse. And when my mother left me alone to bake in a hot car that somehow managed to plunge over an embankment, leaving me bloodied and bruised, that it, too, had a name: neglect.

Needless to say, I grew up in a state of fear. And fear creates tension, which turned me into a child on guard: shoulders stiff, jaw clenched.

At the age of eleven I got my first period which made me of childbearing age; I was a woman. My introduction to womanhood came at the hands of my fifteen year old brother who crept into my bedroom while I slept and slid between the sheets. Years later I learned there are two names for what he did to me; incest and sexual abuse.

I can still feel his rough hands touching my most private places and hear his raspy breath. “Don’t tell.” His words were more a threat than a plea. I did tell; I told my mother. She called me a liar. I confided the abuse to my father, who called me a troublemaker before slamming the door in my face. His path clear, my brother slipped into my room until I was sixteen years old, when he moved out on his own.

I focused my attention on school, throwing myself into my studies so that I graduated a year early. I got a full-time job and struck out on my own, only to marry the first man who asked me. And that’s how I learned the meaning of domestic abuse. The day he threw me off our second story balcony, I somehow managed to land on my feet like a cat. I picked myself up off the pavement and ran, barefoot, down the street, while he screamed, “Get your ass back here or I’m gonna kill you!”

I never looked back. And when he showed up at my workplace with the divorce papers that accused me of cruel and inhuman treatment, I signed them, glad to be rid of him.

Twenty years from the day I was born I learned a new phrase, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” For the first time in my life I was finally free to think, to live, to laugh without fear of repercussion or abuse. I spent my evenings reading self-help books, learning about circles of violence, and how, if left untreated, they spin on, out of control, from one generation to the next. And that’s when I made a promise to myself to break the circle, so that if I ever found myself ready to have children of my own, they would not become statistics of abuse as I was.

Six years later, at the age of twenty-six, I met the man I thought I was destined to marry. When I talked he listened, and when we argued, he allowed me to speak my mind without fear of violence.

Our marriage was far from perfect, though, and we did not make it. But, together, we raised two well-adjusted, kind, compassionate kids who haven’t the foggiest notion what a circle of violence is. And for that, I am proud.