Here’s a truth no one ever says: leaving an abuser is more dangerous than staying with an abuser. And it’s not just a few days or a month or a year or a divorce you’ll endure. With a certain kind of abuser hell-bent on punishing you for leaving and an inflated sense of ego that leads to a fury that won’t ever die, the leaving can last a long time—years, even.
You want to sleep. You want to roll into a ball. You want to storm the castle and say hell, yes, I am here. But all you can do is hit the morphine button, which doesn’t do much except make things fuzzy.
My blood pressure was dangerously low and the doctor wasn’t surprised at the number of times I had fainted in the previous months. This was scary to hear but my mind kept going to the part that truly petrified me: I was going to have to give up my routine and eat things I didn’t want to.
Her doting brother, who’d convinced her to move in with his family when the disease made living alone impossible, hovered in the background. He didn’t want some fool of a chaplain to upset her. This was his little sister and only sibling. Her dying would crush him.
I'm lying on a table in the obstetrician's office holding a newspaper up to screen my vision, getting an amnio because I'm 33 years old and pregnant with my firstborn. The FMP test has come back high, which could mean nothing, or it could mean he has Downs Syndrome. The amnio is to see which it is. I have a needle phobia and the amnio needle is something I do not want to lay eyes on, thus the newspaper.
This was September. By November, I would send that email. I would declare my own sovereignty from the marriage. This small act of independence would mean years of poverty, of self-loathing, of learning to spit out the taste of failure before it found a way to my gut. One day, years later, I would look in the mirror and see something beautiful. On that day beside the Nile, I didn’t know any of this yet. All I knew was how to ache, how to swallow the things that I did not want.
In the past I have thought that jealousy was the worst emotion that we could have, but along the line I added regret to the list and now I've added fear. We are all human, no one is perfect. I do not think it is possible to live never being jealous, never having regrets or fears. We can all just try our best and fail and try again.
Lately, in America, I sense the threat of extermination - choose your threatened community, ethnicity, appearance - with the same dread that accompanies the sight of a bruise that darkens instead of fading.
A shudder crawls down along my spine and I shake off the almost unthinkable, terrifying notion that in the midst of all of this serenity, something really is wrong. Almost unthinkable because, after all, ours is a good marriage. Everyone says so.
CW: This essay discusses sexual assault. If you or someone you know has been assaulted, find help and the resources you need by calling the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673, or visit www.RAINN.org.
Note: most names have been changed.
By Noreen Austin
Gere’ December 1993
My sister Gere’(Jer-ray) has been missing from her North Hollywood, California group home for several days. Raoul, her counselor, a stocky man, coiled with a black belt in martial arts, has the skills to survive in this socioeconomic oppressed part of town. He cares for the mentally disabled. His home is a place of refuge in hopelessness. But he can’t keep Gere’ safe after all, and he files a missing person’s report with Los Angeles County.
My father calls me in my Northern California home from his apartment in Southern California and explains, “She was badly beaten.” The police had interviewed Gere’. They told Raoul they had never seen anyone so severely beaten and still able to walk.
“She wasn’t taken to the hospital?” I ask.
“She bolted before the ambulance got there.” My father says.
All the things I could have done while I still had the chance. While we were still sitting upright. But then we weren’t. The force of his body pushed me flat-backed onto the landing. Mark with the black hair, his body on top of mine. Hard to breathe. The most terrible, unmistakable shape inside of his pants. My body knew what it was. My body knew to be afraid.
Feel her encouragement land in your chest. “You can do this.” Remind her that you don’t have much choice. Let her words nourish you. “You get to choose to be present.”
Taste bitter reluctance as you say, “I should go back in.”
