Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman

On Being a Smart, Independent Emotionally-Abused Woman

But is he mean to you? my friend asks when I tell her that I am changing my last name back to my maiden name after my divorce.

What do you mean? I ask back, not wanting to think that she may be implying that if he hasn’t hit me, then he hasn’t been mean to me.

You know, hit you, she answers.

Is that it? Unless I’ve been physically beaten—smashed against the wall with the requisite concussion, broken bones and black eyes—he has been nice to me? Is the abuse I have endured as naught because only my eyes are red, not my skin? Two years of constant insults and curses, and twenty years of belittling comments and controlling behaviors are okay if I haven’t been physically broken? It doesn’t make sense. Do people really believe sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me? Have they never been upset by criticism? Have they never felt the pain of rejection? Have they never felt a sting caused by a word? Have they never felt a hurt-filled word reverberate through their mind a minute after it was uttered, an hour after it was uttered, a week after it was uttered—forever?

I look at her and respond (truthfully), He kicked a bag at my head once and I called the police. He didn’t try again.

She looks satisfied, as if now there is justification for my disaffection, for my wanting to distance myself from him and his name. And I had played right into those expectations, that to be abused can only mean to be physically tormented. My reply disappointed me; once again I didn’t stand up for myself, I didn’t say what I needed to say. Yes, he’s been mean, I should have said, he calls me bitch and liar and leech every chance he gets. Yes, he is mean. He insults my job, my interests, my ideas, my vocabulary, my family, my friends, my looks, my name, my breathing, my smell—my everything. Yes, he’s mean. And I have had no protection from him because he has not hit me, or threatened to kill me or physically harm me. And that must stop. For if I let her misperception continue, what chance is there to change that misperception?

Yes, verbal abuse is abuse. It hurts and humiliates. What more needs to happen to a woman in order to be protected against a man? Why do only welts count? A man should not be free to use his wife as his verbal punching bag.

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It’s devastating when the person who is supposed to encourage, support and protect you becomes the person you need to be protected from.  Now I pay a lawyer $350 (it used to be $500) an hour to defend me against and extricate myself from the man I unhesitatingly married almost twenty-three years ago. How does love morph into hate? How does the man who tells you you’re beautiful become the man who calls you ugly—inside and out? How does the woman who hangs onto her husband’s every word as if it were the truth from Mount Sinai come to cover her ears and scream STOP over and over again so she won’t have to hear him berate her? How did I come to hate the man I once loved?

I can blame him. I can say he’s selfish and a narcissist. I can say he never really loved me, it was all about him, always, and I naively believed that he cared about me. But what does that say about me? How did I end up with such an evil man? I can analyze and hypothesize about his faults and faultiness, but, ultimately, to make my life better, to make it one that improves upon this dismal present, one that I will be content within—no, happy within—I need to understand where I went wrong, or at least to understand where my intentions were missed, why my actions came up lacking. Much that went wrong can be blamed on him. So what? Does it really matter that he is a deeply-flawed person. The right question seems to be: am I? Am I flawed for having fallen in love with him? for having stayed with him? for having believed in him for so long (even more than myself)?

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Since I have always thought that whatever I live through, someone else has/is/will do so as well, this book--broken up into excerpts for the blog--is meant to bring comfort to other women (and men) who have or will, unfortunately, at some point, live in this debilitating atmosphere, and to help them understand the dynamics of that relationship. And to know, that they are not alone, that there is a community of caring—even if never met or formally established—of women who empathize with them, and who send out thoughts of compassion and care, even if through the ether, and even if out of their own pain and incomprehension and self-doubt. These excerpts are also a heartfelt rending of my soul so that friends and family can understand what I—we—have lived through.