Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman

Epiphany in a Bathroom Stall

Four years ago, on a Sunday morning, I was attending a conference for part-time religious school teachers that was aimed at sharing innovative ways to excite and educate our students. Before things got started, I headed off to the bathroom. I was not in a particularly receptive mood; my husband had managed to get out an insult that morning before I left the house. As usual, I can’t remember the epithet used, but it probably focused around my uselessness, stupidity, laziness, or unattractiveness. The exact phrase doesn’t really matter, all that matters is that he got his lob out, and I bowed my head in quiet shame, trying not to egg him on, but nonetheless allowing the mistreatment by what I now perceive of as my mishandling of the situation—by staying in it.

I looked up from the tiled floor where I was following the lines of cracked tiles to find a poster on the back of the stall door. I started to cry as I read the poster, barely containing deep sobs. I sat there facing the mirror-image of what had become my life—on the back of a bathroom door.

     DOMESTIC ABUSE IS EMOTIONAL ABUSE.

     Emotional abuse is constant criticism,

     making humiliating remarks,

     name-calling,

     mocking,

     yelling,

     swearing,

     making victim think she is crazy,

     making victim feel guilty.

The starkness of the words “Domestic Abuse Is Emotional Abuse” seemed to instantly turn the “you’ve ruined my life” comments that my ex-husband would occasionally pelt at me into a useful phrase, one that I could use to turn the blame back at him, and not keep focusing on me, and my inadequacies. Abuse, it was validating to have a definition from outside that so succinctly summed up the atmosphere in which I had been living. It seemed so obvious, but I had never used that word before; weren’t victims of abuse beaten, weren’t they supposed to leave, weren’t they in trailers, weren’t they and their spouses uneducated? I know those stereotypes have been repeatedly disproved, but that is still what springs to mind when I hear the word abuse. Strong, intelligent women like I thought I was were not supposed to be victims of abuse—we were supposed to help other women. I boycotted and signed petitions opposing oppression around the world, but here I was, a victim of abuse, and I didn’t even know it. I was oppressed and it hadn’t even occurred to me. How could that be?

Confusion reigned in that stall, as I continued to sit there, staring at the poster, wondering about myself, my life, my husband, and my daughters.

How had my life come to be summed up in such a bitter phrase? The sobs did not, could not, stop. Women came in and out of the bathroom. But I sat there, stifling my cries; part of me wanted to be found—wanted someone to knock on the stall door and ask in soothing words if I was alright. I felt as alone there as I was, as devastated as I was. Giving something a name is good; it provides a concise way to think about it while also taking the blinders off, which hurts far more than having them on.

* * *

A few days later, I am standing in the kitchen, taking a break from doing the dishes, when my husband walks in. He stands just a few feet away from me and starts to talk. I do not agree with something that he wanted me to do, and told him so. His reaction was to look right at my stomach (which is present, but not so present as to require a complete break from ice cream), and to say contemptuously, “Whoa, you’re fat.”

What to say? What to do? I stood there dumbfounded. Reeling from the comment, reeling from the nasty tone, reeling from the savagery of the remark. Reeling from the continuance of the abuse. I am this man’s wife; he is not supposed to talk to me like that, I am not supposed to be treated like that. And yet, the vignette continues; we are still standing there, and he seems ready to make more pronouncements.

I turn back to doing the dishes, turning on the faucet, drowning out his talk with the rush of water. He stands there a while longer, showing who’s still standing. But at that moment he is a bully exposed, dressed in nothing but his bravado. A man empty of all value and valor, a man who props himself up by knocking down others. Perhaps I needed to stop seeing the insults as something against me and as showing his flawed character instead, and only then would I recognize that he had been bullying—no, abusing me. Did he realize that to be victorious in these battles would mean that he would eventually lose my love? That I would eventually stop thinking about how to look better in his eyes, and that I would turn away instead. This, it seems to me, is where the separation began; when I stopped internalizing his comments, but reflected them back onto him. This is when I started standing up to the abuse, when I started to gain the strength to oppose oppression—on the home front.

* * *