Anonymous from a shelter
I am sending this anonymously because at least some of you know of me. My dad is an active member of the blogging community, and many of you know and enjoy his writings. I have witnessed domestic violence my whole life between my parents and my grandparents. Then, as an adult, I found myself in a violent situation. I am breaking the cycle but in doing I am causing waves at home. I cannot risk being recognized here.
My husband joined the Air Force and we moved a thousand miles from home. At that point, he changed. At first, it was little things. He was jealous, accused me of keeping things from him, didn’t want me to have money or buy things without permission, called me names, jokingly putting me down all the time, refused to allow me to get a drivers license and tried to keep me cut off from the world. Whenever I started to hang out with someone, he told me he didn’t like them and he would ask me not to see them again. He restricted my phone calls also.
Then, he decided it was time to start a family but making a baby is harder than it looks. Every month when I got my cycle he yelled at me, called me names, accused me of using birth control. Then I had a miscarriage and he got even more pissed. He told me to clean up the mess and meet him for lunch or he’d make me pay. I tried. I got the laundry done, and steam cleaned the bed but I fell asleep and missed lunch. That night he hit me for the first time.
Soon after this, we moved and things continued. He still wanted a baby and he still blamed me for not giving him one. We saw doctors and I took hormones and drugs, I had mood swings and then he hit me and threatened me. Finally, he told me he was ready to admit I was a failure and we stopped trying. Almost right away, I got pregnant and it stuck. Four months later, he was deployed. I started hanging out with some of the military wives, letting the guys mow my grass and such. It was really nice to have someone to turn to.
Two days before my due date he came home for a month. The baby was six days late. It was a quick but painful and complicated delivery. We came home Sunday. Monday afternoon, the guys from the squadron and their wives stopped over to see us. It pissed him off so badly. He accused me of cheating on him, said that that is why I didn’t want to have sex. A few days later, he raped me for the first time. I was so happy when he went back. I wanted to leave then but every military wife knows that no matter what happens you always stand by your soldier.
He left the military and things cycled for the next several years. It would get bad enough that I was ready to leave and then it would get better. He hit me and abused me sexually, emotionally and in every other possible way. Then things got bizarre. He started filming us during intimacy, taking pictures of me before, during and after. He bought toys and filmed me using them. He showed these to his friends, humiliating me. I would get calls from men asking me if I was willing to sell my body to them. On a few of occasions, he invited his friends over and made me have group sex with all of them. My second and possibly third children were conceived during these. He also frequently took me to strip clubs to show me what I should look like. After my third child was born via c-section, he told me I was ruined and no one would ever want to be with me again.
The final straw was not directed towards me but towards my kids. Just before Christmas this past year, we were on our way to get a tree. He stopped the car, got out and left me there. A few days later, he struck my daughter. That was the end. With the encouragement of my online friends, I told him I wanted out and he told me he’d see me in court.
Then the unthinkable happened. I was in the shower when he came in to get some stuff. I didn’t even know he still had a key. On the computer screen was a chat with a friend in which I said some things that were pretty unflattering. They were true and I needed to talk to someone but he hated it. He also found my emergency bag and money. He used my hair dryer to beat me, he punched, kicked and shook me then he raped me and left me there, scared, cold and alone. If it weren’t for my amazing girlfriend, I don’t know where I’d be. I had ive broken bones and bruises everywhere. I later found out I was pregnant and had to have an abortion. I got infected with an antibiotic resistant e-coli and almost died. I would be 22 weeks pregnant right now.
I later had a second threat from him. He brought a gun to my home and threatened to kill myself and him. If I hadn’t been so vigilant, my story would have ended there. Murder-suicide. I was strong though and called the cops. He is currently in jail but has an appeal coming up that will probably move him to a psychiatric hospital short term and then back on the streets. His family has made continued threats. I got to the point where I no longer felt safe in my home. On two separate occasions, we fled.
My children, my girlfriend and I are currently living in a domestic violence shelter. Its not as bad as one might think. For one, we are safe while we are inside those walls. The six of us share a two bedroom apartment with one other lady and her son. The threat will never truly be over but I am getting more ready for it. I am filing for a protection order and a stalking order against his mom.
I look at my life like that of a butterfly. The victim I used to be was like a caterpillar. I was vulnerable and weak. Now, just like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, I am enjoy a quiet reprieve, a chance to rest and rediscover myself. This rest is nice but, soon, I will break out, like the butterfly, dry my wings in the sun and take flight. Never again will I be a victim. I am looking at the possibility of changing my appearance and leaving the area. Anything I need to do to get away.
“Bob”
As a man who has been the subject of spousal abuse, I write this with a bit of trepidation, for my experience so far is that society tends to place shame upon a man who has “allowed” himself to be abused, rather than to understand an abused man is no more to blame than an abused woman.
My heart is a whirling mass of pain. I have lived silently with the shame that she has emasculated me in front of my children, ripped equality as a parent away from me, and isolated me from friends and family she decided she didn’t like.
Currently, my wife and I are on our fourth counselor. We have spent seven years out of the fifteen we’ve been married in counseling. This has been to no avail. The insults, the personal attacks, the misunderstandings, the isolation from family and friends have continued.
For the first ten years of our marriage, I tried desperately to help her see I am not the man she imagines me to be. Yet, her message to me remained the same: you are weak, you cannot keep friends because of how irresponsible and sick you are, your childhood ruined you as a man and therefore you have nothing of value to add to this family.
Over time I began to believe her, so I introspected, bought and read numerous books to find out how to be a man, a husband, a father. But, the fights, the personal insults, the rejection, the blame, the misunderstandings, the attacks continued, occasionally punctuated with moments that seemed like love.
Over the years I feel as if I have been blamed for everything wrong in our marriage; she has shoved the dagger of my dad’s death when I was 13-years-old hard into my heart time after time as an excuse to say I can never be a good dad because I did not have one growing up. She says I’m still a mommy’s boy so my judgment cannot be trusted.
I should have seen this coming when our oldest was newly born. He slept in our bed and most nights my wife would literally lie between me and him because she felt that I would intentionally harm him. What?! My little boy? My precious son?
Oh, she had all kinds of reasons to believe this, she says (yes, that attitude continues): the way my mother is (she can be less than tactful quite often); the one time my dad slapped me silly when I was young in an over-reaction to my disobedience.
Somehow, she figured I would do the same to my son. Despite the fact that my dad came to me in tears afterward, asking forgiveness and never did that again. Despite the fact the even though she hates my mother, that woman has sacrificed her later years to help us. Despite the stories I have told of how my dad took me fishing, taught me to change a bicycle tire, taught me to shoot a rifle, swim, ride a bike, use a slide rule, solve the Rubik’s Cube, and play Chess, Go and Mastermind. Despite the fact I invest every moment I can in enjoying my sons, trying to teach, guide, nurture, build up and treasure them.
Eventually, with a job loss (and with my wife blaming me for that) and the sudden death of a close friend, the pain became unbearable. I chose to voluntarily admit myself to an inpatient psychiatric program. That was four years ago.
She drove me to the emergency room. I remember lying there, curled up in a fetal position, sobbing and asking her, “Why does it hurt so much?” She was tender with me then….
Shortly after leaving the hospital we went to visit some out-of-state friends. I woke up one morning to find my wife showing all my medications to them and talking about how concerned she was about my mental health.
That VERY personal, very confidential information that was revealed to people I cared about devastated me. Even though they moved nearby a year after that, they would not let their kids be alone with me for two years because they felt I was too unstable. How wrong they were! (Fortunately, they have since learned differently and we enjoy some wonderful times together again.)
Over time I began to see my wife for what she is — yet, I continued to hold on to hope for our marriage because of my very often naive faith in humanity. I chose to stay, even though my mental and physical health was deteriorating, in order to be there for the children and in the hope she would one day change.
After a recent fight, she emailed me, “I love you.” I wrote back, “No, you don’t. No one treats someone they love the way you treated me yesterday.” As my awareness of proper boundaries and behavior grows, so does my resistance to her abuse. This causes the abuse to escalate sometimes. At other times, she backs off because she realizes she has pushed up against a man who is no longer going to take it.
Two months ago, I decided I would give it one more try: I contacted a counselor, she agreed to go. I told her, “If there is no significant change, we are done. Period.” But, I had to get the point where I was willing to lose everything in order to make that statement and mean it (oh, yes, how could I forget how often she said she would take the house, the children and everything she could from me if I divorced her?)
To undergird myself when I am tempted to relent, I remember what my 10-year-old special-needs son recently said to me one night after a blow-up: “I wish we had a nice mom.” Ouch.
This is the tip of the iceberg of my personal story and it is far from over. I offer it in the hopes that it might help other men who are in similar situations.
Anissa
It started before I was old enough to remember it beginning. I don’t know if I remember a time of my childhood that it wasn’t happening.
I do remember the day I found out it was bad.
The day my mother opened a door and dragged me naked from the room. I sat naked in the tub for hours while I listened to the crying and the yelling. She came in later and had a talk with me and I don’t recall a single word she said, but I will NEVER forget the look on her face.
I learned quickly that I had done something very wrong. It had to be me. He wasn’t the one being yanked around naked. He wasn’t the one who had to look at mother with that terrible look on her face. He wasn’t the one that had to hand over the cache of secret toys in the back of the closet.
HE, my brother, was spanked and grounded.
I was told that it would be OK and that we didn’t have to talk about it.
I understood it to mean that we WOULD never talk about it.
I was five.
It never stopped.
For years he owned my shame. He stole my innocence and raped my childhood as much as he did my body.
There was a day I walked into his bedroom and told him never again. The day my disgust and shame finally overtook my fear and pain. The day I told him if he ever laid another hand on me I would kill him…. or me…. one of us would die. I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care if no one believed me, if no one listened, if no one loved me enough to stop it.
I took a bit of myself back that day.
I was sixteen.
There were years of pain and self-destruction, bottles of alcohol and bottles of pills, trips to the hospital, stays in places with locked doors and people who wanted me to talk about it, standing on the edge and looking over the cliff.
Laying in a hospital bed, having had my stomach pumped to force me to give up the bottle of Valium I’d swallowed, I stopped holding it in.
I picked up the phone and called. I purged. I told my sister, my favorite aunt, my best friend, the people who had no idea the secret I’d been hiding… the one that had been festering away in my soul. They believed me. They cried the tears that I needed to hear to know that it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t MY wrong. I stood in front of my parents in the office of a doctor and raged at them for failing me and leaving me to protect myself when I wasn’t even old enough to walk across the street by myself.
I started the process of healing, trying to find my peace. I stumbled back into the pain too many times to count, I found a false peace in temporary pleasures and dangerous diversions.
I tried to learn the shame wasn’t mine. I found it possible to love myself. I found it possible to love another. I wasn’t good at it, but DAMMIT, I was going to try.
I was twenty-one.
A conversation in a car threatened to drown me in the pain, having to tell the man I wanted to marry what had happened to me… to tell him how broken I was… to bare myself and hope he wouldn’t reject the shattered pieces that were left.
He didn’t. He loved me anyway. He taught me to trust and love and believe in another person.
I closed my eyes and fell, and he caught me.
I have a wonderful husband, I have three beautiful children, I have a life that I’d never dreamed I would be whole enough to have. I get to protect them in a way I never got to protect myself. I get to see the childhood I should have had through their perfect eyes.
I didn’t want to have children for fear that the black in my past would somehow seep into their lives. Instead, with each miraculous birth, a bit of their purity seeped into me. They brought my peace, my purest love, mended my shattered self in a way nothing else could have.
I told my parents and my sister, the people who would be most hurt by this post, that I was going to write it. It took days to work up the words and the courage to do it.
I felt five and naked again.
My mother told me she hoped I would do it anonymously… hoping that we still wouldn’t have to talk about it. My sister lovingly said she knew I would do what was right in my heart and that she supported whatever choice I made.
There are times that I see the scars on my heart. I see where those events changed me forever. I survived what happened to me, I endured what I did to myself because of it, I am still always learning to love myself.
Without shame or guilt.
I am thirty-five.
***
Anissa blogs at Hope4Peyton and several other respected sites. She asks that you keep all comments regarding this post here on Violence UnSilenced rather than her own blog, in the interest of protecting the feelings of her family members.
Christina
I am a type-1, insulin-dependent diabetic, and wear an insulin pump around the clock. I dropped out of high school to care for a sister and baby brother. I’ve been through divorce, remarriage, separation, reconciliation, and spiritual awakening. I’m a mother, a reading mentor and a good steward of my community.
People who know me would tell you they admire me for my ability to overcome adversity – the way I greet each day with a smile and manage to give so much of my time to others, when others, in similar circumstances, might withdraw into themselves. They might tell you I have a heart for children’s causes and that I spend an average of more than four hours a week working with children through Junior Achievement and Frontline Outreach among others. They might talk about my annual fundraising on behalf of the American Diabetes Association.
What they might not tell you, because I didn’t tell anyone myself for years, is that I was sexually abused by my father from the time I was two years old until I ran away from home at 16. He would wake me up every night after my mom went to bed and rape me. It is the ultimate betrayal … who can I trust when my own father molests and hurts me? He says, “I love you,” and I wonder: Does real love even exist?
I thought it was my fault. I thought I could control it. I thought my mom would be angry if she found out. So I did what the overwhelming majority of rape and incest survivors do: I kept the truth to myself. I was so ashamed. I thought I was alone. I didn’t know then the horrible statistics I can now rattle off as easily as my name or phone number:
That one in six women and one in 33 men are victims of sexual assault.
That in three of every four cases the victim knows the attacker.
That in more than one of every three cases the abuse occurs at the hands of a close friend or relative.
It’s an ugly truth, one that tends to be talked about in shamed whispers instead of angry shouts. Talking about rape and incest makes people uncomfortable. But not talking about it allows it to continue.
For me, the price was almost too much to bear. Years after I left home, I found out my father had also molested my younger sister and two of my own pre-teen daughters, despite my best efforts to protect them. I wanted to kill him for hurting my children.
I picked up a hammer, planning to settle the matter once and for all, but went to the police instead, at the urging of my sister. Five years, two trials and many panic attacks later, a jury convicted my father on one count of sexual assault on a minor. He pled guilty to two additional counts and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. I had the power to change this vicious cycle!
As often happens in such cases, the trial tore the family in half. My mother stood by her husband and testified for the defense. I don’t believe our relationship will ever be the same. I do miss my Mom, but I would do it all over again.
I had been willing to go to prison to stop my father’s terrible legacy, and have spent the last six years in therapy. I now speak regularly about the ordeal on behalf of rape and incest advocacy groups. In January of 2007, I went through formal media training and now make myself available for media interviews through SOAR, which stands for Speaking Out against Rape; and RAINN, the Rape Abuse & Incest National Network. I have the power to make a change!
Will my children, sister, or I ever forget the pain he caused? No, but we have survived and continue to heal. By knowing his actions aren’t our fault, that it isn’t a shameful secret, and by choosing to speak out about it, we are thriving and more powerful than we were before.
***
Christina also speaks out here.
