The thing is, I’m not much of a planner, I’m more of a react-or. I basically ran away from home with my best friend when I was 19, running all the way across the country to a town called Wilmington North Carolina. I’m from LOS ANGELES.
Now that move, I planned. Meticulously.
It was a hundred years ago, so I went to the LIBRARY and looked up statistics about cities and towns in the United States South. I knew the populations, income education levels and distance from the ocean - because this is important to me - for about a half dozen different places across the South before my best friend and I decided on Wilmington. It had everything we wanted; a four year college (for the parties and the boys) and a Community College for us to attend called… get this!... Cape Fear Community College. Coming across a community college called Cape Fear appealed to the Stephen King fan in me HARD.
What horrid irony that the abusive son of a bitch I ended up married to, I met at Cape Fear Community College.
I didn’t plan to be in an abusive relationship, but when you’re taught as a child that love means pain, it makes sense that I would find men who would hurt me as they loved me.
I didn’t plan to get pregnant either, but once I was, I DID plan to mother as best as I possibly could. I was barely 21 and for some, that’s plenty old enough to Adult. For me, though… think more Bambi in the headlights, wide eyed and naive as FUCK.
He mostly stopped hurting me during my pregnancy and since I was having his baby, I also agreed to marry him.
I remember the moment I decided to leave him very clearly, however. It was a normal weekday morning; my alarm went off beside my bed and I shut it off quickly so as to not wake him up… he HATED getting jarred awake. I then went quietly into the bathroom to start his shower; he HATED waiting for the water to get warm. Next, I went to his side of the bed to wake him… gently, but not TOO gently because that would seem insincere and he HATED insincerity.
Once he was awake and in the bathroom, I would iron his clothes, and set them out properly for him to put on. I still remember the right way to do it… freshly ironed shirt on the bed first, pressed pants on top. Undershirt next, underwear on top. Socks unfolded and placed on the right; tie to the left and shoes - toes out so he could put them on easily! - on the floor below.
On this day, however, the baby woke up needing to be fed before I was finished getting everything ready for him.
I gathered the baby and was sitting on the couch feeding him when my husband got out of the shower. He was rather... unhappy … that I had not finished getting him ready for work and began a raging tirade that lasted most of an hour, and during which he threw a baby toy at me from across the room.
I blocked the toy with my left hand, reaching across my body to shield my infant son’s head from the hard plastic toy as he fed from my right breast. I remember feeling the toy hit my hand and the reverberations that coursed through my body were cold. One millisecond earlier I had been terrified but now my fury exploded into ice in my veins and all the noise in my head went silent.
As he raged around me, I took the baby and put him safely in his crib. I knew my husband would get physical and I needed the baby to be safe. As he threw me around the house, my thoughts continued to be clear and simple; Get Out. Save the baby.
I ended up in the street in my nightgown. No one noticed. I watched him leave for work, finally, and went back into the house. I made two phone calls; one to my parents and one to my best friend. Both calls were short and sweet; ‘I’m leaving him’ ‘why?’ ‘he hits me’ ‘we’ll be right there’.
I started packing.
And right then he came back into the house and I can tell you exactly why it is so hard for women to leave a situation like this. Because when your abuser thinks you might leave, when that realization happens, THAT is when they are the most dangerous. My hair would fall out in clumps for weeks afterwards; my entire body bruised and aching.
My plan was to leave and never look back. Of course, that’s not what happened and it was two years before I was able to finally divorce him.
My plan was to protect my son. My best laid plan was to love him so much that MY love would protect him from his father; that MY love would shine through and beyond all the horror, all the lies and twisted affection, manipulation and chaos his father would eventually bring to him despite my best laid plans. I hoped against hope that no matter what, my son would KNOW that I loved him, and that my love would save him.
So when three years ago, when my son was 20, I had to call the police because he was being abusive to me and his grandmother; when immediately afterwards I sent him to live with his father - our shared abuser - in order to ensure the safety of my mother; when then THREE YEARS have passed and I had texted and called and still hadn’t heard back from him, … I realized that my best laid plans had come to naught. I had failed. My love wasn’t enough.
I have three younger children from my second marriage, and when my littles went back to school a few months ago, I got one of those notices on my phone; the ‘You Took This Picture Four Years Ago Today!' kind of thing. It was a picture I took of a painting I had done, with my eldest son, in our last counseling session together. It’s a painting of a rainbow, meant to show how even though things had been difficult, picture dark and stormy clouds, he and I had come out of it together into the light. It was a year after painting this picture that I called the cops and sent him off to his father.
I texted him the picture and wrote, simply and again as I had so often over the past three years, ‘I love you! I miss you!’
So when he wrote back moments later, after years of silence; when he told me he misses his family and we texted back and forth for a good twenty minutes… the knowledge that I wouldn’t NEVER speak to him again was….. transcendent. My love couldn’t protect him; but maybe it was enough to bring him back to me.
“The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry…” but sometimes...sometimes maybe it all works out in the end.
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