"Domestic violence is any behavior involving physical, psychological, emotional, sexual, or verbal abuse. It is any form of aggression intended to hurt, damage, or kill an intimate person."-Asa Don Brown
On a beautiful spring afternoon, the sun provides a special kind of warmth and comfort. Birds in concert, singing from the treetops, add to this delicious ambiance.
My feet seem to effortlessly carry me up to the road and across onto the trail. Such a familiar trail now appears entirely different from the winter months. As the leaves on the trees hatch, so do the bugs in Michigan’s U.P.
There, up ahead, a human is walking in my direction. Spying another human out here is strange indeed. Normally, my walking companions are just some deer, squirrels, and an occasional Bobcat. Quite by surprise, I chanced upon a Lynx while walking this trail once. We had quite the conversation before she meandered on, having more pressing things to do.
“Hey, Willa, is that you? Good to see you, neighbor. What are you doing out here this time of day? We continued walking toward each other until we got close enough to talk without yelling. “What are you doing out here? Aren’t you usually knee deep in chores about this time of day? Good to see you, it’s been a long winter, eh?” I said, slightly out of breath.
Willa is a darling of a neighbor, always willing to lend a hand. About a little over 5 feet tall, she’s slightly bent forward when she walks, most likely from carrying her world on her back. She worked hard all her life to support her family, being the only wage earner in the household much of the time, her fingers now gnarled with arthritis. But mostly, Willa keeps to herself, having learned long ago that life was simpler and less painful alone, away from what she affectionately calls people. She moved out here for much of the same reasons I did. Living in the woods is healing, and a lot of heavy work, but to Willa, it is the first place she has felt safe.
“I was just coming to see you,” she said. “I had some time, thought we could finish our interview for your article.”
“Perfect! Let’s go to my house, and I’ll put on a pot of coffee.” It was only a matter of half a mile back to the house. We took our time getting back, it was such a beautiful day.
It might surprise you to learn how many stories like Willa’s I’ve listened to during my years at a non-profit women’s shelter. It’s the white underbelly of the human condition. Generally, the emotional burnout of staff in a domestic violence shelter is somewhere around 5 years of service. The stories are so tragic, the stress is high, and because of abusers sometimes storming the place. But it can be a place of salvation and learning to love yourself and life again, too. So, because of my experience and training dealing with domestic violence and rape victims Willa trusted her story to me.
With her permission, this is her story.
As the many years of our friendship has grown in number, Willa revealed bits and pieces of her life, slowly in the beginning. Talking is good therapy, she said later on, it does help. “I didn’t dare complain or cry when I was a kid,” she lamented one afternoon over tea. “I would get a swift backhand to the chops. I was a feisty kid, I’m surprised I have any teeth,” she says with a little snicker.
In an earlier interview, Willa revealed to me she didn’t have a safe and secure childhood. Her mother was what is termed a “functioning alcoholic.” Her biological father was a beauty school owner and a hit-and-run Bill Cosby type. Owning a beauty school gave the married man with movie star good looks, a huge ego, and a matching sexual appetite, the perfect cover to access all the young girls fresh out of high school. From what she learned after finding 4 other siblings through 23&me, dear ol’ dad’s obsession was for those naive beauties to be between 19 and 21 years old. Legal for consent, but just not savvy enough to understand handsome sexual predators. Poodle skirts and sock hops were trending in her mothers' era; social innocence was much different back then.
She told me a story once about her grandmother coming to the house one afternoon and finding Willa sitting in a hard wooden highchair sporting two black eyes. Also, she told me she spent most of her first two years of life in her crib with a stuffed toy and a bottle of milk for comfort. Willa let on that her mom wasn’t all bad; she dressed her in cutesy little dresses when she did take her out, and she fed her well, but there simply wasn’t much maternal affection within her home environment. When her mother discovered she was pregnant with her, she married her stepfather before Willa was born, even though he wasn’t good at much except looking pretty and chasing the ladies.
Willa starts todays chat—
“My Dad/stepdad was drop-dead gorgeous, too. (I call him Dad/stepdad because I didn’t know he wasn’t my bio-dad until just recently.) He enjoyed women hanging on his every word, that is, until one day when mother announced she was divorcing him, and we left his house and moved to the big city. Lost track of him after that. Dad/stepdad did, from time to time, pick me up on a Saturday for the court-ordered visit and drop me off at someone else’s house. He returned for me on Sunday and drove me back to my mother’s apartment. I was someone else’s bastard child, and his family didn’t want to deal with me once mother and dad/stepdad parted ways. Dad/stepdad never knew my birthday, nor did he care, I would presume.
Mother held down an overnight full-time job making fishing equipment. A divorcee of the late 1950s and early 1960s carried a stigma and a whole different set of problems. Not anything like what you have today. I pretty much was on my own from about the age of 11. Then mother married Keith. She needed financial help because we were about to become homeless, and he had a special fondness for little girls.
I was married off the first time at 17 years old and the second time at 23. At that time, in my heart, I felt if this made mother happy and she would like me better, then that’s what I would do to please her. It was better than the alternative. Nothing or nobody was going to make me quit high school, though. At least I was going to have a say in my education and they weren’t going to stop me.
The first marriage was brutally violent, and the night I ran from him, it was unmistakable: he was going to kill me and bury my body in the woods. The second marriage was just as abusive, only this time it was an emotional hostage situation and not so much physical violence. If you raised your eyes to him when you had been bad, you crossed some imaginary line and were guilty. His chastising of your trespass was like a well-oiled guilt machine. Sharp, pounding, and demanding.
If you have never been through mental abuse, here’s what it looks like: A friend of ours and I were sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon, sipping on coffee, just shooting the breeze. During our conversation, we managed to get on the subject of electricity prices. I can’t believe how much they have gone up, my coffee companion said with a sigh. We volleyed back and forth a few more minutes about electric prices, and then it was time for her to go. Kids would be home from school shortly. The moment she was out the door and down the steps, he came stomping into the kitchen from the other room and started screaming at me. “How dare you discuss our finances with her. What’s the matter with your head? I don’t want our finances discussed with anyone, never! Do you hear me? It is none of anyone’s damn business. Get your shoes on, I want a beer, he demanded. But the kids will be home soon, I protested. They will be fine, now come on.
We walked the three blocks to the pizza place and went inside. We sat at a table, ordered, and he had just finished his first beer and a slice of pizza when some townsfolk wandered in looking frazzled. They were getting a bite to eat at the pizza place because their house had just burned to the ground.
Holy crap I said, are you alright? I think I would be in hysterics right about now. Is there anything I can do? We chatted for another couple of minutes, and their pizza came up. They paid for it and left.
After they were out of earshot, my husband started another “you are bad” rant. What kind of insane are you? How can you say that to people who just lost their house? You really are a piece of work, you know? He stood up and went towards the men’s room. I thought I must have insulted those nice people. I guess I am bad. What was it I could have said differently?
It was during this self-analyzing dialog playing out in my head that I felt a tap on the back of my shoulder. I turned around to see an older lady, older than me anyway, seated at the table directly behind me. She heard every word of his belittling rant. She said in a soft, angelic voice, and trust me, this was life-changing for me. She said, Why do you let him treat you that way?
I must have looked like a deer in the headlights as I just sat there looking at her. I never thought about it before. Why do I? About that time, He came back to the table, and I turned back around. God sent her to me, I know he did. I wish so much I could thank her.
In the next few weeks after the tap on my shoulder, I began flexing my new, stronger wings, my internal dialogue began to change. Up until now, abuse was all I knew, but something changed; I felt different. This new me needed to be explored. It was mostly an internal exploration, that is, until that one day you have just had enough.”
Willa was on a roll, finally! I gave her the floor and hoped she would continue.
The room got too quiet. Willa was in a holding pattern with memories flooding her brain space.
What about the kids? How did they deal with the abuse? I broke the silence, which shook her out of the drain spiral.
“Ah, well, the kids?” She let a long pause hang between us while she gave her children some serious thought.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I’d tell my granddaughters. Once you have a kid, you can’t put ‘em back. But those newly minted humans are not just yours, they are half his, too. You get him, his family and his genetics all in one neat package. You can have as many babies as you want during your fertile years and I can, with all certainty, say at least one will have his temperament or personality. You know, they grow up just like HIM or worse. Can’t do anything about that except choose wisely your baby daddy if you can. See, I was lucky, I got two. That’s the part that hurts the most. It eats away at your soul like a masticating cancerous tumor. You give everything you are, everything you have to your precious ones, and they...
I’m sorry, I thought I could finish this. It’s getting late, I've got critters to feed. Thanks for the coffee. Maybe another time.”
And she was out the door.
It had been a couple of weeks since I had seen Willa. I planned on going over to see her today. Before I went in her direction, I had to stop at the post office to pick up some stamps before the next price increase took effect.
I’m standing in line with one lady standing behind me. Another lady enters the post office and recognises the lady behind me.
“Hey Belinda, how are you doing? Beautiful morning, eh?”
“Oh hey Liz, nice to see you up and about. Are you feeling better?”
“Yeah, I think I’m on the mend. Hey, did you hear about Willa?”
Gossip in a small woods village burns faster than any wildfire can match.
“No, I haven’t, Liz, what have you heard?”
“She died last night.” Liz left that shock to hang there for effect.
“Oh no! She died? She died? No, that can’t be. I just saw her at church on Sunday. We had a Mother’s Day feast. She looked fine. Are you sure? Oh my, I can’t believe it.” Belinda was shaken by the news of Willa’s passing.
“As you know, my son-in-law works for an ambulance company. They got a call for a deceased person pick up out here. He said someone found her slumped over with her face in her computer, dead. The page on the computer was a Facebook message with a very nasty Happy Mother’s Day message she had been reading. The coroner's report was preliminary, but at this point, it looked like a case of Broken Heart syndrome. Her heart just stopped beating. Happens more often than you may think. One nasty, hateful message too many, I presume.” Liz explained, looking off into the corner of the room.
“That’s so sad. That dear lady died from a broken heart.”
Support others, get involved, save a life
You can’t always see abuse. Some abuse doesn’t leave an outward bruise, it’s a lingering wound on the soul. Willa’s story happens to one of every four women. Domestic abuse is a growing cancer in this country. A staggering 4% of the U.S. population of men have been injured by violence in the home.
If you or someone you know is suffering in silence, please reach out to National Domestic Abuse Website or your local women’s shelter. You will find a comforting, listening ear. They have resources and the knowledge to help save your life or that of someone you know who is being abused. The call can be anonymous and they are sworn to secrecy.
Join me over on chat for further discussion.
