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Leave.
I go back to Los Angeles in a summer before 1994, in our hot, dry smoggy house. Happy house where the boys were small. Where I saw, with my friend Karen, an interview on tv with a woman that we would have dismissed, old, small, grey, poor, raggedy clothes, missing teeth.
The camera found her sitting on the little curb of the meridian of a gas station, leaning against a pump and holding an ice pack to her forehead, one eye bandaged, waiting, I guess for the ambulance ride.
The newscaster interviewed her. She said that she’d had fights before with X., her mate, and he had beat her up and sent her to the hospital before but this time he had actually bitten out her eyeball and, she said, “That’s it!”
Karen, sipping from a cold drink, joked to me: “Well, it’s good to set limits.”
We laughed.
Later, I didn’t laugh. I saw myself in this woman. I saw that she didn’t know when to cut and run. Saw that it was okay for her, up to a point, to take another person’s pounding, to have compassion with that person, they had their own frustrations.
I saw, in small increments, how that slope is built, this okay then not okay but then, this okay but then not okay. How much is it okay to do to you before you leave? How much when you have little to leave towards? When that company, as fucked as it is, is the best or only you’re bound to get.
I lived in that house with very little support. My husband didn’t hit me but he didn’t help me either. I lived as a woman who was barely tolerated. My every word or action was treated with hostility. My body was despised, my request for anything, even food money, treated as absurd. Our union was held together by the expectations of others and we weren’t meeting them. I tiptoed around every encounter, avoided every confrontation. And there were children, and little money.
All the circumstances from which abuse can occur. But only if you are willing to either be the abuser or the person who loses their eye.
Maybe its not true that any one of us can be either one of those. Some people say that we are ‘better’ than that. Who, though, is better? And if they are better, why do they keep on pounding?
I have been told, I have read, I have heard, that we cannot change other people, we can only change our reaction to them.
NOTE to self: In future, don’t wait for someone to bite out your eyeball. Leave now. Don’t look back.