Friends make all the difference

I don't know where I would be right now, or what would have happened to me if I did not have my friends...

Every survivor of domestic abuse, whether it is physical, financial, sexual, or in my case, emotional and psychological, needs to maintain their friendships and relationships. I know well how hard this is, namely when it is that you are told all that you are told about how useless your partner thinks you are, namely when you are told (read "forced")to have little, if any, contact with the people who you love the most - your family, and more than that, your friends.

Friends - the people who make up our Soul Families

It is not a secret that I Love all of my friends. It is also not a secret that they all know how much I Love them, and I Love them because when I was squarely in the middle of the drama that unfolded as my life, it was they who I turned to and it was they who always had a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on, for real and proverbially. Were it not for April, Marsha, Dora and Larry, were it not for Waipuna, not for Napua, not for Patrick...were it not for a whole lot of people I might not have been able to come to the absolutely needed conclusion, the decision, really, to end this part of my life as I know it and have known it to be, and I would not have had the courage to make such a decision.

Our friends give us a different perspective of what our lives are all about, and in my case it was my group of friends - my Soul Family - who were all right there to tell me what they thought, not only about what I was going through or what they thought of my soon-to-be-former-spouse, but also of what they thought I would be able to do in my situation, and it all was the same. They wanted me to be safe, wanted me to be OK, wanted me to be able to live my life the way that I thought and still think I should, and most of all, they wanted me to know that above all else, they Loved me.

They Loved me, and that was enough for me to know for sure that I am a worthy person, that I am not screwed up because one person thinks I am or thought I was, that on my own I am fine but that with him I am so not. It took a long for me to accept this, that I am a good enough person to not have to deal with this, that I am not as stuck as I thought I was and that the big bad man is not really a big bad man but more like a paper tiger who is just as scared as I have been all these years, if not more than I am, and that the way that he shows me this fear is through his past acts of violence on my person, and his present words of attrition for me ("I only say those things when I am mad, Roxanne..." ... yeah, and it seems that you are always mad, dude).

Don't get me wrong - I am not saying that he has an excuse or an out. I am saying that this is the way that he was shown, and this is the thing that he saw his mother and father go through, and because this is "normal"to him, he believed for a long time that he would make it normal for me, too, but it is not normal now and will never be normal, ever.

It is never normal that a person should have to live in isolation away from her family and friends because a person who has never been shown that having good relationships with people who we are not married to is a good thing - this will never be normal to a formerly themselves abused person, and certainly not one who believes that there is nothing wrong with them (but I promise you that there is something not quite right with them). It is never normal for us as human creatures to not have contact with other human creatures.

It is not normal for women to not turn the heads of men, namely not beautiful women, but in the eyes of an abusive mate it is not normal that another man would look at the betrothed of said abusive person, because once it is that you marry an abuser, or more than that, once it is that you have become betrothed to them, they believe that they are all you will ever need, and this is a lie.

I need my girlfriends there to tell me that they Love me, to be there when I cry, and to tell me that I am wrong in their ever-so-gently way. I need my cousins there to tell me that I am Loved no matter what, that just because he said that women people cannot be trusted, that they trust me with their very lives. I need my sibling people to tell me that I always have a place to go where it is safe for me to be, just in case, and of course, so that they, too, can tell me and remind me that they Love me, that I alone will be fine in life and that they will never leave my side, regardless if they are really there physically or not.

And I need my "guy"people to be there to tell me that no, I am not so ugly so as to make a man want to hurl, that the way that I look is NOT the reason that I got hit when I did, that I am called the ugly names that I have been (recently as last week even)out of his fear that I actually AM those things but with other men, that I am worthy of the Love of one good man who is NOT the man I married and that yes, there ARE other men on the planet and that of course- when I am through this very emotionally charged time in my life that yes, I can have my pick if I so choose to have said pick (and I already picked so there!)

There is nothing quite more wonderful than knowing that there is a set of people on the planet who loves us each - and there is nothing quite more lovely than knowing that in their eyes I am good enough just as I am...smart mouthed, snarky as hell, full of moxie, but more importantly, full of the Love that was placed there by them  for me that has blossomed into what it was meant to be...

...unconditionally there and always there when I need it to be and vice-versa, and THAT is the reason why all human being type creatures NEED other people in our lives who are NOT only our abusive mates...and the truth is that we really do not need them - we have just been told and forced to believe that we do.

The Love that we receive from our friends is the most healing kind of all, because they see who we really are, and they value us because of all the things that we have been told as abuse survivors, and more, for the things that they know we are so, so not. Our Soul Family was meant to be there for us when we need them and we are meant to be there for them so as to reciprocate when they need us.

I am elated to tell you all that my Soul Family  is, always has been right there for me, and I know for sure that they always will be!

As always...

I Love You All!!
...Rox...

We Can Be Angry About This, or, We Can Be Proactive

They have lost their damned minds in Wisconsin


Today I was linked with an article on the web about a lawmaker in Wisconsin stating that he believes women should stay married, no matter what, even if there is abuse going on. I did not want this blog to be rife with negativity, so instead of going on and on about what a creep I think this guy is, I will instead encourage anyone who reads this blog posting as well as that article to not only get angry, but to get over that anger and then, get on out there, out in the streets, in the malls, wherever the hell you care to be, and be proactive.

If we all banded together in a proactive manner, thought about why this bothers us so much, thought about the point that we would like to get across, and then spoke after thinking about what it is that we really want to say, if there were more than only my voice, even though a lot of us do not live there, it would make an impact. I know this is true because that is something that all people who work in Public Relations knows - we know our public, and we know the pulse of what is good, what is not good, what is going to be right in the eyes of the people, and I know that there are not a whole lot of people who would be ok with this.

At first I was very angry after having read it, but then when I thought about it I also thought about how many more people there are on the planet who are sickened by the idea that anyone - man or woman - who chooses to use force of any kind at all to manipulate people to do what they want them to do is somehow alright in the head. Abusers are never alright in the head. Abusers like to use their "strength" to bully their targets and abusers like to tell their targets all those pretty words and when the target chooses to no longer be a target the abusers go right back into their train of thought that they need absolute control, that they need absolute power over other people. This is something that I know personally, and this moron in Wisconsin wants to make the rest of the country think that this is a good idea!

Folks, I have learned after having been emotionally battered for many years that we actually have a leg up on the abusers, that we are stronger than they are and yes, it is because of what they have done or are still doing, what they have said or are still saying, and no one can tell me that the reason that any victim stays is for any other reason than that they are scared as hell of their abusers making good on their threats. I had this very conversation with the person who victimized me for many years until I recently stood up to him, got in his face and brought my Goliath down. It took me 20-plus years to finally do what I should have done but was too scared to do any sooner.

And just like all of us eventually stand up to those who have taken it upon themselves to make us into their pariah, so, too must we also be willing to stand up as one voice, together in unison against this idiocy. It makes me sick to know that this man, all for the sake of HIS own beliefs, will try to manipulate the rest of the thinking populace to manipulate abuse survivors so as to keep us with people who are bad to us, and this creep makes his case by using THE CHILDREN!!

Let me tell you something about the children who are in the middle of this crap. My kids have seen a whole lot,  and of late I have made it my point and my only mission that when I start hearing those lovely names that abusers like to call their victims, I shuffle my brood outside, sometimes to the neighbor's house, so that I can calmly discuss with my soon-to-be-former-spouse whatever it was that upset him so, and normally it is really not a huge deal. Making a case by stating that it is better for children to live in a house with a man - even an abusive man, physically or otherwise or both - is somehow better than that of one loving woman who will do all she has to in order to bring up good citizens. If you want to know more, click here.

Right now, though, we ALL need BADLY to send this guy our brand of Love, because something tells me that in his life there is a woman who is agreeing with him but only because the severity of what might happen if she disagrees.

I could be wrong, but what man in his right mind would even bother with this sort of thinking if he were not also somehow an abuser himself???

Bastard!

http://shine.yahoo.com/love-sex/wisconsin-lawmaker-says-women-stay-abusive-marriages-232700220.html 

Reflections of Life

Birthdays are meant for reflecting back on what we have been through to see where we have been, what we have seen and have done, what we have learned, and most of all, to know for sure what it is that we want out of life.

Today is March 11th. Today I am 42, and I look back at the year which has passed and I find that there have been a lot of absolutes for me, there have been a lot of finalities, and more than anything else, there has been massive change in my life and all of it good.

No one can tell me that when you think about all you have been through that it seems that no one learns from what they have experienced. I have learned well from the school of life. I have learned that I am not a bad person but that I am a good person who has made a lot of errant decisions about things and people who, for all intents and purposes, have been the greatest teachers that I have had in my life, and yes, the soon-to-be-former-spouse was, is the greatest teacher I have ever had. Thing is, though, that just like a child who graduates out of grade school into middle school, and from middle school into high school, and from high school into adulthood, we, the students, evolve and move on. Sometimes, though, unfortunately, the teachers do not.

I have learned that the entirety of my 41st year of life was sort of like the ending of a very tragic love story, and I have also accepted that what I went through, was, in part, my own doing because I chose to fear instead of choosing to see with the eyes of Love - Self-Love, that is, and now, on this date, the date of the beginning of the second half of my life, I can sit here and tell you all that truly, I have been an astute student of life, of Love, of Knowing what it is that I am made of and more, Knowing that I was worth every minute, every tear that fell from my eyes, every enraged and loaded word breathed from my mouth that had everything to do with my life the way that I want it to be - my year was rife with pain, heartache and loss, but it dawns on me now that without those things happening, I may not be here to tell you that indeed, you can recoup your personal losses and you can even reinvent yourself.

I know this is the truth because this is the activity that I spent my 41st year of life doing the most of - laying the foundation for the next 41 years, and these next 41 years, because I want it this way, will be what the first 41 were spent bringing into fruition.

So, in light of this knowledge, I will tell you all now that I will no longer be telling you about the bad things an abuse survivor has gone through, and I will no longer be giving anyone any further a reason to fear.

Instead, beginning with this post, I will give survivors a reason to cheer.

Instead of telling you all about the horrid things that I have borne witness to, I will simply just tell you that it gets better, but that you have to want it to - you cannot heal and simultaneously still live in what happened to you. Healing does not work that way. I learned this very well. I cannot heal if I am proverbially ripping off the bandages that I myself put there to bring about spiritual and emotional healing. You will never find a physician on the planet who will tell you that it is a good idea to rip the scab off of a wound because not only will the scar be bigger and worse, but it will take longer for the wound to heal.

Instead of telling you how badly my heart ached, how badly it still aches, not for the things that he'd done and said but instead for the things that I chose to accept as mine, I will tell you about what happened to me afterward, tell you how those things helped to reveal the light shining through the cracks of the walls in my memories, tell you how we expect God to give us an open door or window to get through to the next phases in healing but that sometimes we are given a crack in the wall of our minds and shown the chisel, the hammer and the will to break that crack open to find a different perspective about the door opening to new opportunities because sometimes it is not a door. Sometimes it is a tiny crack in the wall of our inner safehouse and sometimes it is with work and care and time and more heart ache that we are able to break through the bullshit and see that what we have accomplished was indeed no small feat.

If we expect ourselves to heal, then it is high time to stop reopening the wounds from the past, time to stop making our abusers the people who control us and how we feel about ourselves, and most of all, it is time to really begin to Love Us, because we are as important to the circle of life and living as anyone else is.

If we expect things to get better, we have to take action for them to. If we expect to be Loved, then we must be willing to give Love. If we expect peace, we must live peacefully.

That which we expect, we must do, give...Be.

Happy Birthday to me...

I Love You All...
...Roxanne...

Cry

Society sees crying and a show of emotions as a sign of weakness. Yet, in the world of the domestically abused, sometimes, tears are all we have.

The fact that my Sun sign is in Pisces makes it so that when I feel something, some sort of energetic or volatile pull on my emotions, if I am presented enough with all the facets and all the stuff that will take prior to said such emotional happening happens, if it is that the thing at hand is emotionally strong, I will likely end up in tears over it. This is not to say that I am not already an incredibly emotional person who feels every little nuance in a situation, but it is to say that personally I know that when we cry we are not only feeling what we have to feel at that given moment, but we are getting rid of toxicity that was not ours to begin with. This is the very reason that I tell anyone with whom I should have contact in regards to the issue of being physically assaulted for the very first time - that they NEED to cry.

Tears are a gift. Even though we end up with puffy eyes and our sinuses end up being very clogged from all the draining of our emotions, when we cry we very literally release the toxins which were built up within us throughout the time that we were only experiencing the emotional part of being abused. And of course the emotional part is way harder to get over than the physical bruises, but what only an actual formerly beaten person will tell you is that the emotions you feel after that initial attack will leave a person feeling an entirely new set of toxicity, and it is this level of toxicity that will compound the idea that you have already gone through all sorts of emotional stuff and now here is  yet one more thing to have to deal with that you know you never cared to deal with but are now very well in the middle of it.

I know this monster well because this monster is the one that lives in the back of the closet of my mind, taunting and haunting me with the mental images, not only of my bruised,  battered and broken self, but also and more importantly, the illuminated and bigger-than-it-really-is image of that angry face, the gritted teeth, the wild look in his eyes, and that illusory background of anger that he said was caused by me.

Let it be well known right at this moment that the first time you were abused, no matter what way it happened, that at that moment you were changed, forever. At that moment you were stripped of trust in others. At that moment your entire world became enmeshed and laced with a fear that is foreign to you, a fear that now lives in you because someone else placed it there and did so with force.

At that very moment in time, you became someone who you no longer knew, at least not the way that you did prior to that one very intense moment. You became the thing that you told yourself that you would never be - your spouse or partner's victim. The very word "victim" makes people think that you are somehow weak, that you should have had more back bone and above all, the thing that a lot of people will tell you but have no clue is NOT the truth is that they would never let it happen to them.

I am so sorry, folks, but abusers are not the type to tell you when they are going to toss you around physically, and abusers are not going to clue you in to when they have totally lost their mind and are now going to go ape shit on you and physically harm you. There is no abusive person on the planet who is also going to tell you what they are up to and there is no mental health expert who will make me believe that they are the very ones who will unwittingly tell you that they are going to physically harm you. It just won't happen that way. The way that physical abuse begins is at that point where the abuser cannot "break" you or your spirit, and if you are one of the luckier ones then you will know that a broken spirit is never up to those trying to break it and it is very much a case of if you will allow them that leeway - I allowed that leeway, but you don't have to.

You never have to let someone else tell you that they are going to physically harm you even though they will say it a whole lot. You never have to believe that you are not worth someone else's good effort at showing you that you are somehow the effort to be with someone who will not treat you like property. You never have to do a whole lot of things, and at the point where fist meets the eye or the jaw or the ribs, the notion that you do not have to do anything that you do not want to do flies out the window along with your sense of normalcy.
And it is your sense of normalcy that gets shaken and your sense of normalcy that becomes diluted with someone else's version of "normal."

Getting hit is not normal. Being told that you are all what someone else tells you that you are is also not normal and what is further not normal is the fact that in a whole lot of cases, many of us will allow this, out of fear or whatever the hell else it is that you can think of, to become the color of "normal" for an abuse victim because this is the "normal" that their own abusers grew up with. It is never normal for anyone to have to fear what another person  might do, because what they "might" do they ultimately and one day end up doing anyway. To tell an abuser that you are leaving them and that they need to deal with it is just inviting them to conjure ways of hurting you further.

In fact, it is evidenced that once a woman reports the abuse to authorities or when she chooses to leave him the abuse victim is neatly placed in a more dangerous position than she already was. Hence, the reason that I am all for provisions made to the abused through nonprofit agencies and government providers. When it comes to abuse and the leaving of our abusive partners it is the paper trail which matters and not only how the abuses made you feel. The reality is that the abuse is not done once you leave and the propensity and possibility of it still happening and more harshly once you are gone is real. More abused women are killed after they have left their abusers and not while they are stuck in the middle of the madness they have been forced to call their lives.

This, folks, is the reality that becomes that of an abused person, and the statistics you read and hear about are real. The textbook descriptions of what we go through are not real because these explanations do not give credence to the idea that bruises and bones take time to heal, that spirits crushed need time to become revitalized, and further, there is no textbook that adequately explains what it is that all abused people go through. And what we go through is quite a lot.

Hence, the reason that it is good to cry, the reason that when it all first starts it is good and needed to feel and explore those emotions and deal with them as best we can at the beginning of things without the benefit of therapy. In fact, to allow the tears to flow is therapy. It helps rid us of our sadness and our grief, helps to ease the bewilderment, and most of all, allows us to feel whatever emotions that we are feeling at the time it all comes to the head that, in most cases, ends up happening and it does not matter how long it took for your attacker to start in on you with the verbal and emotional abuse because at the onset of those things happening it is but a matter of time before the physical abuse begins.

So please, by all means, do yourself a favor and cry.

Sadly, you earned it...

I Love You All
...Roxanne...

You are important enough, I Promise

The thing about being part of a relationship is that there are two people


If there is anything that anyone who has been abused knows a lot about it is the idea that in a relationship there is the idea that there are two people in it, but when we are speaking in terms of our actively being a part of that relationship, when we think about it further, in an abusive situation, there is only one person and one non-person, or at least this is the lie that we are told.

For many years I have stayed quiet about the things that I have gone through, being careful to not bring up the past, not only so that I would not raise the ire of my abuser, but also so that I would not have to live through the muck that impeded my life and my willingness to go through what I went through - that's right- I said it, now deal with it. Let it be well known that we humans do not go through anything that we do not choose to go through. Am I saying that those who have been abused wanted to go through that hell or really did make the choice consciously to go through it? Oh HELL no I ain't.

What I am saying is...

Precisely what I am saying is that every single person who has been abused chose to deal with the reality before them rather than risk what they did not know would or would not happen. There is no way that anyone, unless they are a sadomasochist, chooses to be beaten, to be belittled, to go through what I and many others like me have gone through.

Everyday we choose to deal with what we will, and we choose to have the reaction that we will have to it, and in the case where a woman is being abused, physically or otherwise, this same thing can be said. We would rather deal with the devil we know instead of risking what we assume is the safer option - which, in reality, is no where near safer. It is safer to get out of a situation where someone else has all the control and the other person is controlled. This is not the way that anyone's life is supposed to be, not at all, but there are a lot of people on the planet who go through this all day long everyday and they do it while quietly pining away underneath it all, watching time and life slip on by while they stay there in that fear wondering when it will end.

When will it end?

God bless my best friend, April, because she has a way with being able to tell me things that I need to hear without making me hurt anymore. She has told me for a lot of years that no, I am not worthless, and no, I do not have to do anything that my soon-to-be ex-husband tells me that I have to do (or else he will....really? who fucking cares, right?) and I want you all to know, right now, for sure and for real, April is right. (April is ALWAYS right!)

April told me these words on more than one occasion, and today they stuck to me like dried shit on a long haired dog's ass - "it will end when you choose for it to end."

This is correct, by the way. We abused and survivors of abuse pine and wait for the opportunity to finally choose to do something, and the one thing that is the hardest to choose is to choose to no longer be a victim. I am no victim. I am not some shrinking violet - not by any means, but when that sonofabitch decides to run his mouth all those years of taking his shit catch up to me and make me a jumblefuck of emotions, these days causing me to have physical pain whenever the adrenaline kicks in and the fight or flight reaction decides to take hold.

I have spent the entirety of my adult life under the thumb of one person, and when someone gets used to that sort of thing, it is a hard thing to not do anymore. He does not like that I, like the ever-blooming flowers, are pushing up through the bullshit of his own life and his own losses, and he does not like that I plan to no longer be married to him, and he does not like that I have chosen to no longer be his to walk all over - those days are over with. It will be a challenge for me to have to get through this all while he runs his mouth, all while he begs me not to do it, all while he still will be who he is and I am who I am now, and who I am now will not allow his bullshit and will not deal with the disrespect that I allowed for so long,

We allow it, guys...really...

While there is no excuse for abusing anyone, after we have been beaten down into an unrecognizable-from-who-we-really-are on the inside shell, because we so badly want peace and because it is that in an abusive situation we are already afraid, we do whatever we feel we must in order to simply keep the peace. Abusers are excellent at the art of confusion and they are willing to confuse their victim enough so that the victim will do anything just to not hear that they are horrible, just to know that they have escaped having the shit knocked out of them again, and of course we learn to duck very quickly because of all the things that get thrown at us both literally and figuratively.

But, again, if we did not eventually grow accustomed to what it is that we let other people do to us, and we do not allow people to turn us into their doormat, we will not become their doormat. Yet, if, like me, because of your size and the fact that you have always been a peace-loving, fun-loving, loving person, period, all your life,and you know this is the truth of you, then like me you likely opted to try to Love your attacker into becoming peaceful, and then later on down the road found out that it only gave them one more avenue through which they could get into the meat of your soul and do what they would in order for you to be so scared. I know this because I lived it and even now, at this late juncture, I still have a lot of fear, but it is not fear over what it is that he has already done but rather and only what it is that I assume he will do.

Collectively we have to stop allowing these behaviors to run amok, because amok running is what the abused are so great at. We run amok when we get a little bit of freedom, and we run amok thinking that the tiny amount, that tiny space of time that we are allowed by those who would like to keep us locked in a prison of our own making, of time that we do have to make a choice is going to last forever, but it isn't.

I know that if I do not divorce this person that I am the one who will pay for my own choice to not be well and not be happy and not be all who I really am, and who I really am is a person who loves fully, who lives to the brink of whatever it is that you want to think is the brink of anything, and I am hardcore when it comes to caring for others - there are only a few people who I know I can trust, and those people know that when I Love, I Love big and real and for a long, long time.

The lingering question is if this is the truth of me, why then was all I had to give to one person not enough? Well, because he could not evaluate it in terms of price tags and how much he could sell it for one day. He could not place a price on it and could not see what I had to give to him as being of any worth.

So, what's a girl to do?

I'll tell you what a girl's supposed to do - get a divorce, that's what, because there is one other person on this planet who deserves me, faults and all, nuttiness and all, me, and all...

...Me, that's who...

When it feels like no one loves you, go look in the mirror and find the one person who should love you and will again.
I Promise...

I Love You All!
...Roxanne...

Wounded, but not dying

There are truths to us all that are not really truth and meant but only to cause us hurt. It is when we are the most wounded in the soul that we are also the strongest we can be.

I am a wounded warrioress, and rightly so, because apparently it was known by God that I was strong enough to deal with all that I have gone through for so long now, with all that has happened, even up to these last few weeks.

Indeed... I am wounded, but I am not dead.

There are a lot of ways that an abuse survivor can heal from the wounds of abuse. Once it was that I accepted that I am a statistic I found that this designation made it so that I would think that people were staring at the big red "A" on my chest that stood not for "adulterer" but instead stood for "abused." And I am an abused woman who can truly call herself a survivor, because not everyone makes it through the ailments of the soul that are not our own. Abused people tend to think at the onset of the abuse that somehow that we are being victimized because of something that we did or said but that is not the truth. When we are abused by someone else it is never because of who we are or even something that we did, but because someone else who sees only what they want to see instead of accepting what is really there chose to vilify it, chose to make it "bad" when in reality what it is that we go through is nothing in comparison to what it is that we will go through if we choose to not speak up, to not defend ourselves and to do nothing - doing nothing is as bad as being the perpetrator. Doing nothing allows our abusers to think that what they are doing is acceptable, not because you would really think it were, but because you said nothing.

Saying nothing is almost like saying that it is ok that you are being hurt, that you are being targeted for sins you have not committed or perhaps sins that were committed a very long time ago. Saying nothing tells your abuser that what they are doing to you, even though they KNOW it is wrong, is somehow ok with you because you have said nothing.

I say to hell with that, to hell with him, with her, and you get your ass out there and you SAY SOMETHING!
Staying wounded by choice is like not bathing after you have gone for a 6 mile walk uphill in the middle of August in 75% humidity - it stinks!!

We get knocked down over and over again, and we do not see the light that we are because we think that when we get back up and we start to recover we are getting stronger and better and unfortunately for our abusers, they think we are just getting over ourselves.

It is hard to get over the shattered heart, hard to look past the idea that there is someone on the planet who thinks so little of themselves that they have to hone in on our "weaknesses," attacking us where we are vulnerable and never thinking for a minute that not only are they our abusers, but they unwittingly become the greatest spiritual personal trainers that no money could buy.

That's right- I said it now deal with it.

If there is a way to get through what it is that you are going through, that we have all gone through in the case of the emotionally abused, it is to think and to believe that we are here for a purpose far greater than we are, more important than the self important assholes who feel privy to treat us as though they own us. No more will there be the days of isolation and no longer will there be a day, at least not for you, the abused, when you will be stronger and better and greater than you ever imagined. I know this. I live it, and even though I have days when I would love nothing more than to watch my abuser writhing in  pain and stuck in the miry goo that is the aftermath of emotional abuse, the frank truth is that I cannot change the past, and I cannot make different what has been done to me, and that the only thing that I can do about his sorry ass is to not do like he has done.

There are always two different ways that any street will go, and in our case we have the option to stay or not stay, and it took me a long, long time to choose to not stay married to him, to grab what is rightly mine and to be happy and settled in the idea that I came to this decision all on my own without prodding from outside help and even thinking ahead and saying to my best friend that I needed her help and her guidance in this because she gets it, she understands me.

You can choose to stay a victim, where it seems that nothing changes and that all that we are is what someone else who won't bother to get to know us tells us we are, or you can choose to fight, like the wounded and wartorn warrior, never putting down the shield and sword and never looking back to choose to go back to what is familiar and "normal" for what we have gone through.

I chose to raise the sword, the shield, and to one last time move headlong into the battle zone, unafraid of what can happen, unwavering in my steadfastness and always knowing that this time, I can't lose...

...make it be your this time and soon, because eventually your blade will dull and your shield will be heavy, and you fought and got this far - it would be a shame to see you give up the fight now...

I Love You All!!
...Rox...

Courage

It takes courage to change your life


It took a whole lot of courage to remind the person to whom I am married just how much damage he has done to me, both physically and emotionally, and it took even more courage for me to finally do what I know I have to do, and what I have to do is not wait for him to pass away. What I have to do is forget about the past and move into the future.

I told him that I want a divorce, told him that I will file one regardless of what he thinks or says, and told him that the damage done is severe enough to make me shake, physically, and enough to impede my life and my health and the lives of my children.

In each of our lives and through each thing that we go through there comes a time, and more times than not the time has come for me, for me and him, to say goodbye to each other. That time has come. I can no longer allow the things and events and situations which await me to get pushed further into the future because I asked for them all the be, and daily they show signs of Being, and daily I sit thinking about what would happen if I stayed.

Well, I know what would happen if I stayed, which I will not be, and I know that there really is nothing for me to be afraid of. I know that I have the love and the support of everyone in my life, and I know, too, that much of who I am anymore is attributable, both in good and bad ways, to the things that I have gone through.

The things that I have gone through


There are a lot of things that abuse survivors go through just to make it through the days without shedding tears, and these last few days have been very emotional ones for me. Though I feel no guilt for choosing to divorce, there is still that manipulative way about him that has been, for the last twenty four hours, trying diligently to chip away my resolve, my strength and the will that I have within me. I begged this man, pleaded with him, for years even, to just please be kind to me, and it was his option to be other than kind.

What an abuser does not know is that the emotional abuse is far more difficult to get through than is the physical abuse, and it is because a survivor can watch the bruises fade, can check the calendar to see when the cast comes off, can physically feel the pain of a bite mark fade with time. The same cannot be said for the abuse that I feel is worse than getting beaten. Emotional abuse will kill you if you let it remain in your life, which is why I chose this to be.

I had to save myself this time, had to hear it from a stranger that I may need some counseling, and it took a day for it all to sink in, and once the reality set in, the tears began to roll and I began to see mental images of all that I have been through during the course of the last 23 years, and let me tell you something folks....it was not easy, and hell no it wasn't pretty, but I am here and I am alive and well and can see that there is much ahead of me that waits for me to finally take that last step in this part of the path.

It isn't easy, and yes, waiting for him to pass away would have been easier, but I am positive that this way is how it was supposed to be. You see, the way of the wounded warrior is never easy. It is rife with pain and heart ache, with failure and the humiliation that comes with it, but it the way that many people never see themselves as being and as living. I see myself as a warrior goddess, the sort that, even through battle, rises above the mess that is her life and sees the confusion and yet also can still see the shades of glory and hope shining through the cracks in the facade of who I was told I was.

Be Brave. Embrace Courage. Live Freely.


The last thing that an abuser wants his victim ever to be is independent of them. Had this man told me what I wanted...no, what I longed to hear for so long we might not be here right now, we might be able to get along, and that longing to hear what I wanted to hear should have started many, many years ago and not a day and a half after I told him that we are through.

It took a long time for me to come to this point, for me to no longer allow myself to care for this person on any other level than that of an angry wife of an emotionally abusive man is able to, which is mostly on a compassionate, human being level. I used to have a problem with telling him that he was hurting me, and it was because he made it a point to tell me to 'man up,' to 'quit pouting and deal with it' because he was dealing with whatever it was and is that he is dealing with, and right now what he is dealing with is what I had been forced to deal with for over two decades - HIS demons.

This is the part that no abused person realizes until one day they are forced to see a situation for what it really is, and what this really is is just another way of another victim of someone else's smallness becoming, through adversity, all they are. The bitch of this all is that he has yet to truly accept that I am done with him and more, that he really did need me all these years, that I was not stupid, neither a whore, nor pathetic, nor immature, not a bad mother, and no where near being a bad wife. All these things became what I was told when I told him that I need out of this marriage, not only to make things better for these three kids, but also, so that I could save myself.

These things I learned the moment that he chose to tell me that we could work it out, and when he began to tell me that I was not getting a divorce and that he would not let me, he learned the only thing that he needed to learn...the truth, and the truth is that I am no longer available for him to choose to behave in an abusive manner with me, and that all these years it has not been me who has been causing him his grief, but his very self.

Here's to new starts....we get one everyday, by the way...

I Love You All!

...Rox...