Fine little day. Beautiful blog.
Archive Page 2
for the beginning pole dancer ;>
Never mind the music, this is impressive.
Acorn Feeder project at Design Sponge. Definitely worth the time.
Two years ago today, I entered a domestic violence shelter for a two month stay, along with my kiddo. Because of that, October 13th will always, always have significance. I felt a quiet pride and gratitude last year, on this day. I’d made it! I wondered, in the days prior, how I would commemorate the date. I settled for a nice, quiet dinner at home. Last night, I decided that this year, and perhaps in the coming years, I would invoke the accomplishment’s larger, more hard fought reward, and live the day just like anyone else.
Just like anyone else. For eight years, I felt little like anyone else, and even less like myself. I’d reunited with an old sweetheart, moved into his house in a nice enough neighborhood in a quiet, rural town, and after three years of cohabitation, we had the kiddo. I was thirty-three at the beginning of that relationship. In love. And ready. Ready to commit. Ready to be someone’s partner, lay down roots, and work together toward common goals. When he’d emphatically stressed that he wanted a lover and not a “just” some roommate after I’d mentioned gunning for a career in journalism during that first week I’d moved in, I capitulated and abandoned the idea with little thought. Why bother immersing myself into a career that I’d only eventually leave when we had kids? It’d be easier to do so if I didn’t have to leave in the first place. I settled for a part time job way, way outside the realm of journalism, for which I was vastly overqualified, and ultimately, bored with. There was to be one more part time job, during which it became clearly apparent that there was really to be no job; that any time spent away from him, or the house (when he wasn’t there), was a betrayal to our relationship; that I preferred to be a “roommate”. There would be no middle ground. Being his lover meant ’round the clock availability—not sexually—-but in presence, in time devoted exclusively to him. Time spent away, in areas among others, out of his control, was a cardinal violation of our relationship. No amount of logical explanation, soothing words, protestations of loyalty, or overcompensation on my part would atone.
I’d done nothing wrong. I’d done nothing wrong. I know that, today. But at the time, I’d started getting the feeling, ominously, all of the time, that I was doing something wrong in his eyes, even when I knew I had not. Which was insane. And that was the beginning.
That was the beginning, what I can see in hindsight as the demarcation between love and abuse. I could not and would not see that line for three years in the relationship; I could not see the abuse for what it was until his control willed and enforced itself through escalating verbal putdowns, veiled threats, and frankly, mental torture, as I began to chafe. I’d like to say I chafed because by then I knew better, but honestly, I chafed because I had someone else after three years who needed my time and attention more: my daughter. I think we both felt joy when our daughter arrived, but I think resentment lay beneath it for him when she became the priority in my life. His demands became more outrageous, his putdowns more cutting. I meant nothing to him, he’d claim, but my self esteem became the prize he was hellbent upon taking. I dreaded hearing the truck pull into the driveway. I could physically feel my stomache recoil and knot itself up. Eventually, I feared sleeping. My own mother feared me sleeping. It was not unreasonable to fear anything happening.
There was no physical violence directed at me until the end, when a tossed end table full of books directed at my head had him led away in handcuffs from the apartment, permanently. I’m lucky. But how much easier it would have been to recognize, how much easier it would have been to exit in the beginning, with so little invested, if there had been that emphatic, undeniable, and clear cut evidence of abuse. Sadly, not even such clear evidence, not even evidence short of murder, moves the court’s attitudes toward domestic violence and women even more unfortunate than I. But that’s another story. Sometime.
I am a generous person. A generous lover. I believe love is a gift, is its own gift. Love is, of course, too broad to be universally, concretely defined. It has its intangibles, and its bastardizations. For me, love is freedom, is freeing. I want those I love to feel that. It would be easy to point a finger at that spirit and blame myself. Blame myself for giving too much. Giving in too much. Giving is not a crime. The crime in this case is taking all of that, and more, and using it to isolate, belittle, humiliate, stymie, and diminish someone one claims to “love”.
I will always, always remember this personally historic day in my life, when I climbed into a van with my little one, along with the husband of my good friend, and their little ones, with an open can of Diet Coke set thoughtfully for me next to my seat “for the road” on the beginning of this journey. This day has its worth. I am not as close to being like anyone else as I’d liked to be. To begin with, after close to eight years of unemployment, I am with little history of professional existence. I still…though less, now…have momentary interludes of weepiness doing something so simple as shopping in public places such as Target. I have filled my house too much, filled myself with too much food, and gotten, quite honestly, too many birds. Because I can, now. But mostly, because I’d felt so empty, after all of that—gutted is a frequently employed word to describe my emotional state. I’m closer to being just like anyone else, every day.
But it begins and ends with me, now. And forever. I promise.
how superbly effective Pam is as a pine sap remover.
The Fern and Moss is a blog to check out. I happen to love ferns…so delicate….and moss, which in every case, is the perfect shade of green. I recently made two terrariums…we shall see how they hold up.
September is starting a new school in a big city. You’ve been craving anonymity, and boy, now you’ve got it. 7 million people. The first night, your anorexic roommate rises in her bed and pounds grubby handprints onto the wall, then falls right back to sleep, while you lay in the semi-darkness, pretending to be. The smudgy prints stay the entire year, hidden, mercifully, under a giant “Breathless” poster. She’ll leave by the end of the week. You’ve stayed. But you’re not really there; caught up in the undertow of a melancholy so thick, you can’t see your own reflection. You stay in your bed day after day in the same thin white slip, desperately reading Prozac Nation for a clue, and pout and scream at the city because its wind tunnels furiously between the tall buildings and right through you. It doesn’t listen. It doesn’t care. You decide you don’t, either.
September is slogging along perimeters of wet soccer field, even though you’ve never cared for running; it’s so heavy and makes your lungs scream. But you love staring down opponents (you’re good at that) while guarding your cage, and concede defeat only when the ball smartly smacks your hand, scoring as you stare dumbly at your finger bones and swear they’re broken (Judy Lee, you rocked. Even though you played for Beaver River). You’re good at this, but decide to sit out senior year, because you won’t humiliate yourself and your coach while you spend every single weekend drinking. You’re honest. You content yourself with shutting out the senior boy’s soccer team during gym and leave it at that.
September is speed and inebriation, a blur of tardiness and languor spent visiting the zoo, or shopping at Barbara Moss when you’re not hiding out three consecutive periods in the Art room, either modeling or drawing. No one says anything. You wake in the morning and pop the speed you’ve scored from your little sister, wandering the week in a haze; living for the weekend, when you can get blasted out of your mind; uttering strange, silly things while your friends hold you up. You never intend to get sick, but somehow you almost always do, because you haven’t figured out when to stop. But every time, you fall asleep with a silly smile on your face. And it’s the only time you really smile. It’s the only time you can really sleep.
September is strange and new, but final, in its way, when the dirt and blue carnations cover your father in the cold, hard ground. Everything is dying, or on its way, you decide, and you can’t understand or relate to your classmate’s freshman enthusiasm. Nothing is ever the same.
But September is the ninth month, the pregnant month; full and heavy as it is, it will always, always have possibility. You pack your six year old into the car and off to school, and hope for better. Always, better.
Pretty, pretty food! Epicute, the blog.
“You need to do your homework and then you can go play outside, sweetie.”
“Homework? Whattttt??? I don’t like homework! I’m not doing it! Hmmph.”
:Arms cross. Little arms.:
“Yep, gotta do your homework. Just one page. It’s really easy.”
“But I ripped it up! I can’t do it!”
:smug, self satisfied look:
“Oh. O.k. Well, collect all the pieces up and give it to Miss Bellacosa tomorrow morning. Tell her what you did with your homework.”
:look of total alarm. A little mind can be seen backpedaling, spinning furiously:
“No, wait! I didn’t really, Mama! I was just kidding! Ok, ok, I’ll do it”
:sigh:
I have to give it to her, though. The five exercises were not that easy. They involved writing a chosen number, then drawing the equivilant bundles with the slant slashed across in the next column. I realized upon scanning the example that for 43 years, I’ve been getting this wrong. See, I’d always thought there were only three little lines, which were then slashed, instead of four. And, the slash, as far as I knew, didn’t count. I’ve actually graduated high school with this erroneous information, uncorrected. Well, it’s not I’ve I’ve actually needed this information…Not like I’ve been hanging out in a cave….or a prison cell….or some deserted island, scratching out a rudimentary calendar.
“I think they’ve always been this way, ” my friend Shelly offered, when I recounted my confusion. But the bundle trios look so much prettier! Really. That should be taken into account, no?
From Artist Lenore Tawney:
Creation is a defiance of ordinary verbal communication. Its origins lie in the ineffable part of one’s own being and are much closer to the silence of the universe, than to its noises and verbalizations. Art is always just beyond language. Each work seems to be called up from a bottomless chaos and despite the magic order it finds in the artist’s creation, retains always the memory of the original chaos to which it is destined to return. The man of deep insight knows that authentic life is not lived arbitrarily but is governed by a secret mesh of invisible images.
From Scraps of Memory: Findings from Lenore Tawney’s Notes: Poetry.
Lenore Tawney
Recent Comments