Friday's 55: Abusive Relationships

UPDATE: Please read the fiction pieces in the link below. They are beautiful and poignant, especially the ones by Daksha, Maitri and thekingsingh. Fabulous how each person chose a different perspective/point of view!

Here's the topic for today from Anna on Sepia Mutiny. And I thought Black Friday would be about shopping!

Abused Husband puts an interesting spin on it, so I tried to mould my contribution to fit both partners in a relationship. But I'm still approaching it from the subjectivity of my so-called gender.

Funny how surprisingly personal even remote topics can be when we dig deep into our memories - be it individual or collective. There's so much we've all seen, done, heard, been....

I've tried to capture the irrationality of a woman's feelings about a relationship that she was voluntarily drawn into. Her hope, her desperation. Let's see if it works.

Here goes...

I have nothing but the certainty of uncertainty when you return. I long to love you less. I long for the love I pray you have for me.
I try to leave. But every time you call, my heart rushes out of my body towards you.
Kill me. Once and for all. Make it stop.

Drafting is disciplining. And creating 55 words successfully is incredibly uplifting :)

I have nothing but the certainty of uncertainty when you return. Yet I long for the love hidden in your blood. And I long to love you less.
I long to get up and leave. But every time you call, my heart rushes out of my body towards you.
Kill me. Please make it stop.

This was the initial draft. See the difference? :)

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The post by Maitri took me back to the time I was doing field work in the Grace Smith Shelter for battered women. It was only a semester long, and I felt incredibly depressed by the end of it (I guess I didn't take things in the right spirit). It all seemed so futile. A woman CAN conquer domestic violence if she has the strength to recognise it and leave. Just leave and work on herself. Every day spent with an abusive partner (whether woman or man), drains one of one's own mental and emotional resources. And there's always a pattern. A woman is more likely to be a victim of abuse in adulthood if she has been a victim of or witness to abuse, simply because she doesn't know any other way. She may change men, but she will always be attracted to the abusive variety of men. I saw girls as young as 18 who were mothers of 3, the oldest being 5 years old! I met strippers, mothers with violent and defiant children, of every ethnicity. And it was always the same. Calls would come in daily, but very rarely were they followed through by a woman actually coming into the shelter to rehabilitate and figure out a change. What kept them away usually was the fear of their partner, for their own safety and that of their children, and of the consequences were they to return, as they sometimes invariably did. Whatever happens afterwards, Brute Force only seems to win on earth (unless the abusers all die in gory gruesome accidents of get their balls chopped off by a chainsaw).

And abuse isn't only physical. It's psychological as well, when you feel belittled, insecure, not good enough, unhappy, and blamed for your situation, when you are made to feel you deserve the abuse, when you are made to feel you are nothing. When you can't protect your children or yourself from something you vaguely know shouldn't be happening to you though you may have no concrete basis for saying so.

Sadly, or maybe not, every woman seems to be, at the end of the day, a dreamer and hoper, no matter how tough she tries to be. Makes one conclude that religion may thrive from the finances of men, but from the faith of women.

YOU DONT deserve to be abused. YOU HAVE to take control of your own destiny. YOU have to help and protect yourself, no matter how hard it is. NO ONE else is going to do it for you. After all, it's a question of your life na?