A Promise Of Freedom

My grandmother told me she threatened to kill him if he ever came back. And he never did. Not really.

Yesterday, I sat in a room of women recently free. Locked away for 5 years, 7 years or more commonly 20 years, 35. All because their attackers came back. Came back again and again. Took their children, their bodies, their freedom. So they found freedom in other ways. In fighting back, in walking away, and yes, sometimes, in a gun. But when there are years of rape, of not knowing, of fists and bloody walls, then what is one shot? One moment? Is it an ending? A beginning? Or just something else to survive?

24 years ago my father stood at my doorstep, grass still wet with blood behind him, and asked to be let in. A few days before that he’d slammed my mothers skull into the head of a sprinkler and won an argument. Her hair still doesn’t grow there. And when my grandmother opened the door that day, he was met with a gun and a promise to use it. So we all lost. Me a father, him a daughter, and my mother, I’m still learning all that she lost. But it was not the gun that took from us. It was his hands.

He walked away from that door. Never came back. But the threat of violence, his and hers, still reverberates through my family. In our history, in my mother's body, in my wondering. My grandmother never saw the inside of jail. Nor did my mother. But both were just a loaded moment away.



http://www.freebatteredwomen.org/

Supersaturation

I am being taught something
poignant about resistance
and the quiet that comes with
naming this.
The quiet that still crashes
in the distance
so that I can feel its
waves on my upper lip,
so that it shakes my shoulders,
and crawls whispering
into my ear,
quiet.

You are not so empty
anymore.
You are full of names,
the salt and sweet
of the wind, the women,
the weight.
It has been absorbed
into you
and crowds up your
chest,
makes it so you can’t breathe
sometimes
with the awe of it,
the super saturation
of stories
forgotten and future
looming too softly
before you.

I am being taught about
resilience.
About fat toes that gently
sweep sharp sides
from my twisting path,
one that folds in on itself
holding me deep inside,
embraced by its journey
and still vulnerable to
the elements.
I sit in the center,
a small space surrounded
by those sharp sides
narrow in its give, but
here I find fullness,
words pushing past
limitation and singing
into the world a
truth that I don’t
hear until it is
outside me,
until I see the stain
of it and can smell
it on my fingers,
the work of side
stepping forward,
draining
the old
water to find what can be scraped
away.
Learning how to fill myself anew.

A Few Hits, A Few Misses And Alot Of Effort

From the Al-Anon reader Courage to Change

March 3rd

A recent searching and fearless moral inventory of myself (Step Four) gave me a clear message: Much of my behavior was extremely immature. But what is mature behavior? Obviously the answer is different for each of us, but exploring the question can help me to identify my goals and apply the Al-Anon program as I seek to change this behavior. To me, maturity includes:

-Knowing myself

-Asking for help when I need it and acting on my own when I don’t

-Admitting when I’m wrong and making amends

-Accepting love from others, even if I’m having a tough time loving myself

-Recognizing that I always have choices, and taking responsibility for the ones I make

-Seeing that life is a blessing

-Having an opinion without insisting that others share it

-Forgiving myself and others

-Recognizing my shortcomings and my strengths

-Having the courage to live one day at a time

-Acknowledging that my needs are my responsibility

-Caring for people without having to take care of them

-Accepting that I’ll never be finished— I’ll always be a work-in-progress.