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/