Protection

I want desperately to yell at {D} right now for destroying my life, my soul, my very self. I want to scream horrible things at him and tell him exactly what he did to me and why he is such a worthless, lying piece of shit. That probably won’t help, though.

I want to yell and scream at the prosecutors who wouldn’t take the case, the disbarment dude for not even trying to fight it, and the entire judicial system that ignores cases like this and causes so much more harm to women who come to them for help and protection.

I want to yell at my family for just abandoning me through all of this. Not being even slightly supportive. I asked them at one point to write emails to the AG and say what they thought. Show them that I had some backup.

My mom said, “Just write whatever you want to say and I’ll send it.” She couldn’t be bothered to even spend a few minutes writing some sort of impassioned plea for justice for her daughter.

My best friend called her lawyer and he advised against it. Most people I asked just didn’t respond.

One person did write a letter supporting me and asking for justice for me. That was Brian 1. The man who beat me for 15 years and still calls me a whore to my children and to my face every time I talk to him. He is the one who took a few minutes to do it. I don’t know what he said. Might have just called me a whore.

I just had a thought about Brian 1.

I was almost unconscious. I was sick because I drank too much, and this was the night I was found at a party naked and unconscious in a bedroom. Someone had done something—God knows who or what.

We were driving back after the party. Brian 1 and his friends, who we drove with, dragged me out and shoved me in the car. I was screaming and fighting because Brian was going to kill me. I got punched in the face so hard my eye socket was fractured and my nose was broken. Because of the punch and the alcohol, I was literally barely conscious.

I asked to go to the hospital. They said no.

I tried to get out of the van and go to the Metro station so I could just go to my mom’s. They wouldn’t let me out of the car. I’m bleeding. I’m barely conscious. I’m begging to go to the hospital.

Then I got nauseous and laid my head on Brian’s shoulder, and he grabbed my hair and slammed my head into the window.

I don’t remember anything after that until we were back home.

I went to the hospital a couple days later and said I had been in a car accident, that I hit a curb and my face went into the unpadded frame of the car.

So it’s pretty easy to come to the conclusion that I had indeed been raped that night, though I have no recollection of the events. Just naked in a strange room. What the hell else could have happened?

They were giving me “special” Jell-O shots. Some of them had cherries in them. They were the special ones.

No one protected me. Or defended me. Even when I was getting my ass beat.

And like, what the fuck was I supposed to do? I was being a whore. I did it. I deserved to get hit. You can’t go to the police with something like that. They all ganged up on me. It was me. Right?

Nobody thought to say, who did that? Maybe kick their ass instead of mine? Or at least separate him and me in the car so he didn’t hurt me?

No one cared.

No one cares, and no one is ever going to protect me and take care of me.

Here’s another Brian 1 story.

It’s the day I came home from the hospital with my youngest. I had a C-section, and they sever your abdominal muscles for that, so it fucking hurts to sit up. It was the middle of the night and the baby was crying, so I had to get up, and I struggled with it. I got the baby and made it to the hallway.

I had woken Brian up.

So he came after me. He grabbed me by my throat and slammed me into the wall a few times. I remember just trying to protect the baby. That was the only thing going through my head—protect the baby.

Funny thing is my mom was there that night. She watched it all happen. She didn’t try to protect me or even try to come and get the baby.

I did eventually stab Brian a few years later. He was on top of me in the driveway. He had broken my shoulder and I was on the ground. There was a screwdriver, so I stabbed him in the leg.

It was a few more years before we separated.

When we did separate, he and I tried really hard to work it out. We would still go to lunch once a week and spend some time just trying to figure it all out.

The last lunch was at Olive Garden. He had gone on a job interview and it went well, and he was happy, and it was a good job. Credit where it’s due—the man always made bank and we never wanted for a damn thing.

So I made a joke and said, “Maybe now I need to rethink asking for alimony,” because I had basically traded sole custody of the kids for any financial support.

Well, that joke was not taken well.

He grabbed my wrist and it was an “oh fuck” moment. I pulled out of it and ran to my car. He followed, and I took some decent licks in the parking lot of an Olive Garden in the middle of the day.

No one tried to help me. No one who watched what happened in the middle of a crowded restaurant thought to call the police when he ran after me.

I’ve been invisible my whole life. No one notices. No one cares. No one helps. No one protects.

And then when I stand up for myself, I’m just loud and crazy, so they ignore me even more. So many times in my life I have begged in a guttural way that can only come from true and deep desperation, and I’ve been ignored every time.

I thought I didn’t ask for help. I asked. And the asking makes me the crazy one.

I don’t get it. I’ve never hurt people. I burn bridges with words. I will say horrible things to people, but I’m not a bad person who just deserves shit like this. I never started the fight. The way Brian 1 would get me was if I lost my cool and started yelling instead of defusing him.

No one will ever protect me. I have to protect myself. There’s no other choice.

But I am clearly not good at protecting myself.

At least I’m fearless.

And maybe that fearlessness is the problem. Or maybe it’s the only reason I’m still here. No one saved me. No one intervened. No one protected me. Not my family. Not the system. Not the people who watched and did nothing. I asked. I begged. Nothing came. So if I’m still alive, it isn’t because anyone cared. It’s because I understood—too late and too clearly—that I was on my own. That’s not strength. That’s survival

.

Postscript

Now I’m thinking, and I have one more Brian 1 story to go. You guys don’t read when I talk about me and what I’ve been through. You scroll through it. So no one is going to see this. Yay.

When my youngest was born, Brian wanted me to get my tubes tied. I grew up Catholic. That’s a bit of a no-no. Brian grew up Catholic too, so he should have understood. But I didn’t want to do it.

I talked to the OB and let her know I really didn’t want to, and she understood. Well, she abruptly left the practice right before my scheduled C-section. I had done all the pre-paperwork. Brian wasn’t one to care about doctor’s appointments or ultrasounds, etc. Work was always more important.

So it’s 7:30 a.m. The new doctor has a golf tournament at 9:00 and is trying to get this over with. He says that I forgot to sign the paperwork for the tubal in front of Brian. Brian blows up and is screaming at me and tells me if I don’t sign that paperwork I will never see that baby.

What was I supposed to do? I signed it. And I sobbed. I was just in tears for the entire birth. I couldn’t stop sobbing.

I will never forget the doctor saying to me, “Are you sure you want to do this?” And I said, “I don’t have a choice.”

I went back to post-op and they took the baby to do the baby thing. It felt like forever. They had to put him under the lights for a little bit. I totally freaked out because Brian said I’d never see the baby, and I became rather hysterical. They brought him to me.

Brian, of course, left and went to work, and I stayed at the hospital by myself for a few days with my baby.

I went home, and I mentioned what happened next.

I did not recover emotionally from that. I was weirdly obsessed with that child. I wouldn’t let anyone—like Grandma—take him overnight until he was four. He had to be with me.

I became convinced something would happen to him. That God was going to punish me for the tubal and take my baby. I wanted him baptized Catholic. I didn’t want him going to hell. You might have to be Catholic to understand that fear.

I went to the church and talked to the priest, and he said no problem—both parents were Catholic and had been through the rites. But we weren’t married in the church, so to fix that it was a simple little paperwork thing. Brian just had to sign a piece of paper.

Now I will note this was a low point for me. I wasn’t doing okay. Brian knew that. He knew how depressed I was and how upset I was. He very much knew. So I asked him to sign so we could get the baby baptized.

He refused. He said he was now an atheist and it went against his beliefs.

And I was like, but this will make me feel better. It was something just to make me feel better. Something I was asking him to do for me. He didn’t even have to set foot in the church. Just a signature. That was all I needed.

He refused.

I was so depressed. I’m more depressed now than when that was happening, but that was the first real years-long depression. I never really came back from that.

To add insult to injury, when he remarried, his wife was Muslim. He got married in a mosque. He couldn’t sign a fucking piece of paper to help the mother of his children not have a years-long breakdown, but he could have his actual wedding in a fucking mosque.

I was so fucking mad. But again, I’m invisible, and no one will ever fucking care about what I need. I just get to be out here floating on my own.

This is one of those stories that doesn’t look dramatic from the outside, but it changed the shape of my life. It taught me, very early on, that my body, my fear, and my pain were negotiable—and that I would be expected to live with the consequences quietly. I did. And I’m still carrying it.