The Nightmare, Abuse

Acutely aware of the latest in the news about abuse of women and children, I debated whether I should write about my own experiences with it.

I didn’t decide to write about this until I saw a deeply moving Scott Stantis cartoon essay in the Chicago Tribune. The original article in the ChicagoTribune can no longer be seen without subscription to the paper's web site, so please see it below.

After seeing it, I felt a need to speak out about what family abuse does to people. I begin with Scott Stantis' cartoon essay. It’s a quick, but powerful read. Please read it before reading about my nightmare and experiences below. Click the following link, then scroll down that page to see the editorial cartoon: Scott Stantis Abuse Cartoon

FAMILY ABUSE

THE FIRST NIGHTMARE

I finally arrive home and I’m so glad to relax. School is one long, bad day after another. My grades are great, but I’m socially awkward and attract bullies. Once I prove to them that I fight like a furious feline on steroids, they mostly leave me alone.

Home is sometimes worse, but it is home. One moment, things could be going along well and the next moment could erupt like a horror movie in real life. We never have friends over because we we're constantly on the alert for sudden fallout and don’t want people to know what it's like in our house.

There are five of us -- Mom, Dad, me, and my two brothers.

**********

Mom is frying fresh fish from the market while a platter of seasoned beef portions marinades and tenderizes in the fridge. She prefers not to cook every day and prepares large amounts of food all at once for us. There’s also a pot of fresh green beans with smoked meat, onion, and potatoes simmering on the stove’s back burner. The smell of corn bread drifts from the oven, beckoning everyone to the kitchen as soon as they enter the house.

Just a bit later, Dad’s home. He hasn’t entered the house yet, but we always hear his keys jingling and a short smoker’s cough as he comes up the stairs to our third-floor apartment. He enters the house as we're all watching some inane thing on TV.

We used to run up to him, jumping up and down and hugging his legs or waist, enthusiastically shouting, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” but Mom told us he didn’t like that (too noisy) so we just mumbled a quiet, “Hi Daddy,” and that was that.

Dad went to the kitchen to find Mom. Their voices began to rise in argument. We three children looked at each other with a knowing and growing fear. We knew what horrors this could lead to, but this time there was no violence. Dad left angrily and we could actually feel each other relaxing, tension dissipating.

But Dad came back later in a foul mood. It wasn’t because he’d been drinking. He never drank. We were eating dinner, but we knew what was about to happen. We could feel it. Years of abuse had taught us to recognize the signs – the feeling – of oncoming violence, similar to animals that can sense a coming earthquake. I was the oldest at 11 years old. I gathered up my two brothers and we left the kitchen, left our plates with food still on them, and went to hide out in the one bedroom where the three of us always slept.

But we didn’t sleep that night.

We all cried as we heard what we knew was coming. The sound of a powerful closed fist hitting tender flesh with Mom screaming, then more pounding and screaming, Mom being knocked to the floor and being hit again. Eventually, Dad grabbed a steel pipe from somewhere and started hitting Mom with that. There were heightened screams, Mom begging him to stop.

Battered, beaten, worn and weary, Mom made a last desperate effort and ran from the house. She had clothes on this time. Once, she ran from the house completely naked in her terror. This time, all three of us dashed out the door after her as we cried in sympathy and sorrow. We huddled a few blocks away, outdoors, on a curb around our mom.

We just sat there in tears.

Eventually, a police car came by and the officer asked if we needed help. Mom said “no,” but the police car came back later and the officer told Mom that we couldn’t spend the night sitting out on the street corner. They took us to a temporary shelter for the night.

Dad went to work the next day, as though nothing had happened. We snuck back into our house. The kitchen looked like a cataclysmic food and dinnerware explosion. Good thing all of our plates and cups were of the plastic variety. There was blood in some places. I bolstered the front door with a two-by-four laid across metal bracings. I had to do the work using Daddy’s tools and stuff from the hardware store because I was the only one among us, other than Dad, with aptitude for building and fixing things.

I didn’t have enough time to brace the back door before we heard him returning home early, coming up the stairs. “I think we should go. Come-on, come-on. Let’s go out the back way,” I said. Everyone was frozen. I ran to the back door to make sure that the manual bolts were at least in place, but as I heard my father kicking at the front door, I knew he would get in. He was a very strong man. He would get in and he would be very angry.

He did and he was. I quickly unbolted the locks and ran out the back door. All I could think in my terrified mind was that I didn’t want to die and someone had to get the police to keep the rest of my family from dying. That someone would have to be me.

I ran aimlessly down streets, through alleyways, yards, gangways, parks, everywhere. I ran and ran in search of police, always afraid that my father was looking for me in his car and would find me. I hid behind shrubbery and in cubbyholes whenever a car approached, peeking out in hope that I would see a police car and terrified that I would see Daddy’s car.

I finally flagged down a police car and frantically explained the situation. The officer was reluctant to believe me, but he eventually told me to take a seat in the back of his car and went to the location I specified to check things out.

When we arrived, the officer investigated the perimeter of the building and heard weeping coming from the basement. It sounded like two people weeping – one woman and one child. My Mom and my 9-year-old brother were locked in there.

The door was held fast by a heavy-gauge chain affixed between a hook in the door and another hook embedded in the brickwork at the side of the door with a padlock. The officer told me to go back to the car and stay there, but I just couldn’t. I can remember hearing his two-way radio chattering about disconnected stuff like background noise from a different world.

As he spoke to my brother through the basement door, I snuck up the back stairs where my youngest, 6-year-old brother was the only one left in the house. He was sitting at the kitchen table alone, eating something crunchy, with crumbs all over his face.

I knocked gently on the window to get his attention and pointed to the door, mouthing, “Open the door.” He got up, fumbled with the locks and finally managed to let me in. “Where’s Daddy,” I asked.

“He went to look for you,” my brother said in a worried voice.

I told him it was time to go – that he had to hurry and come with me to be with Mom and me and his older brother in the police car. But he wouldn’t come and he cried, “I want to finish my food. I’m still hungry.” As we argued, I took his food and wrapped it in paper towels, telling him to come on.

Too late. I heard Dad’s key in the front door, opening the lock again. I picked my little brother up from the table, placed him out on the back porch, forced the food into his hands and told him to run to the police car out front. Hearing my brother's footsteps quickening down the stairs, I then ducked into the pantry, quietly closing the door. “Don’t breathe hard be safe,” I thought to myself, over and over in my panicked mind, like a protective mantra. “Don’tbreathehardbesafe.”

When Daddy eventually arrived in the kitchen and saw the back door open -- my brother gone – he bolted out the door to look for him.

For some reason, I was determined to get my little piggy bank with my savings from our bedroom. I dashed into the bedroom, grabbed the bank, ran back to the kitchen and out the back door. I hurried down the steps as quickly as I could, hoping to find that my brother was safe in the police car.

As I rushed down to the second-floor landing, I saw policemen running into the backyard area. Just the sight of them brought a wave of relief flooding through me.

But what about my brother?

**********

There are police officers standing around a cardboard box in the yard. I want to know what they’re looking at. As I enter their ranks, they try to hold me back but I am once again the furious feline and I break through to see what’s in the box.

It’s my 6-year-old brother all bent at sharp angles in all the wrong places. His terrified eyes look up at nothing and he has been carelessly thrown – piled into the box. A high-pitched squeal I didn’t know I was capable of leaves my throat and I hear it as though it’s coming from somewhere else. I fall to my knees and try to grab my dead brother, but two policemen grab me and hold me back as I kick and scream.

As they try to haul me away, I see my mother in the doorway of the basement.

She says, “Wait, where are you going? You can’t leave me here. Take me with you.”

She looks confused and sad, pleading. “Wait for me,” she says. But she doesn’t move from the basement entrance. She just stands there with her arms held out like she wants me to come and be embraced in a hug.

I then realize that she doesn’t look quite solid. In an instant it comes to me that she is dead. They didn’t reach her in time to save her. In a frenzy of kicking and whirling and screaming, I break from the grip of the officers and fall to the ground in a fetal ball, wracked with tears in spasms so hard it hurts in my gut, my arms, my thighs, my back, my throat. My head feels a crushing heaviness on the inside as though my brain will explode right through my skull. I know I’m feeling these things, but the dream doesn’t let me really feel them.

Then finally, the nightmare ends. I awake with tears streaming down my face and a tight headache in my skull. My throat feels constricted. An impossibly deep sadness that I can feel pulsing inside me, dredging up mental anguish, lingers and aches like a steady, heavy pressure in my body.

And that is dream -- no -- nightmare one.

**********

The violence that this nightmare insists on graphically repeating for me from time to time is a kind of mashup portrayal of things that actually happened, except that no one was ever locked in a basement or killed. That's just my old fear talking. There are other occasional nightmares, but this one is number one on the darkest video carousel in my mind.

I could never speak these words to anyone. I could never verbally share this recurring nightmare without tears of shame, anger, anguish and frustration. And falling apart in front of people is just not my style. I would probably never even write these words if either of my parents were still alive. Writing this has been a heavy and mentally arduous thing, but I feel that I must speak out on this topic.

One of the most difficult things to come to terms with is that I loved both of my parents. I never stopped loving either, though I hated what Dad did to my mom and to us. We were beaten as well, though not as badly or as often as our mom. Dad even made a special, heavy-rubber strap at work, just for “beating the kids.”

Maybe he did that because people started to notice that we had scabs on our arms and legs where he sometimes beat us with an extension cord until we bled. Maybe no one noticed or cared, but he just wanted something with more heft to it.

I'll never forget how good it felt when we simply threw THE BEATER he’d made out the window into the heavy shrubbery, three stories below, never to be seen again.

Both of my parents had faults, but my Dad’s behavior outweighed anything any of us could have ever done wrong. There were good times along with the bad. The bad was just so bad it overshadowed the good. The conflicting emotions we felt were more than any child could ever hope to understand.

In my opinion, my mom should have left for good long before she finally did. My Dad should have had some psychiatric treatment and some jail time. But in those days, things like therapy and jail time for abusers and independence for victimized housewives with children but without money or marketable skills were not commonplace.

This is not written as a catharsis for me. I will have these dreams and feelings no matter what I do. I write this because I want people who have been abused to know that they are not alone in what they sometimes feel.

I also write this because I hope that people currently having this kind of difficulty in their lives will do something about it. Please don’t let the children in your family experience this type of torture and trauma. And if this is happening to you, don’t stay for the kids. It tears them apart inside to see you being beaten horribly and regularly. There are so many resources these days to help people in this situation. Please get help.

Positive things I have gained from my experiences are a determination to be strong, be independent, make my own money, and make my own way, fighting tooth-and-nail for what I believe is right.

I became a professional with a lucrative career as a computer programmer because I was determined not to live as my mom did. I raised a child alone while going to college and working, determined to rise above every obstacle placed in my path.

I won’t bother discussing the negative things I learned. Let's just say that some wounds are so deep that they never really, completely heal, never returning to their original state. They throb on occasion for no apparent reason, just as previously broken bones do.

Scott Stantis is right.

The subconscious can be the meanest mirror, presenting us with seemingly inescapable vistas of the things that have affected us most deeply -- good or bad -- especially, bad. It seems to bring forth our innermost fears when we are most vulnerable, in our sleep.

I hope you read Scott's cartoon essay in the link I provided above. The beating – the abuse -- never stops for many of us. It is there, underneath much of what we say and do, even when we are not conscious of it, for the rest of our lives.