Silence Is Violence

There aren’t words to describe spousal abuse. There’s no prose, no poetry, no lyrical flow to the stream of words that describe the events. When I’m asked, by prosecuters, victims advocates, or police, I hear the words before I speak. Inside my head, there is the crinkling sound of crushing bone as my hips struck the garage floor. The melodic CLINK! of bone on ceramic, the sound of a skull striking the built-in soap dish. The smushed banana sound of someone stepping on unripened fruit, only the fruit is the flesh of the forearm and the stepper has Hitler goose-stepped his heel down upon it.

And with the physical, always the dull, disharmonic chords riding underneath, the words he is using to describe how worthless, how despicable, how non-human I am. He doesn’t know that he has overused his voice. I repeat the disgusting names he calls me in a grade-school, sing-song, over and over while he is attacking my body so he has no entry to my mind. In the process, I’m stripping them of all meaning, peeling away their ability to transfer any more hurt. “Whore” has no significance in my vocabulary, in my world. When I hear it uttered, I smile because the word is funny to me, it’s meaning having been replaced long ago by a nursery rhyme retelling.

This “telling”, what I have been programmed never to do, was foreign to me and to my children. Recently, he called me a tattle-tale in response to my telling my attorney some little divulged facts. I smiled at his choice of expression, so in keeping with the childlike marital existence we maintained. In the beginning, like any small child with a big secret, I stumbled over the words so eager to release them after so many years. Forbidden words like “rape”, “abuse”, and “child abuse”, tumbled unbidden out of my mouth. In the early days, no one was immune to the story. Start to finish, I told the Chase mortgage lady, the barista at Starbucks, the guidance counselor at the college, the receptionist at the doctor’s office. Those poor people! They were fantastic listeners and great sports. Thank you!

I was free to live my life in the open. And I gingerly, tenderly approach the subject with the children. They don’t follow their mother’s example, choosing to keep the past events close to their hearts, taking them out to examine them when they need to, having the opportunity to talk with professionals weekly.

The free flow expressionism has slowed to a trickle. I will answer if asked, but do not feel obliged to share. Slowly, domestic violence is becoming something that occurred to me rather than something I am.