Power

It is funny. The word power. The definition of the word is the ability to do something or act in a particular way. You lose all your power the day you enter an abusive relationship. You don’t realize it at first. Truth is, you may never realize it. And the day you leave? You don’t have it then either. The day you show your hand. The day that you show that you are’t afraid to leave and actually stay gone… the day that you know that this could be the end of your life because you are taking your last and final leave, you don’t gain any power back. You never do. You are stripped of it. The day you locked eyes with your abuser and butterflies filled your body because nobody has ever treated you so good, you’ve lost your power.

The truth is, the man who stole my power the day he kissed me for the first time in November of 2013, he changed my life forever and I was too lost and ignorant at the time to even realize it. He told me everything I wanted to hear. He told me all the sweet nothings that I never believed I would hear. He listened to me. He saw me. He gave me a place that filled the void I had felt most of my life. He made me feel worthy and seen. With him, my life felt complete and at peace. He didn’t see me as broken or damaged but rather as a person worthy of being loved. Our first date, the day he kissed me, I lost myself in the beauty of the possibility of being loved unconditionally.

Eleven years later, two domestic violence convictions, multiple restraining order, and years of verbal, physical and financial abuse and I am still suffering from the invisible prison I walked myself into on that November evening. I am not a victim. I survived eleven years of abuse and I fight (not physically) every day to ensure that I don’t become a victim. A victim by definition is a person harmed, injured or killed as a result of a crime, accident or other event or action. So by definition, I am a victim, but mentally I fight everyday to see myself as a survivor. Every day that I live to see another day, I am a survivor. I am a person who is still alive after eleven years of abuse in which many other women have not made it through in situations similar to mine.

I am terrified of my abuser and for that I will never have my power back. I don’t fear what he will do to me, but rather the damage that will happen to my life. My children are my everything. They are my life. They are my purpose. My children love their mom and their dad despite our short comings with each other and with our children. Every day, I see my children changing. Every day I think about the words my abuser once told me, the day before he attacked my mother and I. The words he told me in our bedroom when I was begging him to stop drinking and change for our daughter. The day I asked him if he would want someone hurting his daughter in the same way that he has hurt me. The day that he told me that if our daughter acted like me, he would do the same thing to her that he does to me. Every day I think about the cut on my daughter’s belly from a picture falling on her while he was physically abusing me. I think about the times that our children ran and hid while he abused me or the times that he would pick them up and hold them while he shoved me around and hit me. The times he screamed and continuously cursed at them after he found out that I was moving out after our reconciliation because despite his sobriety, trust and communication were still a major issue that was continuing to damage our lives and the lives of our children.

Power. It is a funny word. Mistakenly you are constantly reminded in counseling that you can gain your power back. Mistakenly, you begin to think that as your eyes are opening to the reality of your situation that someday you may be free of the prison walls you have lived in and gone back to because you are broken, financially dependent, love your children or because you hope for change. Each time you look forward to becoming yourself again, you realize that you lost your power because you accepted what was unacceptable and you will continue to lose your power because the man that you once foolishly admired, will always be there to remind you of the fear he instilled in you and your children.

Despite the fact that I divorced him in September of 2020, I live every day in fear that he will follow through with any of the promises and threats that he made in anger. I live everyday waiting for the small town boy to follow through with the promises of ending my life or the lives of the people my kids and I care about. I wonder if when I pass, I will finally gain back my power- my peace, my safety, my security. I wonder if my kids will have a mom at least until they are 18 and are able to survive without me in the world with them. I wonder if he will follow through and if my children will be okay and able to break the cycle that their parents are stuck in. Will they have power? I wonder if safety and security (power) are obtainable or a mystical word such as a unicorn.

As I write this blog, a journal of my thoughts and feelings, I fear the outcome. I stress over his reaction or the consequences of my voice. I worry about our children and the small town talk. I worry about our next set of interactions. But more than anything, I worry about the lessons I have been teaching my children for their entire life. The lesson that I didn’t teach verbally but have continued to model through my actions. The lesson that if you stay silent, if you say nothing, you will be okay. Today, I realized that by not saying anything about what has happened and continues to happen, I am teaching our kids how to be victims and allow someone else to have their power.