02.26.08
Posted in Sparkle at 4:42 pm by jeci
On the whole, it’s been a little bit of a weird month and every now and again I’ve felt just a tad down for no real reason. (Except when we found out we are living next to a violent psycho*. That was an oh-so-very-tangible reason to feel down. And has led to some intensely awkward and tense moments in the elevator. “Oh, hi there, CRAZY. Yes, we did get your ass thrown in jail. Yup. And here we are in a small enclosed space. Lovely!”)
But then there’s all the things about my life that are quite sweet and lovely, not the least of which is being happily married. And there’s moments like this, where I’m trying to take a self-portrait to update my Facebook profile and am being accosted by an affectionate kitty:
No longer intrigued by the camera, she turns her attention to snarfling my ear:
And kissing my eyelids:
Before settling in to act as a warm, rumbling, fuzz pillow:
———————–
*By the way, I’m happy to report that by all appearances, it seems as though Mr. Psycho’s girlfriend moved out! She’s not been back since the day the police were here, which means a little prayer of mine has been answered. I intend to keep her in my thoughts for a while more, because she must be hurting right now. I hope she’s getting the help and support she needs.
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02.21.08
Posted in Meh at 3:41 pm by jeci
I mostly just want to move on from the heavy energy of my last post and to thank everyone for their comments. The comments were kind and insightful and if they had a soundtrack it would be a Sarah McLachlan song, by which I mean I felt a hint of some pretty, pretty Grrrl Power.
In other (good) news, I feel silly for having gotten my knickers in a twist a few weeks ago over the fact that it’s February because I clearly forgot that I’m living in sub-tropical Vancouver and that spring was just a week away from the time I wrote. If I still lived in Edmonton, spring would be a full three months away (and let’s be honest, there’s still snow packed along the river until mid-May). (Not to dis the lovely Edmonton, because Edmonton summers blow Vancouver summers out of the water. It’s just the winters, is all.) But I just got back from a walk around the sea wall and I didn’t have to wear a coat and there’s already flowers coming up—crocuses and snowbells and those little daisy things that grow in the grass—and that flowery smell I kept thinking was coming from the neighbours’ every time I opened the bedroom window (I thought it was a Glade thing wafting over from their open window) is actually coming from some kind of blossom that’s making the whole neighbourhood smell like Glade.
And that’s it for today, lambs. I’m not in the right head space for writing. I’m just kinda tired today, is all, and I feel defeated by life because I can’t find jeans that fit. Sometimes shopping just makes me feel like I can’t wait until I’m 90 so that I could just throw on a caftan and some Isotoner slippers and call it a day.
Which, hey, maybe one y’all will know: Is there a brand of jeans designed to accommodate your average Curvy Girl? I.e., If one has a tiny waist and not tiny hips and thighs, is there something, anything, that will work? As it stands, if I buy anything that will fit over my hips, I could stuff a pillow into the waist of my pants and they still gape a little. I know because I just tried this. And seriously, is it so strange for a woman to have curves? Isn’t it absurdly normal to have a waist smaller than your hips? Everyone sings the praises of stretch jeans for this type of thing and I always cave in, only to discover that stretch exaggerates the problem.
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02.15.08
Posted in Second Verse Same as the First at 6:44 pm by jeci
At the end of one of the corridors of my mind, there’s a locked door, the key for which I’ve kept but deliberately forgotten where. Behind the door, I’ve stashed the moments of my life that are too dreadful to see the light of day, a macabre jumble of snapshots from my Life Before. Before, when I was a victim, confused and heartbroken, slowly retreating from life on the sinking ship that is domestic violence. There’s nothing about me that isn’t defined by my choice to survive, my choice to fall down and pick myself back up as many times as it takes, despite the fact that I refuse to open that door.
Certain people are uncomfortable with my approach. There’s a label for it: repression. I don’t care. I embrace my other label: survivor. Survival implies whatever it takes to go on. My God, that’s the truth.
Yesterday, I had that door blown wide open.
It started, fittingly, with the slamming of a real door. The neighbor’s door, slammed loud enough to shake our apartment, to suck the life out of the room. I knew right away what was in the air, recognized it, that hungry rage looking for a place to land. We heard yelling and went out into the hallway to figure out for sure where it was coming from. It became obvious within seconds that we needed to phone 911, and after making the phone call we commenced an impossibly long and frantic wait for the police. (It took close to 10 minutes—ample time for things to escalate out of control.)
We stood in the hallway, helpless, listening to the crescendo of rage, the litany of insults and accusations. While Kieran provided a running commentary to the 911 operator, I restlessly paced between Kieran and the neighbor’s door, occasionally feeding Kieran any information that might speed the arrival of the police (”He’s threatening to kill her! Tell her he’s threatening to kill her!”).
And then the sickening, unmistakable sounds of a beating.
I couldn’t bear it; I went and pounded on their door. I wanted at least to interrupt him, to let him know that we were listening to what was happening and we weren’t going to stand for it, and at most, I was ready to fly in with both guns blazing and yank him off of her myself. Of course, no one answered my knock and I was left to stare helplessly at someone else’s closed door.
At the moment I ran back into our own apartment to buzz in the police, our neighbor’s girlfriend opened the door and fled into the hallway in her pajamas and without her shoes. She called the elevator twice and didn’t get on. Kieran went over to her and she told him she wanted to leave but couldn’t go anywhere without clothes or shoes but she was too scared to go back into her apartment. Kieran told her the police were on their way and that he’d go downstairs and wait for them with her in the lobby. They got in the elevator and she started to cry.
In the end, we spent most of our Valentine’s Day with a police officer in our living room. As we prepared our written statements, the officer sat on our barstool, awkwardly holding his body so that his gun wouldn’t butt up against the bar, and gingerly trying to avoid our cats because he’s allergic. He smiled, commented on the view, tried to reinforce normalcy. I wanted to be a good witness, to make things right by remembering as much as I could, but it was all a mash-up of desperate moments and interminable waiting. The officer read over my statement and handed it back to me, telling me I should explain what I meant when I said I’d heard “punching sounds,” said that I should include anything I’d heard the girlfriend say or do after I heard the punching sounds.
Until that moment, my heart had resisted descending into that tender spot in my soul where it’s dark and sad, but I had no energy left to hold it back anymore.
Punching sounds, I clarified, are the sound that’s made when someone pounds their fist against something. Sometimes it sounded like he was hitting something hard, like a wall, and sometimes the punching sounds were more muffled and it sounded like he was hitting something softer, like a body. After I heard the punching sounds, I went on, I heard his girlfriend crying “Stop it!” over and over.
The description of “punching sounds”, I think, is pretty much synonymous with heartbreak.
Our neighbor was arrested and taken away. The last we saw her, his girlfriend was in the lobby with a team of officers. I have no idea what either of their fates will be.
***
I do, however, know two things for sure.
One, domestic violence relies on silence. It feeds on it. To participate in the conspiracy of silence, to turn a blind eye, puts you on the same team as the abuser, makes you complicit in the abuse. The harassment and assault involved in an abusive relationship are considered to be clearcut cases of criminal behavior in other contexts. In the context of a relationship or a family, these crimes are ignored. People look away, disgusted by the victim’s choices. Certainly, the victim has made a poor choice, but who among us hasn’t made poor choices, whether in a relationship or otherwise? Harassing and physically assaulting someone is a crime; having low self-esteem is not.
Secondly, it just takes one. One phone call, one act of kindness, one open display of respect extended at the right moment in time can lift a victim of violence up out of her life.
For those two reasons, if my neighbor’s girlfriend decides to return, if she isn’t ready to leave the cycle with which she’s most familiar, I’m prepared to give up as many Valentine’s Days as it takes.
***
I had a bad sleep. Nightmares. Today, I have a migraine that’s nothing short of hallucinogenic. Today, I can’t decide if my choice to lock away those memories and close that door has made me an unwitting participant in the conspiracy of silence. Have I put self-preservation ahead of my beliefs? I really just don’t know.
I do know for sure a third thing: survivors of domestic violence are tattooed with heartbreak, doomed to carry in their hearts a sadness that aches unbidden, old injuries of the soul that groan when the air changes.
To that end, I’ve decided to post something I wrote a few years ago (here) because it speaks to that lasting sadness. And because it represents a rare moment when I stepped outside of my own silence.
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02.05.08
Posted in Meh, My Life Is Punctuated by Useless Bouts of Panic at 2:56 pm by jeci
After writing my last post about how happy I am now that I’m no longer in the panicked throes of a nervous breakdown and have chosen instead to embrace a lifestyle conducive to mental wellness, I slid into a bland funk and spent the better part of a week rattling about the apartment feeling restless and lonely. My ambling feelings of dissatisfaction were underscored by disappointment and trailed by guilt. I was disappointed to discover that even when you’re happy, days can be unbearably insipid and disheartening; this, in turn, made me feel guilty, as I’d just boldly announced to my reading public that I’m Happy Now and had thus made a liar of myself to, well, tens of people. The guilt thing just goes to show that for reasons unknown, I labor under the belief that I’m obliged to feel guilty at all times and subsequently grasp at any peg, no matter how ridiculous or far-fetched, onto which to hang my guilty conscience. (Perhaps it’s the undercurrent of latent Catholicism in my upbringing?)
If something is actually wrong, I don’t know what it is. The best I can come up with is that it’s February and I’ve grown weary of being wet and cold and wish it was summer. I often feel like going outside but am loathe to do so until the back door of our building no longer operates as an exit to a rain-splattered back alley and begins to operate as a wormhole that spits me out onto a sun-dappled beach in Hawaii. The results of an informal survey have led me to conclude that this February “Mehhhhhhhhhhhh” phenomenon happens to people across the Northern Hemisphere, even healthy and happy people. I’ve also heard from other people that this phenomenon of Nothing-muchness is often referred to as “Tuesday.” Tuesday is preceded by Monday, which is best just to ignore, and succeeded by Wednesday, which is okay because it’s a sign that things are gathering steam for the impending weekend. The weekend, of course, is when Somethings take place.
In other words, I appear to be suffering from an acute case of normalcy.
You’ll have to forgive me for my nervousness over having achieved a normal life; it’s been a while since I sauntered along the gently undulating plains of well-being. The absence of craggy peaks of panic from which I get to tumble, pumped with delicious, stomach-dropping relief, and dark valleys of sadness from which I get to emerge triumphant and filled with sick pleasure over my gritty inner strength can make these plains seem rather dull in comparison. The quiet in my life is so unprecedented that I can’t help but approach it with my arms crossed and my eyes slitted with suspicion. Perhaps it’s too quiet. I suppose it’s just a matter of time before I realize that this silence is more lovely than it is disturbing, because instead of listening to the clanging of my brain as it tries to flee out of my left ear, I get to listen to birdsong and—what? I don’t know—the tinkling laughter of gumdrop fairies kissing the baby Jesus on his little button nose. Or something.
—————–
*The Vapors. That’s what they called nervous breakdowns a century ago. It turns out that the term nervous breakdown is no less nebulous or meaningless than declaring some poor, nervous schlub to be suffering from “The Vapors.” I found this out when I felt guilty for applying this term to what I went through and decided to research just what a nervous breakdown is before misrepresenting myself or spreading misinformation about mental health. Guess what? A nervous breakdown can be symptomatic of any number of mental illnesses or none at all. It’s a system overload for which no one term is applicable. Perhaps ironically, I didn’t find anything on driving oneself mad by way of expending ludicrous amounts of emotional energy on futile, free-floating guilt.
Anyway, I have decided that I want to refer to my particular condition as “The Vapors” because the term is delightfully absurd. For example:
“Want to go to the gym?”
“Can’t. Vapors.”
And, let’s be honest, I also like to occasionally indulge in a fantasy where I’m the maudlin heroine of a turn of the century short story who does things like press the back of her hand against her alabaster brow before swishing up to the attic in her long skirts, where her delicate constitution crumples and she succumbs to her nerves. Or, The Vapors, if you will. (Of course, this is where the fantasy unravels as my maudlin heroine picks forlornly at the yellow wallpaper while eying the rocking horse on which her son bucked himself to death. Outside the villagers gather to stone to death the unlucky lottery winner, while on the horizon, Mr. Dark’s ferris wheel creaks in an unholy wind. Meanwhile, the next door neighbor sprinkles lime powder around her house to conceal the smell of her dead lover upstairs. Yeah, so. I dunno—either my English 101 prof was a morbid creep, or short stories of a certain era were routinely dark and disturbing. Although it occurs to me now that Something Wicked This Way Comes was a mid-century novel. Anyway.)
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