An Essay Unfinished, A Life Unfinished

 

 

(I wrote this essay in 2006 and could not finish it.  Now, in 2013, I have decided to wrap it up, unfinished as it is.  If you are a victim of child abuse and have also been a battered wife, your experience may resonate with mine.) 

Over the years I have tried several times to write about my marriage.  Each time, however, I have failed to match words to my inner feelings and thoughts relating to this twenty-year period of my life, and I have given up the task. This time, though, I have decided to just do it.  What I have to say about my life and my marriage may prove to be useful information to others, and for that reason I am determined this time to begin my account and finish it.   

Like many other child survivors of abuse, I learned to keep a low profile so I would not be noticed.  I believed that by not calling attention to myself, I could avoid being a target.  By the time I entered college, I had taught myself to be invisible.  Thus, when the handsome ex-G.I. joined my circle of college friends and made overtures to me, I was completely caught off guard because I had done nothing to attract his attention, and I could not understand why he would show any interest in me.  I was so blind to myself that I didn’t see I was a beautiful and appealing young woman, a woman to whom a man might naturally be attracted.  I might have been invisible to myself, but I was not invisible to others. 

As the months went by, I accepted the attentions of this young man and learned to enjoy them and to trust him.  Eventually, I reached a point where I was more dependent on our relationship than he was, it seemed, because he began telling me that he didn’t want a long-term or permanent relationship with me.  But I was not hearing him.  For once in my life, I felt safe with another human being, and I could not imagine having that closeness end.  That would be the end of my world, so I thought.  I am not sure why he did not simply walk away from me, but he didn’t.  And eventually, in December of 1961, we were married. 

Our marriage ceremony should have been a warning in itself of gray days to come.  But I did not have the self awareness or confidence to heed my own intuition and act on the warnings.  Thus, my mother hastily made arrangements for our ceremony.  She contacted a judge for whom she had done some political favors and asked him to officiate on short notice because she was certain that I was pregnant and had to get married in a hurry.  Then she took me shopping and bought me a black two-piece dress, white gloves, and a white lace hanky.  She also went to her safe deposit box and retrieved my grandmother’s wedding ring so my groom would have a ring to put on my finger.   

My mother’s preparations completed, on December 30^th, 1961, my groom and I and our immediate families stood in the judge’s living room for our civil ceremony.  For our wedding music, we were serenaded by the judge’s young daughter practicing her scales on the piano down the hall.  We left for the beach after the ceremony, and in a cheap motel that night, he drank himself to sleep; I stayed awake and wondered what had happened. 

After our trip to the beach and a visit with my groom’s parents, we returned to the college town where we had met so that he could finish the work for his degree and I could find a part-time job.  Our financial base was composed of the money he received from his military education benefits, wages from part-time work he did when he had time, and wages from my own part-time work as a babysitter.  Thus, we managed to survive from month to month on this patchwork quilt of uncertain monetary sources.  And then, in April of 1961, about four months after our marriage, the odor of perking coffee in the morning suddenly became intolerable, sending me retching into the bathroom.  I was pregnant.   

After the doctor assured me that I truly was pregnant, the entire atmosphere of my marriage changed.  Where previously we had been enjoying an extended sense of honeymoon, suddenly with the announcement of my pregnancy a shadow moved over our relationship.  My husband became moodier and more irritable.  I interpreted his change in behavior as prospective-father jitters, but I also knew he was stressed by our shaky financial situation, his studies, and the uncertainty of work after his graduation.  In an attempt to take some of the pressure off him, I tried to downplay my own happiness at the prospect of being a mother, but my efforts were not terribly effective because I enjoyed planning for the baby and gathering baby clothes that I purchased at garage and rummage sales.  I wanted this baby!   

I was puzzled by what came through to me as his hostility toward the pregnancy and the prospect of adding another person to our family, but I shrugged this off by telling myself that he was a normal prospective father, nervous because it was a new experience for him that would put more stress on our financial resources.  He would see, I thought, that once the baby was born, there was no need for him to be so anxious .  .  .  

When I wrote this piece in 2006, my thoughts ended at this point.  Now, some seven years after I began this narrative, I am bringing it to conclusion.  I’ve described the events of my marriage in other writing, so I don’t need to repeat the horrors here.  What do I think when I look back at my thoughts from 2006?  If only I had known a good, convincing psychic in 1961!  I am now, at age 74, still engaged in cleaning up the debris left by a twenty-year marriage in which my kids and I were the objects of my groom’s abuse.  Will the clean-up process ever end?  I suspect that the key word here is “process.”  The process may never end, but the bad times inside my head happen less frequently,  allowing me to enjoy the longer in-between times.  That’s all I can ask.   

I believe in God, a merciful God—whatever and wherever God is.  To state this another way, “Oh God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”