Fallout, Conclusion: Reclaiming Our Lives

The following, the concluding segment of "Fallout," tells how I managed to get my life together after putting an end to the domestic violence in my twenty-year marriage.  There IS life after domestic violence!  Each of us recovers in our own way, and this is the story of my way.  Namaste . . . Jean Fairgrieve

So—where was I exactly in the process?  To answer that question, I took inventory.  I was now a single parent with no job, my teenage daughter was waging war against me and against school and against every other factor in her life which she perceived as having power over her; we had an income that consisted of my meager unemployment check and a child support check from my husband that amounted to $350 per month;  we no longer had access to a car.  Not having a car was no problem for me because I often rode the bus, walked, or rode my bike to shop, so I crossed that item off my list of problems.  We did have enough cash coming in to pay the bills, buy a few groceries, and clothe my daughter, so even though we did not have much, we could survive.  Cross finances off the list of major problems.  That left my daughter, her rebellion, and her depression and my situation as a single parent who had no job and little emotional support.   

After realizing that I now was the sole parent of my daughter and completely responsible for guiding her through the next few years, I decided that to help myself and to have a reason for getting out of bed in the morning, I needed to replicate the routine I had when I was working.  If I could stabilize myself by doing this, then I would be better able to help my daughter.  So one morning in April I sat down at my kitchen table with a calendar and a piece of notebook paper and listed all the ways I could spend my time meaningfully.  Number one on my list was, of course, looking for work.  However, due to the scarcity of work in Lewis County, I knew that job hunting would not keep me busy for eight hours each day.  Thus, I went through my list, chose the volunteer activities that most appealed to me, and made a short list of these items.  

That done, I looked at my calendar and decided how much time I wanted to devote to these activities and when during the week I wanted to do them.  My first choice was to work at the Salvation Army food bank, and my second choice was to tutor at the local juvenile facility. 

Decisions made, I implemented my plan.  The Salvation Army was happy to have my help in their foodbank, and I worked there two days per week.  I enjoyed the work.  Bagging powdered milk and flour were messy jobs, but they were simple.  Those jobs and the others I did at the Salvation Army were low-stress, and as I worked, I could think about my future.  The staff members were friendly and seemed to enjoy my company, and I liked being with them.  In addition to finding structure for my days and meeting friendly people, I gained the benefit of being able to take home fresh produce when the local farmers donated their excess to the foodbank.  At the end of the day, if there was produce left, and if there was no room in the refrigerators, I was allowed to take what my daughter and I needed.  So even though I received no pay for my work, I made friends, gained satisfaction from completing my simple tasks, felt good because I knew that what I was doing was helping people survive hard times, and managed to add some variety to the meals I prepared at home.   

My other major volunteer project, tutoring a teenager who was spending time in a juvenile offender facility, kept me busy on two of the days when I was not working at the Salvation Army.  In the process of trying to help the young man with his reading, I discovered that he was severely dyslexic and was reading sentences backward.  I did my best to help him, but because I had no training in the area of special education and helping people with learning disabilities, I could not do much for him.  However, in telling his counselor about my discovery, I may have helped him more than I was aware at the time.  Over the years, I’ve wondered how the young man fared after he had served his sentence.  I hoped that he was able to complete the work for a GED, get a job, and go on to have a happy life. 

With looking for work, volunteering, raising my daughter, and my therapy, then, I was busy every day and had good reason to get out of bed each morning.  As I met and compared notes with other about-to-be-single women, I could see the wisdom in what I had done, for many of them were suffering from such debilitating depression that they slept most of their days away.  One woman I encountered said she stayed in bed, let the kids take care of themselves, and read on average six Harlequin Romance novels each day.  A few I encountered turned to alcohol to help them get through the divorce process.  I believe that what saved me from depression and alcoholism was the structure I had put in place to give me reasons for getting out of bed and to force me to try new activities and interact with people I would not have otherwise met.   

Finally, in 1983 my search for employment paid off.  I saw a notice in the local paper stating that the community college was hiring people to work part time in the learning center.  The work involved working one-on-one with students who were earning their GEDs and their high school completion certificates.  Since I had a variety of teaching experiences behind me, including working with adults who wanted to learn English, I thought I might have a chance, so I applied.  I went through the interview process and was hired.  Granted, the job was not full time, but that did not matter to me.  Any money coming in was welcome, and I wanted the experience the work would give me.  Perhaps later I could get more hours, I told myself.  In the meantime, I had a job that I knew I would enjoy.  One step at a time.   

By 1983, my daughter was sixteen and was able to be left on her own at home for short periods if I had to stay later than usual at work.  After school, she helped the neighbor by cleaning out the horse stalls in her stable.  In exchange, the neighbor taught her how to ride.  That summer my daughter worked in a federal teen employment program and earned the money to buy herself a horse, which the neighbor boarded for her.  From then on, my daughter was occupied after school and on weekends caring for her horse and mucking out stalls of all the horses in the stable.  Having a horse to care for and ride gave my daughter a sense of purpose, something she desperately had needed since our family structure had changed so dramatically.  As a result, I believe, of tending her horse and working for the neighbor, she began the process of reclaiming her life and finding a direction for herself.   

By the time my daughter was eighteen, I realized I needed to plan my own future.  I knew that my future was not going to involve picking my daughter’s dirty clothes up from the living room and bathroom floors and cleaning her makeup from the bathroom sink.  No, there would be more to my life than that!   

Have you ever had a job that you enjoyed so much you felt you should pay for the privilege of working?  That’s the way I felt about my job at the community college.  Because I had just a bachelor’s degree, however, I was not allowed to be a contracted faculty member.  So in 1985 I sold my house, set my daughter up in her own apartment and found an apartment for myself nearby.  I had decided to spend one more year working at the community college and then attend Washington State University and earn a graduate degree in adult education.  During my final year in Centralia, I would, I decided, teach my 19-year-old daughter to run her household, pay her bills, and do all the other chores an adult must do.   

In fall of 1987, I began my graduate program in Adult and Continuing Education at W.S.U. in Pullman, Washington.  I was about forty-eight years old and scared!  I had hated college as an undergraduate and, therefore, did not do well.  That was in the late 1950s and the early 1960s.  I hoped, then, in the late 1980s, that my experience as a graduate student would be different.  For one thing, I was motivated, something which I had not been in 1957 when I entered college as an undergrad.  As it turned out, I need not have worried.  I enjoyed my program at W.S.U. so much that I decided to enter the doctorate program at Oregon State University and earn a degree in administration.   

By the time I entered O.S.U., however, the program to which I had been admitted had been changed, and I discovered that my instructors would be, for the most part, no more qualified than I was to teach the classes I would take.  Since I had an assistantship in the Composition and Rhetoric department that paid me a stipend for teaching lower-level composition classes, I decided to stay in school and earn an interdisciplinary degree with a major in Composition and Rhetoric.  The two degrees would, I reasoned, lead to a faculty position in a community college doing what I enjoyed most, teaching remedial writing to adults.  I was right about that!  I was hired to teach remedial writing in the Developmental Education department at Walla Walla Community College in fall of 1991.  

During the years I was attending graduate school, my daughter was struggling to get her life together.  I had taught her the basics of taking care of herself, and she knew I loved her,  but that was not enough to give her the feeling of self worth she needed to direct her own life effectively and find satisfaction in her decisions.  As many incest survivors do, she became promiscuous and became a binge drinker.  In addition, in the summer of 1988, she rode her motorcycle directly into the path of an oncoming car and spent several weeks in the trauma ward of Harborview Hospital in Seattle.  She had sustained a closed head injury and was in a coma for eight days.  When she had recovered sufficiently, she was discharged to a rehabilitation hospital in a small town south of Seattle.  From there she was sent to an adult foster home in Centralia.  Because my daughter was twenty-one, the State of Washington had custody of her and I had no voice in the decision.  However, when I discovered that the son of her foster mother was molesting my daughter and his mother was using the money the state sent for my daughter’s care to make payments on her r.v., I helped my daughter get an apartment in a low-income complex in Centralia.  She was capable of living on her own by then, and I felt that would be far better for her than being subjected to the sexual advances of the foster mother’s son.  She was more than ready to live on her own!  

During the thirteen years I taught in Walla Walla, my daughter held a lot of jobs, all of them low-paying because she had just a high school education and few marketable skills.  In the summer of 1994, I persuaded her to come to Walla Walla to get away from Centralia for a while because so-called friends of hers were supplying her with meth.  Her accident had left her with grand mal epilepsy, for which she took medication, and her brain was a time bomb waiting to go off each time she took meth.  She stayed in Walla Walla long enough to work for a year at the humane society shelter, a situation which she enjoyed.  When she returned to the coast, she found a job and also met her future husband.   

*     *     * 

The year is now 2013, and I am retired from my community college teaching position and living in housing for low-income seniors.  My daughter has married and lives within a few hours’ drive from me.  She seems happy with her life and doesn’t dwell on her abuse.  She does, however, suffer from symptoms of PTSD such as bad dreams related to her abuse, flashbacks, hyper vigilance, and intrusive thoughts.  I, too, have suffered those symptoms, but presently I am in therapy for what I hope is the last time, and my PTSD symptoms have faded.  My present goals for what’s left of my life are those of enjoying life free from the chains of Complex PTSD, writing my story, and helping others understand that they, too, can survive those events in life that seem impossible to survive.  The human spirit, while delicate and fragile, is at the same time amazingly sturdy and resilient.  We humans are wondrous creatures!