Kelly
[Editor's note: There are still dozens of survivor stories in the queue and they are posted in the order in which I received them; however, every once in a while a submission is moved to the front of the line because of the immediacy of the teller's situation, such as in the case of Kate back in March. Today's survivor is not in any danger, but it will become obvious why your support is needed now. Kelly contacted me back in the beginning to tell her story, but she didn't turn it in until last week. She had started it but couldn't figure out how to end it. Fourteen days ago, the ending found her.]
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The first words he spoke to me were “you bitch,” and somewhere in my seventeen year old mind I found that amazing, or endearing, or cool. I had inadvertently shut a door in his face and he said it. I was hooked, enamored… in love. I wanted nothing more than for him to want me. He was the ultimate bad boy and it was an immediate challenge. I wanted to love him, to fix him. I think about those moments now as I look at my daughters and I can only pray that they want so much more. That they are smarter, that they don’t settle.
I remember the warmth of the sun and the changing of seasons. I remember him coming to pick me up in his old Ford with the windows down. I remember music blaring and dogs barking and excitement. It took less than a week before he came to pick me up drunk. He jumped out of his truck with a beer in his hand and yelled, “Let’s go!” My dad said if I left I couldn’t come back.
I did, and I didn’t.
We stayed at his parents with their carpet that smelled of cat urine and their towels that stunk of sulfer. The hard water had stained everything it touched in their house. It was one week and a bottle of wild turkey. One week. And when he hit me that first time I remember sinking to the floor and biting my lip. I remember pretending that the blood I tasted was from my own hands. I justified it. I washed myself up and slept with him. I have often wondered how different my life would be today if I had just left then. If I had had enough self respect to go.
We lived like that for months in that dirty house, until we decided that we needed a place of our own for him to beat me in. A quiet place all our own. My first apartment furnished with hand-me-downs, sunflower dishtowels and hate. It was a tiny apartment where I would hang plants and hide in the closet while he dealt drugs to our friends. An apartment where I thought we would evolve and yet we just became those people. We lived the classic cycle just as they teach it in school: Hurt. Sorry. Make up. Hurt. Sorry. Make up. Hurt again…. It was my reality.
We moved a lot. A new number, a new street, a new town…. and I assumed a new start. I still vividly remember the smell of fresh paint and the sight of white walls…. free of the holes and the scars and the stories that they would someday hold within their beams. We never stayed long enough anywhere to make connections. Gradually, all my friends and family were gone. Separated by the thick line of chaos that I called my own. As a mom now I can only imagine how my mother felt. I don’t remember calling her or if she even knew where I was. I don’t remember telling her that I needed or loved her. I can only imagine her fear. I remember feeling completely alone and yet I remember feeling like I was supposed to be there. I didn’t want to quit, I didn’t want to lose. I didn’t want to fail no matter the cost. I thought that everyone’s relationships were like mine even though I grew up in a completely functional home.
I remember making friends once with the couple who lived next door. I remember craving their normalcy. I remember finally wondering what I was doing wrong. I never led on to her what was going on behind my walls, but I know she knew. She called the cops one night when she could hear me scream. They came, macho boys our own age that laughed with him. When they left, the real fight began. We moved weeks after that and I have never gotten over not telling her thank you. Or, I’m sorry. Or, I’m OK.
The years we spent together made me a better liar and him a better abuser. And I just loved him more. He eventually became more brazen and started to hurt me in front of others. He would lash out with a knife or his fist and I would be where his anger would land. I still cover many physical scars yet it is the abuse that had a more emotional undertone that still seems to affect me. They are the memories that sneak in at night that you just can’t seem to shake or hide. I remember a wonderful camping trip where when he got drunk with his friends he tried to drown me. I remember the struggle for air and the laughter of those I thought of as peers. To this day I don’ t swim. With him I never knew what would set him off. I would wait with anticipation for him to come home only to endure a fight over the dinner that was not perfect. It was always petty, always controlling. I didn’t dress right, or clean the house right. Or I was smiling because I must be cheating. I became a shell of a person. His dissection of each and every part of my body has left me a confused, self-destructive adult. He questioned my thoughts and memories and reality to the point that I felt like a liar in my own head.
I became pregnant with her in the fall of 1996. I remember vividly sitting on the nutmeg colored carpet in our latest apartment. I remember looking at blank walls and a positive test. I remember my fear and my determination. I knew that this was one thing that I would not allow him to take from me. I remember speaking the words with trembling hands. I did not waiver, though, as he shook his head over and over again no…no…no. You will get rid of it or you will leave. He drove me to my parents’ home the next day. I waited for her birth lost and alone. I waited for his call that never came.
She was born on a Friday with the help of a surgeon’s sword. Tiny and pink and perfect. He came drunk and called me a whore. Her hair was a darker shade then his own so she couldn’t be his. His escort out was swift and loud. A sheriff sat at my door for the remainder of my stay. I begged him to see her for the whole first month of her life. I wanted twisted validation of her. Instead I got a phone call that his girlfriend — the one I had found in our bed — was expecting.
It was five years and a string of men who all treated me the same way later that I saw him again. Drunk, high, and separated from his wife, he came in where I worked. I touched my hair and felt my face. My stomach still lurched, he still had that pull and he knew it. He wanted pictures of her, wanted to know if I was raising her right. I spent ten days with him as my family feared every moment. Ten days of drugs and chaos and memories and proof that nothing had changed. He never asked to see her, not once. I think he just wanted to prove that he could still control me. I told him many, many things during those days that I had never said. I asked him many questions that still held no answers. One night on a binge he put a gun to his head and told me if I left him again he would kill himself. I told him he had better go home and be a good dad to the kids he had with his wife. I told him that someday my daughter would ask and that those people would be the ones who better have something good to say about him. I swore it would not be me.
Time has had a way of softening memories that once held me so tight. Years passed. I married, became a mom again, moved away, moved on. Infrequently I would hear through the grapevine that he had gotten a new job, or went back to jail or rehab or moved. My daughter grew and I began to wonder what I would tell her one day. I wondered how I would make her understand. I fully believe that it was she alone that saved me and I thought often of the ways that I would tell her. I hoped that she would not hate me for taking her away from him. I hoped with all my heart that by the time she was grown that he would finally be okay.
She called me two nights ago at 4am. She, the other one. The one he had married, the one that he had had babies with that he actually held. She told me that she was sorry but that he had died. I thought it was a sick, twisted joke.
Died. Heart attack. Uppers. Downers. Sorry.
Died. Dead. Funeral.
Sorry.
And in an instant my memories became all my own and my pain became confusing. And no one knows whether to say “I’m sorry” or “thank God.” My feelings rush to the surface in an embarrassing mess. I cry and then I am thankful and then I cry again. I guess that I will someday tell her that he didn’t make it until she was old enough to know. And I will hide my anger and bury it back in the far depths of me where no one dares to tread. I will know that he was selfish even in his own death.
I already knew that he had his ending.
I guess now I have mine.
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Kelly blogs at And Then She Writes.
