No Defense Here

We have a local blogging team called Shoalanda Speaks, who recently posted this blog, which elicited this response and this rebuttal.

In my own rebuttal to the woman who sent the anonymous communication, I have a story to tell.

Many years ago, I married a man whom I hadn’t known very long. To my great surprise and dismay, four days into the marriage, he viciously beat me because I took too long at the store, where he’d sent me to get him ice cream. At the time, I had never heard the term “domestic violence,” but it certainly is not a phenomenon that started with me.

The writer of the anonymous communication stated that pain has no color. It certainly does. It came in the colors of black and blue bruises left around my neck where my former husband picked me up in a chokehold and threw me into a wall. It was more bruises and red marks where he beat me with a belt. It was yet more colorful black, blue, green and yellow bruises where I suffered various punches and slaps for such offenses as his inability to program the TV like he wanted it. Fear, perhaps, has no color; pain does. Pain’s color comes in the form of marks, cuts, and scratches left on a victim of domestic violence. I was also told that I had no place to go, because he would burn down the house of anyone who tried to help me. Incidentally, I was pregnant with his child while he was doing this to me.

The writer commented that it “pained her that simple minded people choose not to open their minds to change.” What change, exactly, should “simple-minded” people make? Should they ignore the noise and not call the police, as my neighbors chose to do, when I was being shoved into walls, screamed at, slapped, and having my neck jabbed at with a large, two-pronged grilling utensil in the middle of the night? Or, again as my neighbor did, not answer the door when I came to borrow her phone because I didn’t have one, when my tormentor finally left the apartment in the only vehicle I had? There are definitely changes that need to be made in how society deals with domestic violence, though I’m not certain that the changes the anonymous communicator deems necessary line up at all with the changes victims think are needed.

(I'm not sure how things are now, but when I filed for a divorce, I met with Judge Edward Tease in his chambers.   I showed him some of my bruises, including the ones on my neck.   The judge refused to do anything with my divorce until my baby was born because, in his words, he found that most women went back to their husbands in these situations.   It was almost a year before I got to readdress my divorce.  But I digress....)

The writer correctly points out that God is love, and as such, I am certain He does not want any of us to suffer as victims of domestic violence! Thankfully, I got out of my situation a long time ago. Unfortunately, there are people who still suffer repeatedly at the hands of another, and yet more unfortunate is the fact that there are people who will defend those who abuse.