Broken Together: Am I Guilty
I walk through life thinking I’m clear of guilt, but I have to be honest. I wanted to fight, not a skilled verbal match kind of fight but a full-on fist fight. I’m bad at it and I know that because I was in one. He said ‘it’ and furious, I threw the first sort of swing. We were equal partners in the horror. I made my point, but I was badly bruised, he was spotless, nothing broken but my bruises were in body and spirit.
It’s the kind of scene no one wants to admit they co-authored. He could care less; I was embarrassed and horrified. It was my fault. I’m the guilty one.
But…
My first husband was a drunk. When he drank, he did things he didn’t remember (he said). When we were newlyweds, he loved to rip off my clothes and force sex. I’d weep sewing the buttons back on my things and embroidering flowers over the rips. As we got older and long after we divorced, he’d come around, sober and charming, suggesting we get back together. I wondered if he’d changed and become his true self. He was his true self, a sociopathic narcissist who lied, baited, and accused.
When he died last year, penniless and alone, I only felt sorry for our daughters who had to take care of his final needs.
It’s a pitiful story and I accepted that I was a victim of it. This character victim was woven into the fabric of my life and added to the certainty that I was not what a wife should be.
In the current OSV email the question is asked – “How were you complicit in your own victimization?” My immediate response is ‘How else should I think?’
I was the wife/woman/weaker one who couldn’t leave because of the children, because he had all the money, because he was stronger, because he had the car, and because he could kill me.
There it is.
I got myself into it, stayed to take the high road then, messily got out from under that shelf of shame and guilt. It was painfully difficult. There was no offramp of freedom and high spirits. It was a day-by-day grind to a halt with not enough money, time, or energy. I begged forgiveness from a deity formed in my childhood belief system. I stumbled into the next year job after job trying to maintain normal for my little family.
When my daughters tell the story it’s not of their brave mother but of a woman focused on her own survival. It’s not true, any interpretation of it. We made it through – not all of it pretty and easy but we are together still, my strong girls, their girls, a boy and me.
We are not victims anymore. I am a whole woman – forgiven for my own victimhood. I was fighting for something then, through the tears and recriminations. I have what I fought for and can tell the story of my full-on fist fight and laugh.
We live today within a rich history filled with forgiveness and blame, laughter and tears, arguments, and reconciliation. We live a full life.
Writing about difficult and painful experiences—even in fiction—can be the first step in finding healing. In our workshops, you'll practice deciding what details are comfortable or necessary to share and how to channel anger and hurt into finely put turns of phrase.
From that creative exercise, the story – your story is ready to be told. We aim to give voice to these experiences and inspire healing in the retelling.