b i r t h d a y
It was my birthday recently.
content warning for domestic violence and all that that can entail and more
For the weeks leading up to it, all my mind could think about was:
I am about to turn as old as my mother was when she had me.
I am also about to turn as old as my mother was when her own mother was shot in the head and killed in broad daylight by her partner.
Feels like the first bit is a common threshold for people to face and have feelings about – the second one, not so much.
I didn’t want to write this post for many a reason, which is why I haven't thus far. It's at least in part due to the fact that it entails a lot of very personal information of people who can’t consent to having that information being shared. As a result of this and more, I'm being very sparse.
My mother's mother, who I've never called grandma (I didn't know her, and it's never felt right for some reason), had almost ten children. By all accounts, it seems like her relationship with her husband was… good? I don’t think my mother would know otherwise, really, but of the stories I’ve heard of my grandfather (many of them not particularly pleasant to today’s standards), they have never included him beating her, or even really yelling at her. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, but compared to the stories of every single other woman in the family of that generation and back, it seems like she had a good marriage.
He died of cancer when my mother was still a teenager. It seems like he was fairly successful in life, albeit humble; I believe he had a successful workshop, he owned at least two properties, and was very much able to feed all of those mouths even if having to tighten the belt to do so. Once he was gone, my mother’s mother had no means to sustain herself – everything he’d owned was mismanaged or stolen from afterwards, including by his own family, until there was nothing left. My mother’s mother had no skills and still had at least three children to sustain; she would have gone hungry if my teenage mother hadn’t started working at that point.
Not a single one of the adult children did anything to sustain her – particularly not any of the men who were already grown and financially successful. The husbands of the adult women cared even less, if at all possible.
She’d said it herself: she didn’t know how to be alone. So she got with another man.
That man, when faced with the possibility of her leaving him, said that if he couldn’t have her then nobody else would, according to witnesses, before shooting her and then himself.
My mother was pregnant with me at the time.
I found out recently that my father’s side of the family once tried to teach my older brother how to shoot. This was news to me on many accounts, including the very fact that they had guns at all.
So it goes that when my mother saw them trying to hand my – at the time basically still a toddler – brother a shotgun, she went ballistic. As usual, her concerns tried to be pushed aside and she was mocked for them; at least until she said they’d have to shoot her like they had her mother if they ever wanted her son to wield a gun.
I’m fairly certain that this was one of the only times, if not the only, where my mother set a hard boundary and it was listened to.
I wonder if that’s why she’s still alive today. Of all the things my father’s done, he seemingly never possessed a gun while in our home.
It's a weird realization to have: knowing that every woman in your family, since ever, has experienced domestic abuse. It’s weird to be the first generation that’s an exception, except that's not true either since you've only really escaped intimate partner violence (for now).
It’s odd to see people who act like core feminism is basically a struggle of the past. It’s downright bizarre to know that there are people whose entire existences haven’t been defined by violence, and/or the constant threat of it, and to see those same people believe that experiences where that’s the case are exceptions rather than the rule.
Having to witness with my own eyes the glee and levity with which people made jokes about Amber Heard and the abuse she experienced genuinely ruined me a little. It was inescapable. I still remember every single person who did so; every single creator, every single acquaintance, every single friend who thought it was hilarious; who thought “well it was mutual abuse”; who so eagerly hopped onto ‘discourse’, who so quickly tried to quantify how ‘not that bad’ the evidence was, how flimsy; who so simply believed and echoed the words of a man who is every little bit a textbook abuser, because they trust narratives more than they do real life, and they get enjoyment out of witnessing a woman’s ruin for seemingly stepping out of line. For daring to not be thankful.
My father liked being a savior. Probably still does.
I remember sitting by the front of the house one day, and a neighbour running out of her house screaming for help at the top of her lungs. The desperation in her voice was chilling, and I remember my father coming out to the front of our house and snapping into action: he was one of a couple of men in the street who went over to her house at once. It turns out her husband had hung himself in the living room or something.
My father was tall, strong, handsome, ‘reliable’. When my aunt’s husband was threatening her and my cousin in their own personal hell, he was their savior: he went there to threaten him off them, to guard them while they moved his things out, to move them into our old apartment.
When my brother and I were kids at a food court and we mentioned this guy who was watching us and who’d gotten up as soon as we did to leave, I remember my father nearly pouncing on the guy. I’d never seen him so explicitly aggressive before, menacing, very visibly threatening.
Except I had. At that point, not to a level I could quite remember and connect to – but I would see it again.
Because that same man who was lusted after, envied over, looked up to, was the man who’d sequester my mother in her own house; who drove her to near insanity, gave her life-long spinal injury, harmed himself and threatened to kill himself more times than I could count; who’d cheat relentlessly, drink so much he’d build pyramids of beer cans in his office, hide drugs in the house; who made the most intelligent, capable, compassionate woman I know into a shell of a being.
And no one believed her.
No one knew how bad it was, but when she tried telling them, they wouldn’t believe her.
It’s odd, because it’s not even that. It’s not even that people wouldn’t believe it—they just wouldn’t listen. The presumption of guilt was always on her, who must’ve done something wrong, said something wrong, not been enough.
I’m frankly not sure whether my family would still be alive if he’d had a gun.
Mostly I think he was too self-obsessed to actually do it—his threats were always a means to an end, control, and killing either himself or her would be ultimately relinquishing that control. It'd also make it much harder to still be seen as the amazing guy he was seen as beyond four walls.
But I also remember all the times he’d say she’d never have anyone else but him. Did it make her think of her own mother too?
She’s had men offer to kill him for her. She’s always said no.
Sometimes I wonder whether I’d say the same if I was in her place.
My mother went to her own mother once, back when her relationship with my father was somewhat fresh still. She’d wanted advice, comfort, reassurance, some light in the face of what we now know were clear warning signs.
Instead, her mother told her “you need to do what your husband tells you to do”. I believe my mother never tried to go to her for advice again—not that she had much time to get the chance to afterwards.
How many people told her the same thing. How many people said she was lucky to have a man like him, that she should be grateful; that she should be ‘less’.
She’s a miracle, frankly. In another world where she didn’t have me—because he didn’t want her to, as he didn’t—maybe she might’ve never left. She might’ve become her own mother, killed by her partner, or she might’ve become her own sister, beaten by him constantly, or her other sister, abused and controlled within an inch of her life for the rest of time, or her other sister, falling into the charms of another abuser presenting himself as a savior. Or her aunt, or her sister-in-law, or her grandmother...
It’s impossible to know the ‘what if’, of course, and it’s a waste of time to try to imagine it too much.
She’s said she certainly regrets not leaving earlier, but she never regrets being with him because it gave her us.
I can’t agree.
All her life she was told she was wrong somehow.
What would be of me if he’d killed my mother? I can think of so many times when it frankly could’ve happened, the statistics and our family history mere confirmations, and the one thing I know is that I wouldn’t be here still.
But what will be of me once she’s gone?
Well. I suppose we’ll see.
People look at you differently when they find these things out. It’s certainly interesting to see the reactions, and how most folks have no idea what to do with it. How scared they are, or how much they think you might need something from them. Sometimes it’s like watching someone find out that the boogeyman is real.
I don’t want anything from you. This is just my life; I don’t know any other.
So I baked myself a cake. That’s about all I could do, and I didn’t even particularly want to. It didn’t turn out that great, but adding sprinkles made it better, and I finished it the other day. For now, I’m just trying not to give my mother another heartbreak while she’s here.
Beyond that, I don’t know. I guess I wish everyone who laughed at Amber Heard has a choking incident that makes them scared within an inch of their life, just so they know what it’s like at least once; that’d make a great birthday gift for me because I’m not as good a person as my mother is, and, if offered, I’m not so sure I’d say no.