This month (October) is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. There are a lot of Eons members on this site and growing! I've only been a member since July, so I don't know if anyone has stepped up to tell their story of domestic violence in their lives or not. I just know that I must tell mine. This story can only be shared w/ you because my scars are healed! Scars from being beat physically, mentally, emotionally, and yes spiritually have ALL been healed by God. Having tried every way possible by man, God was the only complete Healer!

There may be a woman (or man) that feels there is no way out of their circumstances. You may have grandchildren that are in an abusive relationship. Even a great-grandchild, that has an abusive boy or girlfriend. So let us 'cry loud and spare not!' this month. I've opted to share bits and pieces over the course of the month, so here's my story....

Girls begin to dream of their 'Prince Charming' when they are very young. Listening and reading fairy tales, growing up, is all most of us talk about. So when I was 17 I THOUGHT I met my 'Prince Charming' who was 19. He wasn't my first love, (that was at 13) he was my Prince. A young man whose sister was a friend of mine. We all used to go rollerskating together on the weekends. He was shorter then me, (I'm 6'0") but what is height when your in love? My parents could have stopped me from the whole nine yards, but my father seperated from my mother when I was 12. Since I was a 'daddy's girl', mother and my relationship deteriorated, (I was adopted at 3 weeks old) worse then it already was. Needless to say, I was READY TO GO!

My mother told this young man (no doubt hoping to thwart his attempts) that if he wanted to date me, we would have to become engaged. Didn't scare us any. My boyfriend knew how miserable I was. I cried to him everyday after school. He would have to drop me off at the corner. He went and bought an engagement ring within the week! (never challenge young people!) We met so much oppostion on both sides that we began to plan just how we were going to be married. I was still in high school and wasn't about to let 13 years of school go down the drain. Graduation was a MUST!

A problem did arise. There was another woman that had her eyes on my prince charming. An older woman of 20. Although he proclaimed his undying love for me, she offered something that I was not about to offer until after marriage..SEX! But the icing on the cake was of course she got pregnant. My heart was broke, my mother was hollering, "I told you so!" and all I could do was cry.

After about a month or so the young woman had a miscarriage (was she really pregnant is still a mystery to me this day!) and I took (the jerk) my fiance' back. Young and in love puts blinders on you! That was my warning from God not to marry that boy, that had I not been trying to escape my mother, would have listened to.

In the span of 4 months and 5 days, I turned 18, moved out the house, and got married. The ride begins.

Part II

Past Doesn’t Determine Future Pt. 2
We began to settle into our adult lives, or so our ages of 18 & 20 years proclaimed. After all, age is nothing but a number. If your mental facilities don’t show physical signs of maturity, then they are just numbers behind one’s name. My husband was employed at a small local plumbing company, while I finished up my senior year of high school and worked part time at Sears, Roebuck Co. We had a particularly mild winter that year of ’74-’75. One day was a crystal clearly blue sky and no snow. Unseasonably warm for March. The day was beautiful, but the events on that day weren’t. I had gotten into an argument with my mother over the phone and on my math and science tests, I had flunked. Plus I missed being at home. Whether my mother and I saw eye to eye or not, was beside the point. Just a few months ago, I was a normal teenage living at home and the baby of the family. Now here I was trying to live life as an adult and it wasn’t going to swift.
I knew where my husband hid his weed, so I went and got it out of the top drawer of the dresser. (when a teenager gets bored, they get into trouble) A nice fresh “lid” of ‘red bud”. I opened the bag and inhaled. My husband was a recreational drug user. When he smoked weed, he wouldn’t offer me any. Said I didn’t need it and not to even start. I was cool with that because I figured he was trying to protect me. However, THIS day, my curiosity had gotten the best of me and I had to find out what all the woopla was about marijuana. It took me a few tries to roll a joint, but finally, I had the facsimile of one. Slowly I was creating new ‘bad habits’ that could kill me. Another was smoking cigarettes. Always trying to find ways to ‘calm my nerves.’ I lit the joint and inhaled. WOW!! I thought I was going to choke to death. It was much stronger then the occasional Kool Mild cigarette that I smoked every now and then.
“Not bad,” I thought as I stepped out on the back porch. I got half way through and said to myself that it didn’t make me feel any better then the cigs. Restless, I grabbed my tints (sunglasses) and decided to walk downtown, which was about 5 blocks away. By the time I got a half of a block, everything was magnified and more intense! That weed hit me like a ton of bricks! AND I was hungrier then I had EVER been in my life! Unable to eat up the whole downtown area, I went home carefree and NO problems.
When my husband got home from work, he knew I had gotten in his weed and although disappointed, he was alright. Little did I know that it was the beginning of 22 years of hell. 11 of those years with him.
It was about one and a half years later that my husband cheated on me again. I replaced cigarettes with weed and began drinking more than on the weekends. Through his many infidelities he gave me STD’s more then once. I got pregnant a couple of months after we were married, but had a miscarriage. Our first child was not conceived until 3 years later. During that period, we partied ALL the time.. Every weekend and some weekdays. My husband began to get into fights hurting other people and getting hurt his self. He lost a well paying job that had a promising career and future. He began breaking and entering into buildings and homes. It was like he was chasing some kind of thrill. We began to get into other drugs..hashish, tysticks and opium, along with more fighting. The police started coming around our apartment because someone had given them a tip that he was behind the rash of burglaries. He was finally arrested and put on probation. It was then that we decided it was time to move to another city and start fresh. Yeah we started fresh alright. A new kind of fight and violence erupted from my husband. Violence towards me, his wife.
We moved to a city about an hour away from our hometown, and got a room in a seedy hotel until we could get on our feet. Soon we got new jobs & seriously tried to turn our lives around. One evening, we were in some friends’ room drinking and drugging. (We were slowly reentering into party mode and still no kids) It was someone’s birthday party. One of our neighbors was a woman who had just moved into the hotel about 2 weeks before. Since my husband had already cheated on me twice, I kind of knew when he was checking a woman out. He had an appetite for older experienced women. We were all pretty tipsy and on the edge of drunkenness when he flashed his smile that should have only been intended for me. I screamed at him, “who in the f*% are you grinning at? It took him quite by surprise. I was always quietly passive with a ‘yes honey’ mentality. I was beginning to not care how I said things, trying to hold together a marriage that was doomed to failure from the start. ( I held on to the faith that my love, plus a child, would change him)
After blurting such a foul question that had shocked and embarrassed my husband, he quickly led me out into the hallway and asked me had I lost MY mind. We were in each others face! He stepped back into the room to ‘excuse us’ and took my arm and twisted it behind my back. Once we were at our door, he launched me into the room with his foot kicking my butt. I was shocked! He had never man handled me in such a way EVER! I turned around and screamed, “I know you didn’t just kick me bitch!” (Where I come from, to call anyone a bitch implied that you were about to STOMP their behind!) He said, “What did you call me?” I said. “BITCH” with my bottom lip curled. The look that I saw in that man’s eyes would be a high red alert to future beatings.
He pulled back his right fist and hit my eye like an arrow projected from the bow. For a few seconds we just looked at each other, too stunned to believe what had just happened! My mind could not even process that he had hit me! You don’t strike or hit the one you love! (abuse comes in more forms then just hitting too) He just got angry because of the way I confronted him about that woman. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have confronted him in front of everybody, I tried to convince myself. He’s really sorry and won’t do it again. He loves me and I him.
The next couple of days, I had to call into work until the swelling went down in my eye. And when I did go to work, my excuse was that I had too much to drink and I ran into the swinging kitchen door. (That sounded lame to me!) It wasn’t until after my son was born that my husband raised his hand to me again. Our lifestyle got progressively worse and I didn’t think anything about it because I was trying to hold on. After all we were young and that’s what young people did. Neither one of us kept gainful employment. Although it wasn’t hard for us to get a job, we never stayed at one longer then 2-3 years.
Our son was born 1 year later and our daughter 3 years after that. During that time things had gotten ridiculously bad. My mother and sister did a surprise visit on us and I had 2 black eyes, wearing sunglasses at night. Violence, drinking, drugs, sex, women, jail, all became a blur into what was supposed to be my life, happily ever after. About 2 years after my daughter was born, I made up my mind that things had to change. Either someone was going to die or my kids were going to be taken away from me. Not to mention that my children would grow up thinking that this behavior was normal and acceptable. So I began to go to shelters, but that didn’t do any good because I ended up right back with him. I prayed to God to give me the strength to do what I had to do for my children’s sake. One night, the last beating I took, was ENOUGH!!