With my bicycle ride across the country now over and done with, I found myself in need of a hair cut. So, my feisty 83-year-old mother escorted me to her hair salon to meet her hairdresser, Maria. And so the story begins as some stories do, a happenstance meeting with another human being, someone you don’t know, who not unlike yourself is on a quest that enlightens and informs your own personal quest.
Maria cut my hair and we talked about our families. I don’t know how and I don’t know when, but at some point, we crossed the threshold into a very candid and engaging conversation on the subjects of child abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence and forgiveness. Given that the salon was really not a conducive place for us to fully carry out our conversation, I asked Maria if I could interview her at a later time so that I could record and possibly share her story.
“If I tell you my story and it helps somebody, sure why not” she said.
A few days later, I arrived at Maria’s house, walked to the front door, rang the doorbell and, as I waited, noticed a package that had been left on the front steps. When Maria opened the door I picked it up and handed it to her.
“Oh that must be my husbands work boots,” she said, as she took the package. “How are you”? Come in please.”
Maria put the box down and introduced me to her only daughter, Sarah, who’s about twenty years old and just arrived home from college on summer break. Maria is very proud of Sarah, and rightly so. As I witnessed their interaction, it was palpably clear that a powerful bond exists between them and this realization in some way compelled me to ask Sarah if she would be comfortable joining us.
“Sure. OK,” she said.
“She knows all that I’m going to tell you, I have never kept any of it from her,” Maria added.
Maria placed the glass of water she’d offered me on the kitchen table and sat down across from me and next to her daughter. As we were about to start the interview, Maria said that she would like to tell me the story in English rather than Spanish, that it would be easier for her. Telling it in English would not be as sad or as painful.
“Of course,” I replied. And so the story commenced.
“I remember the first time my mother beat me. I was three,” Maria began. “At the time I was living in Spain and I remember that I was three because we had moved to a different house, It was an old house but it was a new residence for us. We were in the kitchen and I was looking at her as she swept the floor, we were alone. I was sitting against the wall with my hands in my lap, I was so happy. I watched her and thought, Wow, my mom is beautiful, so beautiful! All of a sudden, she just hit me with the broom and I didn’t know what was happening. And she just started laughing and I started crying and she hit me again and she started making fun of the situation, like laughing. That was the moment that I realized that I wasn’t safe.”
I asked Maria where her father was, she told me that he wasn’t around most of the time because he worked at sea. He was a fisherman and was usually gone six months at a time. “That was the nightmare, when he wasn’t home. When he was home everything was fine. He never suspected what was going on in the house and I would be terrified to share that with him because she made sure that I knew that I would have to suffer the consequences when he left, if I ever said anything to my dad.”
(She also said that her father was a smoker. Because of that she’s always loved the smell of cigarettes. Cigarette smoke makes her feel safe and perhaps because of that she started smoking when she was 13 years old. “The first time I tried a cigarette I just loved it!” she said.)
Maria recounted that the abuse endured throughout most of her childhood and early teenage years. She recalled being pulled out of bed one night while sleeping. “It was late at night and it was raining. My mother dragged me outside to the back yard and she kept hitting me and repeating, I told you to be quiet, I told you to be quiet and you don’t listen.”
Maria believes that her older brother and sister must have been making some noise and, without bothering to ask who was doing it, Maria was singled out. She stood out in that rain for about half an hour, but to her it felt like much longer.
“I was so terrified to be outside in the dark and it was raining and thundering, to me it was an eternity.” She was five years old at the time.
Maria turned to Sarah and said to her that she’s pretty sure that there must have been good moments in her childhood. Pausing, to search back through the chambers of her mind, she is unable to remember any. Turning back to me, she says that for her the bad moments were so extreme that she must have thrown away anything good that could have happened.
”One of those really bad moments I remember because I was about to start first grade and had just turned six. My brother or sisters broke the chain of the rubber sink stopper in the bathroom and blamed it on me. I remember my mother put me on the bed and started hitting me, just went on and on and on and on, saying, ‘Say the truth! Di la verdad, fuiste tu! (it was you!)’
“I didn’t do it, I kept yelling and screaming, I didn’t do it!’”
“If you don’t say the truth, I’m going to go to the kitchen, I’m going to take a knife and I’m going to kill you.”
It was in that moment that Maria learned, that for her to be safe, she had to start lying.
It was also around this time that Maria’s older brother began to sexually molest her, which she had revealed during our initial conversation at the salon. He sexually abused her from six years of age to fourteen.
“What’s really strange” she said “is that a couple of days after our conversation at the salon, out of the blue, my brother reached out to me through Facebook”.
“Out of nowhere, he started telling me that Jesus Christ is talking to him, that he’s so sorry for what he did, and he went on and on and on. And I replied I forgave you a long time ago. You don’t have that over me.”
After Maria married and had her daughter, she put all that behind, she said. “I kept it a secret for a long time, I did, and that’s a horrible feeling because that’s a feeling of shame, you feel ashamed for what happened to you because you feel that it’s your fault, that you should have done something more, that you should tell people. But it was a taboo thing to talk about sex. I was born during the times of Francisco Franco( a strongly authoritarian regime that existed in Spain from 1936 until 1975) -- anything sexual led to a punishment. Telling my mother what my brother was doing to me, after all the beatings she gave me, that was no option.”
The last time Maria recollects her mother laying a hand on her, she remembers her mother punching her in the face and bloodying her nose, running upstairs and locking herself in her room. Her mother was outside trying to open the door.
“I’m not staying here for this,” Maria remembered thinking. She had a pink shirt that her grandmother had given her -- a fake Adidas shirt that was covered in blood from her nose. Outside her window was a mountain of gravel from a construction site and she decided that if she jumped and broke something that her mother would at least take her to the hospital, and so she jumped. She landed safely, ran to her grandmother’s house and asked her to take her to the police.
In the late 70’s, in Spain, no one went to the police. “I told the police my mother did this to me, can I get her arrested? Can I do something about it? They told me that there wasn’t any law preventing my mother from beating me. I think she found out that I went to the police as after that she stopped beating me.”
A couple of years later, Maria met a man from a Portuguese family. After a fairly brief courtship of six months, they married. “I saw that he was a hard-working guy and he was good-looking”, Maria laughs. They moved from Spain to United States, as he had family in New Jersey. Soon after, another set of problems began.
“He comes from a culture were the man is the dominant one, you have to do what the man wants to do. So he would be very mean about things like money. He was always worried about the money. He was also physical but he didn’t think it was wrong because he just pushed me. He didn’t beat me, cause his father used to beat the crap out of his mother, I guess he thought pushing was okay. But my girlfriend would confront him and say stop beating her, you push a woman against the wall, that’s beating her. But I didn’t let him get away with it, I fought right back and after he did something like that, twenty minutes later he cried and said he was sorry. I thought this guy is more screwed up than I am. So I fought back because ever since I was a kid, you know, I promised I wouldn’t let anyone treat me like that when I grew up. So I called the cops on him a couple of times. The last time was on Sara's second birthday, it was a Saturday morning and I had to get her cake. I remember it was a Barbie cake.”
Maria had asked him to stay home with Sarah. He said NO, he was going to the gym. And he did, he went to the gym. So when he went home, she told him that on Monday she was going to go to a lawyer and get a divorce. His response was to go to the bank and withdraw all the money. He left Maria with nothing except her paycheck of $300. That’s when Maria decided she wasn’t going to take it because now he was threatening her ability to take care of her daughter and she was going to fight like a lion. So she called the cops.
“A couple of days prior to the incident I tried to climb over the fence in the back yard and fell, leaving a huge bruise on my leg. So when these two cops arrived at my house and ask me what happened, I told them that he left and went to his mother’s house. I told them that we started having a fight in the morning, about babysitting my daughter and he kicked me. I showed them the leg and they said: ‘Wow! That’s pretty bad,’ and I said, ‘I know, and on top of that he took all the money out of the bank, I have a two-year-old, what do you expect me to do?’
“This is why I believe in God and know that God is real,” said Maria.
“The two cops that showed up at my door, I showed them his picture and it turned out they knew him, they knew my husband. You see before I met him he had already been married to a young Portuguese gal that lived in this neighborhood. It was a short marriage; he was 22 years old. Anyway, it turned out that he beat the crap out of her a couple of times and so these cops, they had already been involved with him. They gave me a restraining order against him and when I went to court, the cops and judge were in my favor, and he goes to jail for a couple of days. I eventually get a lawyer and even though his lawyer tells him not to contact me cause he could get locked up for five years, he kept calling and calling and begging me back. At this point I weighed the good and the bad of a divorce. I wanted my daughter to have a father, I didn’t want her when she turns 18 to blame me for a divorce, and also he was a good provider. So I decided to give him a final chance and we went to a marriage counselor. I picked a Portuguese psychologist, not an American one, because I knew that if I picked an American one he would not trust him as much. I picked one for his background and we went to therapy for a couple of months and he did make an effort, I’m not going to tell you that everything changed from one day to the other because it didn’t, but he tried, he was a little bit more understanding. If you asked him today he probably wouldn’t admit it, but a couple of times he has told me that he is lucky and grateful that I didn’t leave him.”
At this point I asked Sarah how she thinks her mother’s experiences have influenced her life experience. “I think because my mom experienced what she experienced, she did everything that she could and everything there was to do for me to experience the complete opposite. Never in my life can I remember feeling unsafe, feeling unstable at all. If anything, it’s been the complete opposite, she and my father have made it so that there have been no bumps in the road.
They’ve had their fights, but I’ve never felt unsafe. I don’t really remember half of my childhood, maybe because it was so flowery and fantastic. I don’t have the memories that my mother has, I’ve been very sheltered. I feel because of the way my mom and dad raised me, I don’t feel anything can stop me. My mom and my father are working-class people and they worked really hard to get me to where I am. For me it was never really an option not to go to college and now I’m a very driven individual. From the moment I started college I hit the ground running. In my freshman year I got an internship. I’ve just finished my junior year and am doing very well, so for me, whatever my mother’s done, whatever my father’s done, has put me on the road I’m on.“
Maria cried as she told me that deep down in her heart she feels that she is a loving person and was a loving person when she was little. The narrative about her life that she’s shared with me has not changed who she was and was born to be. She just thinks that without the trauma, she would have been so much happier, so much healthier, but her childhood trauma has not made her an aggressive person or vindictive person.
When Maria talks to her mother about times in her childhood her mother tells her that she doesn’t remember. “That kind of bothered me a lot because I felt that she didn’t want to take any blame for it. At least say I’m sorry, say something, you know…own it! Say okay, I didn’t know how to be better. I had my own issues, I’m sorry that that happened. I think that’s what hurts me the most, that she doesn’t remember, she doesn’t remember anything negative.”
But Maria doesn’t want her mother to feel she was a bad mother. “I’m pretty sure in some moments she was a good mother. My mother told me that she should have put her priorities together and that set me free. My faith in God sustains me.”
Maria’s narrative of violence is complex and cannot be grasped through the one-size-fits-all lens of discipline and education that we presently dwell in. Her resilience and wisdom has enabled her to learn how to carry her trauma and turn it into something positive. Sarah is proof that families can overcome violence and thrive.
Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor and researcher at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, has interviewed thousands of domestic violence survivors. Recently in speaking about the Ray Rice incident, she said, "This is a teachable moment for the public to not only understand a little more about how domestic violence happens and how serious it is, and how there is no excuse for that kind of behavior, and how there should be very clear sanctions, but sanctions are not enough.”
She continued "When someone is abusive toward another person — violent toward a loved one — there are deep and complex reasons for that. That’s not to excuse anyone. But ... this kind of human behavior needs some real strategic intervention specifically for domestic violence.”
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month and I’ve shared Maria's story with the hope it helps those who read it see that success is more than just ‘ending the violence, that it is much more nuanced, that it requires a recognition of the more subtle though ultimately life enhancing changes.
(Jane Stevens has laid out a very powerful road map for us that point us in the right direction. http://acestoohigh.com/2014/09...layers-on-the-field/)
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