When I was 12 my mom had a friend whose husband beat her. It was the same every time. He’d be ok for a while—sometimes better than ok, for a day or two or ten he was maybe even the doting husband she’d long ago fallen in love with and said “I do” to—but then something would set him off and he’d go on a verbal and physical rampage. Each time he laid a hand on her she’d call the police and he’d get sent away to prison for a while—and each time she’d call my mom (with me in tow) and swear, SWEAR, that this time was the last time; this time she’d had enough; this time she’d learned her lesson; THIS time she’d finally realized that love wasn’t supposed to hurt this much.
Except her angry diatribe was easily quelled by his tearful apology. He promised he’d never, ever hurt her again. He was a changed man. He’d made a mistake, and all he wanted, all he NEEDED, was a second (or maybe a twentieth) chance; he’d finally, finally realized how much she meant to him. He knew her worth, and he didn’t want to lose her.
Except he DIDN’T know her worth. But neither did she. Even at age 12 I wondered if she’d ever heard this age-old adage: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” At the end of the day, he only did what he did because she allowed it. Even I, inexperienced child that I was, realized this. As I listened to her tearful assertions (“This time, Maria, I’m not letting him come back home. I deserve better than this. I can’t, won’t, do this to myself anymore.”) I wondered how anyone could value themselves so little; how any woman could say she “loved” a man—and, worse yet, swear he “loved” her—when the only thing holding them together was the nightmare they’d woven. I couldn’t wrap my brain around such self-inflicted torture. I was 12 and full of big dreams and an I-can-do-anything attitude—it seemed the easiest and most natural thing in the world to me for her to pack up her bags, leave her good-for-nothing husband, and start over. Move on to greener pastures. Find someone who’d love her wild mane; her warm brown eyes; her soft, sing-songy voice; her infectious laugh.
But for a reason that evaded me then, she chose to stay.
Twelve years later, I see that her situation wasn’t unique. Hers might have been one of the more extreme cases I’ve encountered in my 24 years of existence, but it was certainly not the last. In fact, it happens all too often. It’s happened to me, to my mom, to my aunt, to my college professor, to the woman behind the check-out counter at the supermarket—all of us have, at one point or other, stayed when we should have left. We’ve done all the math in our head—how thin are we? how popular were we in high school? how many boys asked us to the prom?—and come up with a myriad of formulas and equations to denote our worth: Sara is worth two abusive relationships and a dead-end job she abhors; Claudia is worth three years of being a doormat and friends who like her as long as she lends them money; Cindy is worth a decade of low self-esteem and a boyfriend she only tolerates.
We settle. We compromise. We accept the unacceptable because we don’t believe we deserve better. I was a precocious child raised to believe I could do and be anything my heart desired but even I have played the “unworthy” card; even I have sought lesser things because deep down the unchallenged belief is that I’m a lesser thing myself.
The truth of the matter is that none of us have gone through life unscathed. Our pasts are riddled with the very things we unconsciously invite into our lives now: abuse, rejection, betrayal, abandonment, slander, contempt—the list goes on. And on. Somewhere along the line someone made us feel unloved; someone told us we were ugly; a teacher told us we’d never amount to anything in life; the man who promised to love us forever walked away and never looked back; we were bullied, insulted, degraded; the scale or the mirror or the movies or, sometimes, our own flesh and blood, told us we just weren’t good enough—and we accepted it as irrefutable truth. So we stay with the husbands who show us their love with blows to the head. We know our dreams are too big so we stop dreaming. We chase after people incapable of loving us because we don’t really want to be loved anyway. Isn’t that a scary thought? That, ultimately, we’re the keeper of our own keys; the guards outside our own cells; the villain counterpart to our own repressed hero?
I think sometimes we forget that we have a choice. We were powerless to stop our parent’s divorce; our father never asked us for permission before he left our family and started a new one; Life never took us for coffee and politely inquired what we’d like from it and how much heartache we’d be able to withstand before the damage became irreparable. For better or worse, at one point we really DIDN’T have a choice. The love we were given was the love we had to accept. The circumstances we were born into would color every aspect of our lives until we grew up enough to assume responsibility for our own present and future. And once we no longer had to rely on Mom or Dad or Abuelo or Abuela to feed and clothe and shelter us the choice became ours: what are we worth? What are we worth to ourselves?
Because THAT, my dears, is the important question at the end of the day. NOT: What am I worth to him? To her? To my teacher, my pastor, my friend? They’ll do unto you as you do unto yourself. You can cry and complain and raise a battle cry against all the injustice, but if you stay it’s because you made the decision to do so.
I’m no longer 12. I have more scars, more hurts, more emotional baggage than I did then, when I looked at my mom’s friend’s tear-streaked face and wondered how anyone could love herself so little. Knowing what I know now, I don’t think I would judge her so harshly. But I’d tell her that Rob isn’t the issue. Even his violent abuse isn’t the issue. The issue is her own conception of who she is and what she’s worth. It’s what she’s allowed—what she ALLOWS and most likely will continue to allow—because her gauge is warped, broken, misaligned with the reality of her inherent value as a human being. I would tell her that she’s beautiful. That her smile lights up a room. That, when you love yourself first, love from someone else DOESN’T hurt—not ever.
I don’t know where she is now, but I hope, like I did then, that she finally stood up.
