Tea Tuesday: Memoirs of a Tainted Woman – Purple October

Hello and welcome back to another Tea Tuesday. I’ve taken such a long break since the first chapter but now the story continues because to every ending there is a beginning. In light of domestic violence awareness month, I wanted to share a small piece of a chapter that should have never been, for me or for any other human being out there. Before the prequel starts, let me just say that I’ve tried to write this piece as best and as clean as I possibly can but it may still be inappropriate for some audiences so if you find that it’s not your cup of Tea please come back for a different read. I fully understand it’s not for everyone.

“From every wound there is a scar, and every scar tells a story. A story that says I survived”

He was 18, almost 6 ft tall, medium build, dark, bushy eyebrows and had the exact replica of his mother’s smile and maybe even her tongue too. He was an inner city kid, behaved like one, spoke like one and hadn’t the slightest clue about his language or his culture. I married a boy with nothing, nothing but priviledge and a cushy upbringing that made him invincible. It was hard to believe that the person I would one day be standing across from was the same one who walzed into my life and promised me the world. It was even harder to believe that someone who’s hands never wanted to let go of mine would one day use it to strike me. Little did I know the world he promised would be so short lived and the heart break he’d unleash would cripple me for life. It would forever rob me of my innocence. The innocent boy who took me home late one night when I was 15, was not the same person I fled from at 16. The person I walked away from that day so many years ago was no more human than the shadows that lingered in my worst nightmares.

There’s no denying that many fragments of this chapter in my life still moves me to tears but I think a lot of people can be mistaken why any feelings would still remain after all these years. You can rest assure, I’ve stopped crying for him decades ago. Each time this story is told, the spellbinding pain dissipates just a little more. Those memories have been well detached from me yet they’re also a very real part of who I am. The truth is, I cry for the youth that I’ll never be able to get back. I cry for the young girl in me that I’ll never be able to go back in time to save and I cry for the mistakes that I have never been able to make amends with. People often wonder how the memories remain in tact after so much time has past but they fail to understand that victims of trauma continue to live that trauma. It’s hard to forget all the vile details that’s been embedded so deep. It has nothing to do with longing for that era, time, or even that person. Some say that if you continue to reminesce about something or someone, then it still matters to you. The only thing that matters to me now is sharing with you how very real domestic violence is and why it’s so important to bring awareness to it – especially in our culture.

I don’t know what you’ve heard, but we were a young marriage, like most marriages in that time. It was a marriage that started on all the wrong terms. One that wasn’t approved of on all sides. One created out of desperation, foolish ultimatums and young lust. One that not even heaven itself approved of. It was a celebration that started at dusk, such an unusual time to welcome a new bride. It made the atmosphere wreak in complete obligation. It was a matrimony amid a wavering storm. Thunder clapped and shook through the house in disapprovement as lightening danced across the night sky like fireworks outside the window. Yet, there we stood, commenced in ceremony, gazing, smiling, so innocent and unbeknownst to the anguish that would soon unravel. In the weeks to come was a tell tale wedding that followed. An event graced with the pitter patter of summer rain, rain which trickled alongside every tear drop of a young bride’s farewell. It was so grand yet so sad, almost grief-stricken. Ironic don’t you think. And just like a premonition of a broken marriage to come, a dismantled wedding umbrella was seen sholved into the back of a loaded van leaving nothing left intact but it’s iconic black and white striped trim flapping back and forth in the wind as we drove off into the sunset. My life as I knew it grew smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror until it finally disappeared into the gray horizon.

Married life started and before I even knew it puppy love was gone. All that remained was a selfish boy who couldn’t undo what he had done and a foolish girl who openly accepted her fate. He wasn’t man enough to own up to his mistakes and he didn’t love me enough to push forward with his commitment. I now understand that at 15 I couldn’t offer him any luxuries or guarantees. At 15, young love simply wasn’t enough to compensate for the bachelor life he gave up. It certainly wasn’t enough for a boy who everyone treasured and had so much hope for. Of course they all failed to consider that I too gave up the same for him and that my family also had high hopes and dreams for me.

And so, his metamorphasis began. First consumed by jealousy, then abuse and seclusion and finally succumbed by hate. It goes without saying that no matter how we define it, or how we try to justify it, abuse will always be abuse. It’s often a misconception that physical force alone defines this word, and for a male led culture, that was the prime belief. It’s the absence of this knowledge that imprisons a woman and plays such a significant role in the cycle of abuse. By the time any woman is actually given the platform it’s often too late. You see, not all abuse starts with physical or deadly force. Every abuser works up to their own level of comfort. For him, it was his jealous rage, one that dictated much of my life. And as he wreaked that havoc onto me he made sure there was no shortage of mental infliction and ridicule: I was shut out from the rest of the world, no one could befriend me, let alone look at me, and god forbid someone should ever be polite or helpful towards me. It was these unwritten rules that made it impossible to get through a day with him. Most nights ended with interrogation or accusation. But those were still considered the good old days, believe it or not. Getting dressed and groomed on a typical day was no ordinary affair. Dresses and skirts had to be a certain length, tanks needed cardigans, cardigans needed to be buttoned all the way up and makeup, I never knew when it was too much or not enough. You would think that this was my everyday attire but nope, only for times he didn’t have a direct line of sight on me. I made the foolish mistake of leaving my cardigan partially unbuttoned once and paid a hefty price for it. Getting kicked out of his car became just another norm to me. Ironic how posessive he was, yet I was never good enough for him. He had a certain type and it evidently wasn’t me. I wasn’t thin enough, pretty enough, or tall enough, turns out I wasn’t even the right race, but if I thought that was bad, I was going to learn a whole new meaning of hurt.

It seemed like one day he was my husband and then the next I woke up to a complete stranger. It was the epitome of sleeping with the enemy. I honestly can’t tell you when the metamorphasis took place. Was it while he slept, was it during one of our disagreements, or was it during one of those long, secret conversations with his mom and sisters. The table I set for him every night started to grow cold, the laughter I shared with him started to take on a different tone, and the more I tried the harder he resisted. The food I made was no longer tasteful to him, the things I did no longer suited him, and my character and words no longer sweet and tender to him. “I” was nothing more than a nuisance. “I” was no longer enough. Painfully, I watched him drown in hatred and regret as the space and silence between us grew further and further apart with each passing day. Were all the changes a result of his true colors bleeding through or was it a desperate plea from someone who’d been completely reconditioned and manipulated? It didn’t matter I guess, because once he decided he was comfortable, he sat back and unleashed a kind of hell that was impossible to break free from. To this day I still don’t know what burned more, his words and acts of betrayal or all the scars that he left behind. When he unlocked that door, the beast inside of him slowly crept out of the shadows and into the light. What remained human was reluctant to hit at first. It began with petty insults and ridicule; childsplay. I told myself it was “normal” behavior in a marriage, those small and superficial insults. Of course it eventually intensified to personal attacks, questioning of my intelligence and comparing me to other women. Yet I can’t say the blame was ever his to carry alone. If anything was going to make a marriage fall, it happened to that marriage; abuse, greed, conspiracy, cheating – nothing was an exception, everything was temptation for a foolish boy with a MOB standing behind him.

What was marital bliss disintigrated a few short months after we were married. In a memoir that I wrote many years ago I detailed a conversation he had with his sister late one night. What I overheard, the pain I encountered, it crushed my naïve and fragile heart – so much grief in one setting. I had no courage to confront him, to validate the words he whispered to her. He no longer loved me. He was afraid and he wanted out. I didn’t know how else to accept it but to pretend I never heard their conversation – to pretend it was only a fragment of my imagination. But as certain as my world changed after that night, so did his. He became a beast I could no longer tame. He started a war that changed our lives and forever robbed me of any peace of mind.

We fought every waking minute of our lives. We were so toxic for one another; pure poison. I became the wife that fought to hold on and he became the husband that wanted his freedom. There’s a saying in our culture that goes “kuv lawv koj qab los koj tsis xav tos, kuv mus ua ntej lawm los koj tsis xav lawv qab”. That phrase summed up my life in a nutshell. He didn’t want to be seen with me, he didn’t want to be close to me, and he didn’t want to be associated with me. I was a walking, talking, breathing puppet at his disposal. He pointed, cursed, and called out my stupidity in front of people. He degraded me in front of family and friends and he had no problem leaving me jilted in complete and utter embarassment, sometimes with a sprained ankle, with food, baggage and luggage all in toll, stranded. Public humiliation was a weekly ritual. But the ace up his sleeve was unleashing personal attacks on my family. It’s what he enjoyed most. It was the kryptonite to my weakness and he knew exactly what buttons to push. Protection? That word didn’t exist in our marriage or to him. Fending off hustlers late at night, encountering the supernatural, you name it, my safety was never his concern. It was easy for him to push me to the front line. Still, none of that was enough for me to let him go. I continued to follow in the footsteps of a traditional Hmong woman, to bear the beating, to be obedient, and to forgive and forget.

The thing about abuse and violence is that once someone gets a taste of that adrenaline it’s so hard to stop. It becomes a grave addiction, and for him, it was a supported addiction. Sooner or later all the yelling and cursing would fail to fuel the kind of rush he fiened for. If there’s no other truth, it’s that a victim will always find a way to justify a beating, especially the first encounter, if not all beatings after that. As for me, it was just another day, unprovoked. I was hit with the back snap of a baseball cap because I didn’t do his laundry the right way. He was OCD about his clothes. I should’ve known better I told myself. But once he had his foot in the door, anything after that was a walk in the park. Everything in his path was considered lethal weapon: basket balls, food, utensils, shoes, and towels. Have you ever had a towel whip so fast across your face it burned like ice? Towels were the worse.

And if that’s not enough, let me paint you a picture – standing in the middle of the kitchen, drenched in food, surrounded by shattered glass, surrending to him, shaking, praying that it isn’t blood you’re soaked in. Flinching at every scream and move that he makes. Panting and crying ever so silently just so he won’t chuck another object across the room. Sadly, this is just one of the many nights. This is no isolated incident. It isn’t a scene unique to the kitchen or over spilled food, it existed in every situation and in every room of that house and in every inch and corner of that bedroom.

Fear? I was stuck in survival mode all the time, it never even crossed my mind. It wasn’t until after my 2nd marriage did I pick up on my patterns and realized how much I did fear him. Once the beatings began, I learned how to walk on eggshells. I thought I was doing it for love; to keep the peace. I forgoed my school work in order to complete his. I got up and flew out the door at any time of the day or night on his command, rain or shine, sick or well, hungry or full because it wasn’t worth the consequences of making him wait. If I’d forget something on the road, I’d pray it wasn’t something of his otherwise it was routine to quietly go without it, accessories, necesseties, you name it. Bringing it up would only lead to more unpleasantries. And God forbid he should find out that I’ve misplaced something, I’d pay for it 7 ways to Sunday. But I always found a way to lose something, and sure enough he always found out. I was damned if I wore it and I was damned if I didn’t. I despised that ring, it was hardly the symbol it stood for. He hung it over me and it was the best excuse for so many deadly fights.

Eventually, the only part of me left that had any value was my body, and even then, it didn’t belong to me. Lifeless or by force, I was violently stripped of any dignity I’ve ever had to my name. At 15 who do you think a girl’s first and foremost savior is? Her father of course. I would cry out for my him on so many nights, but he never heard and sadly he never came. If he only knew, I think his heart would break in more ways than one, to see me, to think of me running around that room or every corner of that house trying to defend myself. So many nights I laid there and thought of my mom just so her memories would serenade me to sleep, but only after tears have formed a salted sahara at the bottoms of my cheeks. How I begged for mercy and for the suffering to end but evil is strong and evil is relentless. There was no escape, no place deep enough or dark enough to hide. I was violated, so angry, so defeated. I cried myself to exhuastion. I was submerged in water that only kept rising and when it would seep over the top it was that fighting gasp for air that made my cries crescendo into the night. But that house, it stood so still. No one wanted to bare witness to what was happening, after all, I wasn’t the ideal daughter-in-law. The only saving grace that ever came knocking occassionally on that bedroom door was his mother’s voice, humming, “Nyab…you better stop it” – in english, exactly like that. Sure, it managed to cease the commotion but it was no saving grace at all.

I would lay there, dazed in wander, Mom are you thinking of me tonight? Dad do you think of me as you’re getting ready for your day? My brothers and my sister, do you think of me when you’re in happier times? Do you think of me at all when you’re rejoicing together over a delicious meal? Because I laid on that cold hard floor, beat and famished, night after night and thought of you, one after the other. It was the only thing that I was able to hold on to. It was the only thing I thrived on to survive. I woke up every single morning of that year in a time warp and wished I was anywhere but there. Why was I paying so gravely for a mistake I made when I was 15? If there was a God, I’m sure he never heard any of my prayers because it never got better – I knew deep down that saving me was far beyond anyone’s reach.

Still – I fought, I begged and I pleaded for my freedom but he always gave me the same old, cold response “you gotta be cruel to be kind”. I can still hear those words echoing. I can still see that smirk. Love or lust, whatever it was that remained, he sold it for short-term comfort and loyalty. There was nothing left for him to reason with, nothing left for him to feel merciful for. We were no more than strangers living under the same roof. My name that he used to call for with so much sincerity was now nothing but a faint whisper in the wind, it was no more. I was actually lucky if he didn’t speak to me at all, but at that rate, I was answering to any name and anything. My stamina and my fight was slowly and surely coming to an end. Everyday he’d walk into that house and say “yog muaj ib hnub twg kuv los txog hauv lub tsev no es tsis pom koj lawm mas ntshe yuav tshav kuv ntuj nrig xwb os” and this was coming from a guy who barely spoke his own language. It was apparent, he’d been well trained. Long gone were the days he relied on his strength to control me. Long gone were the days he wasted time and energy to scream at me. I don’t know which was worse, when he still reacted to me or when I stopped existing to him. By the time I was on my way out the door, he’d already sombered down and ignored me into oblivion. So many nights I’d sit alone in that kitchen hovered over a cold plate of dinner wiping back my tears as he sat in the next room devouring his with the full enjoyment and company of his family. How ironic that I felt all the deprivations of an orphan child knowing fair well my family existed out there, so close and yet so far. I was no more than a shadow roaming that house, much less, an invisible spirit. That make-shift bed on the floor that he occassionally kicked me to had become my permanent place of rest. Every night he’d snicker “ntsej muag aws, cas koj yuav muaj kua muag quaj ua luaj nas. Kuv tsis tau pom ib tug neeg muaj kua muag ntau npaum li koj li os”. Over and over like a broken record.

Sure enough, it was the longest year of my life and the days leading up to my departure lasted even longer. By the time hate completely took over, I had been on shutter island for weeks if not months. I was shut out from the rest of the world. Any priviledges ever given to me had all been revoked. Allowances that my parents had been sending regularly were no longer coming through to me. Phone calls couldn’t go out or come in. School had ended for the year and summer had just started. It created, perhaps, the perfect setting to make me disappear. It’s true, that in a parallel universe time moves differently. I’ve aged 10 fold, I’d been dreaming, living in a nightmare, and most importantly, I’d been waiting for him to change – a ship that we both knew had long sailed. So, I looked at myself with the little life I had left in me and decided that I didn’t want to become part of the statistics. I didn’t want to become living proof of how deadly domestic violence could be. I mustered up any courage I had left and finally chose to save myself, for once, and for good.

I hope you can understand that there’s no way I could possibly walk you through all the trauma that occurred and even then it would be nothing more than repetition. What I do want to emphasize is that it doesn’t matter what graphic details I’ve left out, or that it was only a year in my life. It doesn’t even matter that I wasn’t the ideal wife or daughter-in-law. We all have choices and every choice bears a consequence. He decided to continue hurting me and I finally decided to leave. Don’t ever let your choices convince you that you deserve to be mistreated, humiliated or stripped of your dignity, even if those were poor choices. Remember that people change on their own terms so to sacrifice your safety, sanity, or humanity waiting on that hope alone is unwarranted. Some may say it was only a year of my life and that people have endured far worse. As true as that statement is, it was still a year too long. Cycles of abuse, no matter the length, should never exist. So please, let’s all do our part to end the cycle of abuse.

Last and foremost, please reach out to someone you trust or the nearest outreach center if you feel your well-being or safety is being threatened. Let me be clear that just as I don’t condone violence, I also don’t condone vengence and personal vendetta. Speaking as a survivor of domestic violence, I encourage you to be honest and truthful. I ask that you understand the significant difference between an abusive partner and leveraging your power as a woman for personal gain when coming forth. My intention is not to silence any woman, but it’s important to remember that every stand you take as a victim impacts the next woman in our culture and every word you say will forever be held against him – in the court of law.

As always, thank you for reading. I apologize and am aware that there hasn’t been a single light chapter yet among my blogs but I look forward to sharing a brighter side of life soon. Take care, and see you on the next Tea.