my story

I was duped from the start.  During our courtship, all the promises, all the glowing self-description, were lies designed to trap me into “until death do us part.”  The urgency to get engaged and married quickly, claiming passionate love.  It was all part of the plan, after which the promises meant nothing because I was no longer an equal or a person – I had become property.   The permanence of marriage was dangled in front of me smugly when I cried out in misery.  The sanctity of God’s covenant was an iron cage that he taunted me to try to break out of, knowing, believing that I would never do it as long as I believed it God’s will for me to stay.

When I read the book on abuse, all of it came crashing down around me.  My eyes were opened in a way that felt as shocking as the fall from Eden.  The book told the story of my life, clinically, emotionlessly, as accurately as if someone had been silently watching, listening, recording the shrieks and cries of our secret household.  I could not believe that the hapless victim in the book…was me.

I learned -- his every expressed pain had been a strategy.  His every accusation – a clever manipulation to keep me distracted and trapped.  Even the good times, the affection – all part of the plan.   Something in me snapped.  The foolish, blind, trusting, sweet, loving girl I was – she disappeared in a puff and I cannot find her again. 

It was as if the man I believed him to be suddenly vaporized before my eyes and I realized that he had never existed.  The man who had described himself before marriage as kindhearted, gentle, thoughtful and devoted – I had been searching for that man in what I thought was a little boy so scarred by pain that he lashed out blindly, and I had to love him back into wellness – I had thought that was a possibility.  But no, that man had never existed.  I had never had a chance.  He had made up the illusion in words, conjured him up out of imagination, and I had believed.  I had only caught glimpses of the desired one in the fog, and I pursued him in desperation, getting torn and ragged in the chase, as the elusive one struck back at me bafflingly in the darkness before slipping away again.  I cried out to him to wait, to trust me, to come to me, that I would love him and help him.  I stumbled blindly in the dark, weeping and hoping.  But when I finally caught up to him, the veil was torn away:  the image was an illusion and the real him stood there, cracking the whip at me and gloating that I could never, ever get away. 

He had never loved me.  Only loved to control me.  His affection was all conditional upon my complete obedience, and it evaporated the minute I stepped outside his will and expressed my own thoughts, even if it was only to express my pain, because it displeased him. He took all my gifts, everything good and beautiful about me, and used them for his benefit, and when they made him feel bad about his own inadequacies, he punished me for them. He used my every weakness to subjugate me and hurt me, taking what I gave him in trust in the quiet hours to hurt me when he pleased. He accused, he hounded, he neglected, he stifled.  He publicly humiliated me.  When I looked at myself in his eyes, even the best of me was pushed into the dirt and muck.   I became lost, swallowed up, in the whirlpool of his needs, desires, and interests.  By the end I could hardly tell what interests I had and who I was that was not conformed to his will.  

And the church kept telling me to go lower, serve harder, answer his every blow with love, his every cruelty with kindness and mercy.  I was reprimanded.  I was disbelieved.  I was accused.  When I wailed out loud in desperation to them, begging them for help, they clicked their tongues and wrote in their books that I was “overly dramatic” and needed emotional help.  “Temper your reaction,” they told me, “and try to respond in a different way.”

“And unless he hits you or cheats, you can never, ever leave him.”

I was doomed. 

And then God whispered to me – in the airport, in the quiet of the night, in the bitter tears of the morning, as I hesitated over the threshold of my marriage.  Like the moon to a fleeing Jane Eyre, he whispered, “Run, my daughter.  Go.  Quickly.”  He rescued me.  And in a sweet, incredible moment, I was free.

But now he comes back begging again, playing the part of the hurt little boy, pleading with me to come back, telling me that illusion man exists.  It is all the same old talk, the promises, the bargains.  Nothing has changed.  And people rally behind him, telling me I cannot divorce him even if he beats me, telling me that all marriages are hard and this is a problem common to all.  No.  No.  God did not create me to be a slave like this.  No.  Who will see but Jesus?  Who will witness my pain?