Blue Flax

     In my book, one of the essays I was most satisfied with, and received the most feedback for, is entitled "Blue Flax Dance," a piece that explores the many letting-gos a woman must live through, comparing the life of a married woman/mother to the life cycle of the blue flax flowers that bloom wild all summer in meadows, barrow pits and flower beds throughout the West. In "Blue Flax," I write of a watching a married couple circle the dance floor on Saturday night when I'd had a fight with Shawn and ended up at the bar. I talk of how graceful the woman was as she followed her husband's lead, "swirling, turning, dancing backwards with elegance and grace." To appear so graceful on the floor, the woman had to let go of the will to control the dance, and move backwards to her husband's moves, in order to propel the dance forwards. 

    I did that for nearly 30 years - danced backwards to keep my marriage intact, my family together. The woman in the rose-colored dancing dress might have been blessed enough to have a husband who fully supported and cherished her, so that she could relax in his arms, trusting his vision to guide them across the floor, confident in his strength to protect her and keep her from falling.  

    I did not. 

    Written between the lines of "Blue Flax" is the story of a woman constantly moving from ranch to ranch because of a husband whose perennial dissatisfaction led to a constant search for a "perfect" job. The fight we'd had the night before I'd driven wildly to the bar? Earlier that evening, he'd told me he had given his two weeks' notice at the ranch where we'd lived for five years; although we'd discussed him quitting, he actually resigned without telling me. He'd also rented a house in town before I'd even had a chance to view it. The new job he'd accepted, the house he'd rented? He thought both of those things were "what's best for our family." Whether the new house and job, leaving the ranch at Ucross, were good or bad for our family is beside the point. The point is that he made that decision alone, without listening to my voice. Leadership of the dance, our family, taken, not given.  Definitely not earned. 

    And yet, when I, justifiably, got angry and left the house, I allowed a chance encounter with a married woman dancing in a small town bar to convince me to just go back home. I even wrote that digging in my heels, refusing to leave - as if I had a choice - would make me a "bitch."  

    I look back now at that label and in that one seemingly small word lies the crushing weight of patriarchy, the absolute devaluing of woman's power. Language can be used a s a weapon, and in my relationship with Shawn, it was the instrument of choice. Often the words used were innocent-sounding enough.... just like his justification that he wanted "what's best" for our family earlier that day. Using terms like those allows a gaslighter, a manipulator, to take the upper hand in a conversation, because any further argument against his point would be, by default, a fight against "what's best." To argue against "what's best" would make me the selfish one, the one who didn't care about our family. Insinuations of my selfishness made up the current I swam against daily, the current I drowned in most of the time. 

    Sometimes, the abuse was more blatant, the weapons more sharply pointed - labeling me "bitch" or "cunt' any time I did stand up to the manipulation, raise my face out of the current long enough to out-argue and out-reason him. When he knew he couldn't win by any other means - short of physical abuse - Shawn hurled words so hurtful that I stopped speaking just to make them stop.  Interestingly, the fact that he "never laid a hand" on me was a source of pride to Shawn. 

    But in order for the verbal abuse to work, in order for those words to have an effect on my decisions, my own brain had to cooperate. I had to buy into the illusion that a good mom only wants "what's best" for her family - never what's best for her. Forget any idea that what is best for a mom could actually be the highest good for her children as well - that idea was not even a consideration My worth was based on my ability to let go, to sacrifice - like generations of "good" moms before me. The woman labeled by men as "bitches," "cunts," "ball-breakers," and "nasty women" - these were the selfish ones, the dark witches who ate children and danced naked in the forest. We didn't talk about those ones. We strove never to be one of those women. We were "good" girls. 

    In truth, the woman on the dance floor didn't convince me to go back home, to Shawn, that night: my culture did. The culture that told me, growing up, that only "good" girls got to heaven. The culture that taught me to take care of others, to put my needs second, to blend into the wallpaper and not call attention to myself, my needs. The culture that ignored my adventuresome recklessness and my deep intelligence but praised my cookie-baking and jelly-canning skills, and told me I'd "make someone a good wife someday." The culture that raised me to view having a man as the ultimate proof of my worth, to view other women as competition for a limited number of men on the planet, to feel triumph when a man - regardless of his own value as a human being - "chose" me over another girl. The culture that whispered about the shame of divorces and the tragedy of single motherhood. The culture that marveled at my supposed abilities to raise six babies, commenting on what a "good" mom I was. 

    The depth of the horseshit in these beliefs suffocates me.  Looking back now at that night, over sixteen years ago, and knowing in hindsight what was to come for my babies, I will tell you what a "good" mom would have done. 

    A good mom would have packed those six babies into that oversized SUV before speeding down the highway, and she wouldn't have stopped at a goddamn bar. She would have swallowed her pride, let go of the need for her family's  approval, and she would have driven all the way to the South Dakota farm where she and her babies were safe, would have told the truth, would have asked for help. She would have let go of the belief that she could handle it all, that she was somehow still in control.  She would have surrendered to the dance, accepted the signs that had already started blazing, and put to death any idea of being a perfect wife and mother. 

     A good mom would not have allowed her babies to grow up thinking such an imbalance of power was natural in a marriage. She would not have allowed her precious, beautiful daughters to learn that grace and worth came from dancing backwards, from dropping pieces of their identities, the way the blue flax drops it petals, in order to earn a man's approval. She would not a have allowed her sweet, handsome son to grow up thinking that simply being male entitled him to special treatment.  Mostly, she would have allowed her children to see her for all she was, not just the parts that were socially accepted and approved of.  She'd have let them see the beauty of her breaking down and falling apart, instead of the false, filtered, carefully-kept-together version she usually presented. 

    And yet, as angry as I am now at the woman who went back home that night, I have compassion for her as well.  She was 34 years old. My oldest daughter just turned 27 - only 7 years' difference. That 34-year-old woman simply made the best choice she could have at the moment.  She believed she was doing the right thing, and until that belief changed, she was not capable of leaving. So she survived.  Like the blue flax, she adapted to her tough environment by letting go of things.... but not the things I originally wrote about.  Sure, that woman let go of her body, her beauty, her own personal dreams.  But she let go of so much more. 

    When the blue flax drops its petals, it appears as dead as any other flower past its bloom. In truth, I had been dying, slowly, for many years before that full-moon night.  A petal dropped when Shawn first told me to fuck off, the night before our wedding, when he was so blindly drunk he couldn't stand up.  A petal dropped the next day, when he found me and apologized, so tearful, so contrite, and I smiled my way through the ceremony and laughed as he got drunk again at the reception. A petal dropped when his parents came to visit shortly after our wedding, and his mother cried that he wouldn't sit with her anymore, so he left me alone on the love seat and went to sit with her on the couch. A petal dropped when he arrived at the hospital where my dad lay dying, and couldn't wait to get to the hotel to have sex to "make me feel better." A petal dropped when Laura, our oldest, was delivered by c-section, and he became angry at the prospect of not having sex for eight weeks, and then lamented that I didn't seem to have time for him now that the baby was here. 

    So many years. So many petals. So much dying. The fights over leaving various ranches, various homes, my jobs almost always sacrificed for his. My bouts with loneliness and depression when the moves and the isolation became too much, and his frustration at why I couldn't "just be happy."  The texts, phone calls, and pictures from strange women, or sometimes women I actually knew, who were "just friends" or "just clients." The criticism of our kids, that they were too loud, too messy, too spoiled, too overweight, too ... whatever,  and that somehow it was my job to fix them. The endless dissatisfaction, with jobs, with meals, with weekend plans, with me.  The silent treatments, hours and days without speaking to me, often without explanation, broken usually with fiery, intense bouts of sex that left me confused and uneasy, though I didn't understand why.  And always, above all, the words - sometimes innocent-sounding, sometimes blatantly disrespectful, but always having the effect of making me choose between the uneasy feeling in my gut and the nagging voice in my head that told me to "just go home."

    But I didn't know where home was.  I thought home would be the life I had created, the wife and mother of six, the hard-working, resourceful woman who could manage a huge family, a huge home, and a husband with a huge ego.  I'd been brought up to believe that God only gives us as much as we can handle, and so I didn't question that He seemed to think I could handle a lot.  I simply disassociated from myself.  I learned to work twelve to sixteen hour days, to be mind-numbingly productive, to fill every waking moment with a project or errand, to prove my worth my what I accomplished. After all, that's what the women in my family had done for generations.  I learned to anticipate Shawn's moods, and to intercept bad behavior, difficult news, and minor inconveniences such as my monthly cycle, all in order to prevent his outbursts.  I became not just a control freak, but a control monster.  I bought into the myth - planted in my mind since childhood - that if I just did enough, accomplished enough, brought home enough, supported enough, he would finally approve of me, finally love me, finally see me. The way that woman on the dance floor seemed to be seen by her husband.  

    Over the years, after that full-moon night, that 34-year-old woman - who grew to be 51-year-old me - let go of more than her dignity.  She let go of being a stay-at-home mom, to return to work twice - once as a teacher, and once, after yet-another move to yet-another ranch, as a public librarian. And that letting go of the idea of being a stay-at-home mom, that forcing herself out of the isolation her husband would have liked to keep her in, led to a career, a masters' degree, and a workplace of women with healthy - or at least healthier - marriages.  Where the woman in the rose-colored dress convinced me to return to Shawn and his various infidelities, the women at my library job showed me that marriage could be more than a continual backwards dance with a partner whose moves were dangerously predictable. I began to see that having a man who loves you has less to do with who you are as a woman, and more to do with who that man is himself. Some men are not capable of love. 

     Not that the letting go became any easier for me.  In the spring of 2019, I was forced to let go of that which I'd literally sacrificed everything for - my marriage and even two of my kids.  In moves that followed a classic narcissistic discard, Shawn started a relationship with another woman while still living and sleeping with me, and then asked for a divorce when that woman promised to divorce her own husband.  What followed, the months that followed, were the darkest I've experienced in my life.  The things I've since learned about Shawn - about the multiple infidelities going back at least to the time I was pregnant with Emily, if not before; about the smear campaign he began with our children long before he discarded me; about the web of lies and false images he kept in place to protect him from being seen for who he truly was; about the actions - such as attempting to slice the tires of a hired man who quit him - that he blamed on me; about the threats and insults he used on our children to demoralize and control them - these have threatened to destroy me, have come close to convincing me that my life is no longer worth living. The tears, the crushing ache, the obsessive thoughts, the overwhelming guilt, and the wretchedness of that period were unlike anything I've ever had to survive. 

    And yet, I did survive. Or more accurately, I am surviving; each day is a new battle.  I survived the way I survived the emotional abuse for nearly 30 years.  I cooked, I cleaned, I gardened.  I sobbed, I screamed, I prayed. I threw my time and attention to creating a home and caring for my kids.  Sometimes I escaped into books, but I also used books and information to fertilize the growing knowledge within me, the knowledge that the abuse I suffered was not my fault.... it reflected a poison within the man I had married, but not a defect in me. 

    And I am gradually letting go, again. I am now letting go of those ideas from childhood that a woman's worth comes from keeping a man, a marriage, a family.  I'm letting go of the conditioning of my church, that somehow married life is holier, counts for more, than single, divorced life.  I'm letting go of the idea that a man, any man, should be able to determine my value, and I'm facing the dark part within me that has sought that male validation for most of my life.  

     Any gardener knows that a flower that holds on to a bloom too long runs the risk of depleting resources for future blooms, and for the life of the plant in general. This is why we "dead-head" most flowers; but the blue flax, in the wisdom of the great Gardener, drops its blooms on its own, every day.  It continually lets go in order to conserve strength, in order for the entire plant to become stronger, bigger, healthier. As I work to grow stronger, I think of all the petals that have littered the past 30 years, and I realize that I had to go through what I did in order to know what I know now.  To have learned what I know about narcissism, about emotional abuse, and about how my conditioning made me susceptible back when I was 34 might have destroyed me; my roots weren't deep enough, my strength wasn't developed enough.  And as I learn, let go, and connect to the voice within, it sounds a lot like the one I heard in that bar years ago: "Just go home, Darcy."  Only now, that voice comes from a deeper place, a safer place; it sounds more like love and less like correction. Only now, I know my home is the wild soul within me, the force that blooms like the blue flax in the barrow ditches, for its own sake and nobody else's.  Only now, I dance alone, wild and messy and uncertain, but finally free. 

July 3, 2020

30 years.  

30 years since that full-moon Yellowstone night when you picked me up at the ranch and we headed in to Ennis.  We, the crew, were all frustrated at the boss' demands, the late night, the ever-more-important clients who saw all of us as little more than services rendered for the cost of their once-in-a-lifetime dude ranch vacation. 

God, you were charming.  And funny. You showed up in your big black cowboy hat, smiling shyly and saying "a little bird" had told you I wanted to go dancing. My white knight, riding in on your Jeep Cherokee to rescue me from the drudgery of another lonely night in the lodge. My hero. 

It was our first official date. We'd met just a few weeks earlier, when Barbara introduced me to you and the guys in the lodge basement -- you'd been spinning your lariat, doing the same rope trick our son would master many years later. You stopped spinning and touched the brim of your hat; your old-fashioned manners made me think you were older. We laughed about that later, on the night we went to the bar with the rest of the crew and both revealed we were too young to get in. 

After I left the basement that first night, you turned and told the other guys to "back off - she's mine." Or at least, that's what you told me later. At the time, it seemed sweet; now it's just creepy and possessive. 

And so we went to Ennis, that magical town we shared a common love for, and in our Camelot, we danced. And somewhere amid the twirls and the beers, the slow dances and the long kisses, I knew. I was yours. And I decided to love you that night, to give you all of me - not just my body, but to offer you what I loved best about myself: my wild, open heart, my fire and ice intensity, my ever-thinking mind and ever-working body. I entered a dance with you that night, and I haven't danced with another in 30 years. 

At our wedding a short year and two months later, we asked the band to play an Alabama song, "Forever's As Far As I'll Go."  It was the song you'd sung to me during the ceremony - the promise in the lyrics calmed me, moved me, reassured me.  And I believe that back then, you believed your promise, too. 

But Mike and the Montana Muskrats didn't know that song. Instead, they offered another: "The Dance" by Garth Brooks, a wildly popular country singer. I didn't like the choice. It's a haunting song about pain, about love ending, about all the things I thought could never happen to us. But you said it was fine, and not wanting to make a fuss, I went along. Stuffed my intuition down into my churning stomach, probably drank another beer, and stepped out onto the floor. 

        "O-our lives, are better left to chance; 

        I could have missed the pain, 

       But then I'd have had to miss

       The ... dance."

And so here I sit on the back deck of the house I bought without you, trying to write out the pain, bleeding blue ink onto the page and weeping tears and snot down my face. I've cried more in the last year than I ever knew I could, and still a river pours out. I didn't know grief could be this deep and wide and constant. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better if you had died instead of asking for divorce, instead of replacing me with so many other women. At least then I could have continued to live in the illusion of you being my white knight, my hero, my partner. At least then I wouldn't have had to see what you've become, or what you've finally revealed. 

When I listen to that song now, sometimes I wonder if I should have refused your offer that July 3rd night, if I should have just gone to bed like a dutiful employee. Sometimes I wonder why that girl, for all her intellect and all her sass, was so swept away by your cowboy charm that she ignored the signs of your darker side - the temper, the jealousy, and oh God, the possessiveness. 

But instead I learned to dance with you.  It wasn't easy. You danced differently than most of the partners I had had before - a quirky combination of country swing, clogging and a little square dancing.  Friends who sometimes danced with you commented on how hard you were to follow. But I learned your steps, caught on to the patterns, figured out how to anticipate your moves - anything to avoid the thunderstorm that crossed your face when I missed your hand coming out of a spin. I became expert at dancing your way - stepping backwards to your moves. 

Not always, though. Sometimes I'd try to take the lead, to smooth out the rhythm and even out the steps into something a little less exhausting. Or I'd pull you onto the floor in a burst of joy as a song from my past set fire to me, twirling and spinning away from your arms, free in my own orbit. The first scenario usually led to a whispered growl to "let me lead, goddammit." The second led you to pull me back in, stilling my fire and laughing at my abandon -- until later years, when you really would abandon me, walk off the floor and leave me dancing with myself. 

Or sometimes, I'd be distant, detached while we danced, spinning through the same moves, cycling through the same turns. That pissed you off the most. "What are you looking at?" you would hiss, your grip on me tightening, fingers digging into my waist. "Nothing," was always my response. 

But it wasn't nothing. I was looking at the other couples - wouldn't it be fun to dance like them? To try some new steps? Whenever I suggested something new - whether through dancing lessons or therapy sessions - the response was always some variation on the theme of "What's wrong with the way I do it? Why can't you ever be happy?" And so I learned not to ask and to content myself with your steps; we were often so "in sync" that others commented on how well we danced. It's the princess' job to make the knight look good, after all. To make the dance look smooth and effortless, even if she's doing it backwards with a pasted-on smile. 

I wasn't always looking at the steps, wasn't always wanting my turn to lead. Sometimes I just watched the way other men looked at their partners with such joy and delight that I couldn't help but stare. You were usually watching the band, other dancers, your feet - focusing on the steps, the moves, anything to keep the dance moving along within your control. You didn't look at me much when we danced, and certainly not with that look of pure delight. I was a dancing partner to you, but not a woman dancing. 

Our dance? it was complicated - magical and menacing, artful and awful, life-giving and soul-sucking. An image, a mirror, a promise, a hope. 

Our dance gave us seven children: six on earth and one in heaven. They are the treasures in the dark cave, the exquisite beauties among the shredding thorns. They are spiritual beings gifted to us in this lifetime, and being their mom is the most profound privilege I've ever been given. I pray for healed, wholesome relationships with them some day - to appreciate and delight in all that is wild, weird, and wonderful in them, as they do for me. No steps, no patterns - just pure, joyful abandon. 

But our dance also led to devastation and despair. My feet are bleeding from eggshell-walking; my arms are tired from burden-carrying; and my heart is exhausted from approval-earning. And I guess maybe I'm not a good princess after all, because I'm damn sick of protecting your image. 

        "O-our lives, are better left to chance; 

        I could have missed the pain, 

       But then I'd have had to miss

       The ... dance."

It's been a wild ride, a beautiful and awful turn, oh my knight.... but it's time this queen waltzed off the dance floor. 

Cleaning Stalls

In her life-changing book, Untamed, author Glennon Doyle begins a chapter with a quote from one of her previously-published books.  The attribution she writes under the quote is "Some horseshit I wrote in an earlier book."  

I know exactly what she means.  Some of you may be familiar with my only previously-published book, Circling Back Home: A Plainswoman's Journey.  I wrote that book over the course of ten years, fitting in writing between having and raising babies, working outside and inside my home, doing what I could to market and support a horse business I owned with my then-husband, Shawn.  And the writing reflects not only the length of time it took to compose the essays, but also the prolonged denial I lived in during that long period.  Even more so, the year-long editing process of the book, after it was finished and contracted, for me reflects the volatility of my marriage, and my own patterns of sublimating my truth in order to keep peace. 

When someone reads my book, or comments on it now, I want to say, "That's not me anymore.  Someone else wrote that book."  That isn't entirely true, but I often feel the horseshit I wrote in some of those essays completely covers up who I really was during that time.  More to the point, recognizing the horseshit has been a part of my growth into who I am now - in some ways very much the same person as that author, and in some ways not even recognizeable.

Anyone who has stalled a horse in a barn knows that cleaning those stalls involves a constant responsibility to shovel horseshit, scrape up horseshit, cart out horseshit.  In this blog, I'm cleaning stalls.

In some of these blog posts, I'll write directly about the essays I wrote in Circling, and tell the truth between the lines, behind the pages.  I'll go back and look at the ways I thought then, and hopefully remove a few piles of shit in order to gain more clarity now.  I'll tell you the parts of the essays I left out, was asked to leave out, edited out in the name of peacekeeping.  I've decided to be more of a peacemaker instead of a peacekeeper these days, and you can't make real peace until you wash away the shit and tell the bare truth. 

But the horseshit goes beyond my marriage.  It's part of a culture, part of our society.  I was raised in it, taught to value it, measured by my ability to put up with it.  Talking about those patterns is as much a part of the cleaning process as going back to look at my previous writing. 

It's an ongoing process, as cleaning always is.  Just when you think you have everything scraped and shoveled, more shit happens.  And sometimes, in really dirty barns, cleaning and scraping one layer only leads to more underneath, so you have to circle back and do more. 

I'm discovering a lot - about narcissism, about emotional abuse, about unhealthy attachment styles, and about how society - and particularly, ranching culture - measures the worth of women.  Most importantly, I'm seeing the horseshit in the demeaning ways we raise our daughters, and in the crippling lies we tell our sons.  It's all horseshit.  It's going to take a lot of cleaning.  I hope you'll join me, read these posts, comment on and challenge my ideas, and use your own voices to share yours.  Cleaning stalls is always a lot of work, but it goes more quickly when we use many hands to wield the shovels. 

Shirt of Arrows

In her deeply personal exploration of the Blessed Mother archetype, Untie the Strong Woman, storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes how the old men of her community used the phrase "she wore a shirt of arrows" to show deep respect for a person, female or male, whose eternal soul was untouched despite the piercings of arrows of disrespect, misunderstanding, or even abuse. Such a person bore up under extreme emotional, and perhaps physical, duress, refusing to let those experiences define her or defile her. Too, the description reminds me of part of a hymn I've sung since childhood:  "No storm can come to me, no arrow strike me down; no evil settle in my soul." 

This blog is my shirt of arrows.... or at least, that is my hope.  My intention is to explore, describe, lament, understand, and ultimately, triumph, over the arrows that have, after 28 years, brought about the ending of my marriage and my pending divorce from my husband, Shawn. My intention is, through writing, reading, learning and praying, to release the anger and bitterness of the poisonous arrow tips currently piercing my life.  

An archer, in learning her craft, studies not only her bow, but also the weapons she shoots from it.  She learns the weight of each shaft, the shape of each tip, the feel of the fletching.  With the love that only comes from studying something closely, she peers at her weapon in order to learn it by heart, understand how the various parts work intricately together to launch a missile that will efficiently destroy her target.  

In the same way, I intend to use this blog to look at the various patterns and behaviors of our marriage, to understand how they worked together to effectively destroy what I thought was lifelong love. In becoming my shirt of arrows, I hope this blog will help me grieve and release my marriage, in order to move forward with my soul intact. 

I have other intentions here, too, however.  I've joined several online support groups for women going through difficult divorces, and for the most part, I'm frustrated by what I see as largely a victim mentality.  It's true that Shawn was emotionally abusive to me, and throughout this blog, I will tell stories that will illustrate that.  However, I don't intend to join in the "poor me" commentary I read so much of online.  I've tried to always teach my children - both those who are biological and those I've encountered professionally - that one always has a choice between being a victim, or a victor.  I choose to be a victor by learning all I can about emotional abuse, narcissism, and what I know is a connection between these behaviors and childhood trauma.  Knowledge is power, and in learning why these patterns surfaced in my marriage, I hope I can educate younger women (and men) whose spirits are not yet in danger. 

In the year since Shawn filed for divorce - the afternoon after I refused to sign our cattle and horse brands over into his name as sole owner - I have learned that some people suffer from a behavior disorder known as narcissitic personality disorder.  Although I am not a psychologist, the descripors of this disorder are often eerily similar to behaviors I'd become accustomed to in my marriage.  Sometimes I wonder if, somehow, an expert in these disorders was recording my mind-numbing conversations with Shawn.  Behaviors prevalent among people who suffer from narcissistic personality disorder include gaslighting, grandiosity, entitilement, lying, blame-shifting, and an overwhelming inability to feel empahy. Behaviors of narcissists who abuse their partners and children include verbal and physical abuse, infidelity, lack of concern for the other person's individuality or needs, using an extended silent treatment as punishment, various forms of addiction, and blaming the other person for their own inappropriate, even abusive, behavior. Since beginning to learn of narcissistic abuse, I've connected with others who have also been victims, and have begun to recognize patterns.  I've even learned of a male cousin whose first spouse was this way.  I choose to be a victor because I want to learn why I stayed in such a relationship for nearly 30 years - how I, as a woman, was socialized to put up with this behavior, and how many of us who are raised to be good, kind people become easy targets for narcissists. 

I choose to be a victor because I see an acceptance of these behaviors in the agricultural community in which Shawn and I lived for most of our marriage.  I don't mean to say that all  ranchers or farmers live in situations that are emotionally abusive.  I just see certain behaviors being rewarded by the nature of the lifestyle, even being made necessary in some situations, but then carried from the barn or the field into the home.  That is heartbreaking, and marriage-destroying.  I write this blog for the young wives physically and emotionally isolated on farms and ranches, trying desperately to balance childcare, helping on the place, and perhaps earning money with some sideline business. There is a strong current of patriarchal control in the agricultural world, and I intend to peer into the corners of that world and shine a light on the cobwebs that have gathered there. 

I choose to be a victor, ultimately, by shining that same light into the corners of my own world, and by using my beam to chase down the critters that scurry away.  I know I have developed behaviors of which I am not proud.  I know that if I want to move forward with my soul intact, the only way to do that is to look as closely at myself as I look at the other people involved in this story.  Emotional abuse is ugly... uglier than mice that hide in dark corners. And the research will give you many reasons why that abuse happens, why the perpetrators engage in such behaviors.  But for my own healing, one question rises above all:  why did I allow, and even participate in, it?  What about my own self-esteem made me live with such behaviors for such a long time?  In the end, it will be this question, this central arrow in my shirt, that I hope will make me victorious over what is one of the most painful and most demoralizing experiences of my life. 

One caveat:  If you are familiar with my writing from other blogs or from my book, please don't expect more of the same.   That writing was edited for peacekeeping.  In this writing, I choose peacemaking, and from what I've learned so far in life, the only way to truly make peace is to tell the truth, no matter how unpleasant.  This writing won't be whitewashed to cover up any nastiness, and then presented with an ending neatly tied up with a bow.  This writing will be raw, emotional, uncomfortable for both you and me, and real.  This is my truth.  If you aren't ready to know it, then please don't read it. 

Thank you for being here.  You, too, are my shirt of arrows.  In the last several months, many of you have saved me.  I write, at last, for you.