by Dawn Slagle
My name is Dawn Slagle and I am a survivor. As cliché as those words may sound, it is who I am and is how this story should begin.
The hardest day of my life was the one when I had to admit, in a court of law, that I let myself become involved with—and gave almost half of my life to—a man who could not love, could not honor, could not respect me as a woman. The room was filled with my dearest friends and family who gathered as a buffer of solidarity and yet stood silent, forcing me to retell the story that I had only just begun to unveil. For the long sleeves in my life were not to cover the bruises that I bore, but the lies that I told in hiding the truth. In rolling back those sleeves, my friends were stunned. Shocked. Shaken. One moment my family was on the front page of the newspaper featured in an article as the epitome of young marriages, the next we were in a police report. To them, I did not appear as the picture of a battered woman. Strong, confident, driven. When, in actuality, I was. In actuality, there is no “picture,” no stereotype. Abuse transcends boundaries.
The prevailing question posed, either outwardly or implied, to those involved in a domestically violent partnership is why stay? Why not just leave? The whys and wherefores of women who stay run much deeper than one would think. It’s quite easy to say what you would do when you aren’t confronted with the actuality of having to do it. In my case, I stayed because of the hopes, the reveries, the family, the familiarity, and the all too alluring honeymoon filled with dreams and promises.
The Cycle of Violence 1 is characterized by three stages: the tension building stage (tension in the relationship gradually increases over time); the acute battering stage (tension erupts, resulting in threats or use of violence and abuse); and the honeymoon stage (the batterer may be apologetic and remorseful and promise not to be abusive again). The cycle continues throughout the relationship, with the honeymoon stage becoming shorter and the episodes of battering becoming more frequent or more severe. The honeymoon stage reinforces the victim’s hope that the batterer will change and contributes to the victim staying in the relationship.
I remember the first time that Bryon ever laid a hand on me. We were newly engaged, and while I can’t remember the whys or the hows, what I do remember is his great sense of remorse and my believing that it would never happen again. In fact, several years passed before I felt the anger in his touch for a second time.
What I know now is that the honeymoon could only last for so long. I remember letting the warm water of a shower’s retreat rain down on me as I sobbed with regret, arms wrapped around the girth of my blossoming womb, weeks away from birthing my own daughter. How could I let this happen to me again?
And yet I stayed.
And the honeymoon began all over.
It was only a few months after my daughter entered into my life before I felt the burden of his self-loathing once more. This time I knew better. This time I took pictures and tucked them away “just in case.” This time I was willing to give our relationship one more try for the sake of the children, and we entered into counseling. This time marked the beginning of my dissociation. I began to realize that in order to stay in this relationship for the sake of the children (whom he never physically abused), I would have to disconnect myself from that man. With every cut to my soul, every insult, every “stupid fucking bitch,” I began to feel pity. It saddened me to see that the man I once had such great hope for was just a boy so insecure, so threatened, so unaware of what I had to offer, of all that I had to give.
I am not sure if we ever had a honeymoon again. There were times of great joy, but the tension was always just below the skin and for the last half of the marriage the egg shells were always cutting in to my feet.
