Breaking the Silence: A Woman’s Courageous Choice to Leave Abuse by Kevin

A Woman’s Choice: He was my first stepdad. He used to beat my mother up all the time. I never quite figured out why. He said it was because we were both dummies. “You’re nothing but a bunch of dummies” is exactly what he would say to us (when he was in one of his “rages,” as my mother put it), and then he would start hitting her. The sound of a face being hit is not a pleasant one. It would make a smacking noise as the hard flesh of his fist hit the soft flesh of her face. After just two or three years of these smacking sounds, I would begin to wonder, “Is he going to kill her now? How much more of this can she take? What do I do if he kills her? How can I escape?” For three years, there was no escape from this madness. Needless to say, my self-esteem went down to nothing at times because I looked down at myself and felt bad for not being able to protect my mother from his beatings. My mother did not want me to tell anybody else about what was going on, so I did not. For three years, I kept silent. Even though I sometimes felt like I would explode with anger at him, I kept silent. “You’re nothing but a bunch of dummies!!!” He used to say that to us every day. It was programming, and to some extent, it worked, but only to a certain point because I knew it wasn’t true. It was a lie that he was trying to get us to believe. It was kind of like Hitler’s “Big Lie.” If a lie were heard every day, no matter how outrageous and untrue, eventually, people would believe it. I thought about Hitler’s Nazi Germany and how wrong Hitler was, as a way to fight his statement, “You’re nothing but a bunch of dummies!!!” I even went upstairs and looked in his closet at the German Iron Cross that he had (it was a souvenir that he kept that he said he’d gotten from a German officer). The few times I looked at it reminded me of the horrors of Nazi Germany, and how wrong Hitler was, and of all of his outrageous lies that people believed because they heard them repeated long enough. I had heard “You’re nothing but a bunch of dummies” every day from him for years, but I wasn’t going to believe it. I was going to fight the lie that I had heard, any way that I could, because I knew that if I didn’t, eventually I might end up believing it was true. This helped me to get through seeing my mother get beaten up by him, just because he thought that she was nothing but a dummy. And even though he thought of her as a dummy, she chose not to be one, because she ended up making the bold choice to leave him. She passed away recently, but she lived a happy life for 30 years after she left him. It was a woman’s choice, and it was her choice.