The Lioness Within: Writing About Women with a Passion

One difficult experience I’ve had to live with is my verbally abusive husband.

People like Rick (not his real name) will have the world believe they are the most honest, upright, staunch Christians you’ll ever meet. They’ll give you a dollar before they’ll steal a nickel.

Rick’s parrot vocabulary was carefully uttered in the benign presence of the uneducated, undereducated, poor, ratty, toothless, rusty-truck owners in the realm of his quasi dignity.

I graduated from high school.  Rick hated that. He used my education as a weapon in the many arguments he initiated with me.

There was always some remark about my “attitude” toward some silly molehill subject he wanted to make a mountain of. “Higher than thou art!” he would growl. “You graduated from high school; you ourght to know the answer,” to whatever backwoods blurb he would throw at me.

“You think you’re better than everybody!” he would complain.

When I would remind him, “Nobody is a mind reader so how can you know what I think?”

“It’s the way you walk around,” he would say with a sneer.

I was taught to assume erect posture not only to have my clothes hang better on my body but also for the sake of good health. I am a climber who developed her upper-body strength, hence, the almost military posture. But, to him, I was of a snooty mentality. A snob.

With my high spirit and curious mind, I launched into a marriage with a ready-made family of five children ranging from age four through sixteen.

Rick’s parrot vocabulary began to crumble when he started a “Baptist Church” in an old municipal building near where we lived. With a following of some of his friends from a previous congregation along with a group of “rusty trucks” he’d known, he rolled out a grungy spinet from the back room for me to play, mustered a pulpit and some hymnals from God knows where and opened services.

During his first sermon, I picked up a phrase he uttered while spreading his arms and shouting, “That’s the minarculous thing about Jesus!”

When we got home, I asked him innocently, “What is minarculous?”

He glared at me. Actually, I asked the question with tongue in cheek because I had already begun to realize the man was putting on airs. So I wasn’t too surprised at his anger.

Not caring that I had angered him, I pressed on, figuring I had his attention. “I mean, I know what the root word ‘min’ is. That means small. And ‘arc’ means king or high leader. Does that mean Jesus was a small king?”

Rick stretched one side of his mouth downward in an ugly frown, turned on his heel and stalked away.

For the first fourteen years of marriage to Rick, I did everything I could to please him. I never got it right. If I did a chore one way, he would change the rule, If I followed the new rule, it should have been the old rule. The same with the discipline of the children. He would lay down the law but if one of his kids broke the rule, he would argue that the rule wasn’t exactly this, it was more exactly that. Anything to throw me off. But my three-year-old couldn’t do anything right. If he smiled, he should’ve frowned. Once he learned he wasn’t to do either, he kept a straight lip and got yelled at for that.

I was walking around with fistfuls of my own hair, snatching myself bald. After one of our now famous arguments in which he would sidestep every logical question I would ask or hedge from every intelligent conclusion I would come up with, I found myself shaking so badly that I couldn’t calm down.

I chugga-lugged a bottle of NyQuil. I lost my breath and went down.

In the emergency room, a psychiatrist gave me a prescription for Valium and asked, “Why do you want to kill yourself?”

“I don’t want to kill myself!” I said. “I just want my life to have some sense and logic to it!”

He sent me to a four-session block of psychiatric treatment. The most important lesson I learned from this man was, “It takes two to fight.”

If the conversation goes awry just because your partner tries to steer you away from the issues at hand, and, believe me, that is exactly what he’s trying to do, drop the ball!

I will say it again. DROP THE BALL! He really is playing games with you. These games are important to him. He needs to keep you under his thumb, keep you frustrated.

These games he’s playing with you are more important than the children’s discipline, more important than love-making, more important than the children’s learning process. In fact, the subject of the children was among the most vehement of the arguments. If I tried to teach them proper English, I was “higher than thou art.”

If I reported something bad that his five children were doing, he would retort that my one little three-year-old was just as bad. Two one-hundred-pound girls could play on top of the oil tank but my one little thirty-five pounder would destroy it.

There is a great deal more to this story and a lot more psychiatric treatment. But my message in this story is, “Never get out of a situation until you know how NOT to fall into another situation just like it.” You don’t want to fall into the same stupid pattern all over again.

Unless he is beating you to a pulp, I advise you to use the slob as a learning tool. All those years you spent trying to please, reverse it to trying to displease him. If he says cut the potatoes one inch, cut them a half inch. If he says cut them smaller, fry the damn things whole. Yes, he will react to this change in you.

I am going to make this short. There is a big difference in the two words, COPE, and DEAL.

When you cope with a situation, you put up with it.

When you decide to deal with a situation, you initiate change. Never look back. Tell him quietly, “Shut up and eat your supper. Get up and get your own coffee. You cut the potatoes the way you want them cut.”

Once you have learned to deal with a difficult person and feel confident you can do this in the workplace, with your children, with your mother-in-law, or even with a new partner, get the hell out.

If he keeps the car keys, walk. If he hides your shoes, walk barefoot. You WILL SURVIVE!