New Grimmerling Start

Around the start of Spring 2007, an incident occurred in Oakland, California that appeared on the front page in the newspaper for several days. The newspaper reflected the increduality of a woman’s close family and friends who witnessed her being gunned down and killed by an abusive husband in front of a church where she’d arrived as usual for Sunday morning service. But even more than the horror of watching this happen, there was a disbelief about how this had happened at all.

Day after day, the newspaper painted the portrait of a 40 year-old woman who was loving, hardworking, and professional. People recounted how she always wore sleek hairdos and dressed to impress. Newspapers reported that she was confident, assertive, and worked two jobs. As a real estate agent, she’d personally managed to acquire six homes.

A friend described her by saying, “She was like a Rolls Royce…All you needed to do was look at her and you knew that she had class.”

Her friends also remembered a deeply religious woman who carried scriptures in her purse and sometimes shared a reading if another co-worker was having a bad day. But few knew that she hid a secret. Court records showed that for two decades she'd struggled with domestic violence. There was a shocking gap between her success in the world and the reality of her home life. Following the arrest of her husband and an emotional funeral, a question rose up from the newsprint and the community—how could such a smart and driven woman remain in such an abusive relationship?

For several days I read these reports and cut out the articles, placing them on a corner of my desk until I realized that I was responding to certain similarities within my own story. Of course, my situation was much less extreme, but this woman’s death raised familiar questions. How do so many of us, particularly women, manage to function in physically and psychologically damaging relationships without getting the help we need? And how can the people who are closest to us not realize the issues that we are struggling with?

Unlike the woman in the news reports, I did not struggle with domestic violence. Instead I lived with ongoing verbal abuse for more than two decades from a man whose life was controlled by alcohol and childhood wounds that he was unable to heal.

From the outside, our relationship looked like love. But for years, I began my day by wrestling with the issue of my marriage. Should I leave or should I stay? Those thoughts preoccupied me. They drained energy and caused me to withdraw into myself. After finally reaching a point where I was unable to retreat further, I left my husband who died shortly afterward. In grieving for him and our lost lives together, I also began a journey to understand why I choose to remain in an unhealthy marriage. Why did I do it? Was it because of the children? Was it because I was afraid?

I think the crux of my issue was that for me there was no real choice. I had built a trap from materials that I didn’t even understand, materials that are not available at the supermarket or lumberyard. They were more intricate and cunning and fabricated out of my own being and needs, wrapped together with invisible threads and as such, I was unable to recognize or to speak of them to others. Or maybe it’s more accurate to speak of them as swaddling clothes, a family cocoon that shaped me into having certain expectations of what was comfortable and familiar, which I then sought to recreate in my primary relationships. I also believe that I was bequeathed certain gifts, which as an adult, allowed me to reach toward more understanding, the way the fairies at Rose Red’s birth each granted her a certain strength or curse. As she matured, those positive and negative gifts helped to cancel each other out.

I’m not sure that my life could have unfolded in any other way because how could I as a child be conscious about my own upbringing? I also think different children probably respond differently to the same circumstances, part of the nature or nurture argument, but having to do in this instance with a kind of learning that shapes how we make choices and then live with them.

Growing up, there was something deep within myself which I needed to heal. I needed to spring myself free from my own trap, but even with the intervention of counseling and drug programs, I was unable to do so. Self-help books took me walking step-by-step, but it was not where I needed to go. Clinical psychology books put me to sleep in front of the television. I was unable to recognize myself in literature from Alcoholics Anonymous. Like the woman in the newspaper story, I’d built an outside shell to keep the truth not just from others, but from myself.

I’d graduated with an MA degree in Creative Writing and worked for years as a technical writer, periodically changing jobs for reasons of advancement, but also with a nagging sensation about wanting to change something more basic. I participated as a PTA member, went on field trips, volunteered in different organizations, and served on synagogue committees. I continued to layer my inner disquiet with a layer of normalcy. But the veneer clouded. After my husband died, I wasn’t sure how to rearrange the shattered pieces of my life, or if they should be rearranged at all. I only knew I needed to recognize my own truth.

So I set out to write this book. I didn’t want it to be a story of blame. There was so much I loved about my husband who was also the father of my children. I wanted the book to be a personal story that didn’t draw upon the clinical language of dysfunctional families. To heal myself, I needed to return to that place where as a writer I'd first encountered story, which was within the fairytale. I think the idea of being asleep for a very long time and then waking up has great power, or in being assigned a seemingly insurmountable task in order to achieve greater understanding. Both stories are universal.

I also wanted to offer others who are close to those who are locked inside their own traps, a metaphorical notion of how to intervene. Most of all, I wanted to give thanks for the time that has been allotted to me to explore and understand my own journey as I now begin to wake up.