Finding My Voice Again: A DV Story
Writer Carin Cryderman
The air in my upstairs bedroom was cold. In the rooms below me, my daughters and husband slept soundly beneath quilts and blankets. As I sat at my desk in an empty room, dark October branches brushed against the window, letting me know I was not alone.
Comforted, I wrapped my hands around my mug of tea, warming them while I waited eagerly to see what I was going to say.
My small desk was just big enough for a laptop, a bouquet of silk flowers, and a candle. It was positioned in a corner of the bedroom I shared with my husband just a few months prior, before we separated. The room was unusually large and resembled a dance studio with its vast space and wood floors.
From the moment I first walked through the door, I knew the house was meant for us and hoped it was a good omen for the future of our family. In the beginning, I kept it clean – carefully making the bed by day and lighting candles by night.
Months later, clothes and clutter lay scattered in disarray without care. Regardless of how hard I tried, all my efforts to fix the relationship from the outside could not heal the brokenness within. The awareness of this, along with the impending inevitable, left me scared and sad. But there at my desk, in the hours past bedtime, I found hope.
Throughout the course of a year, our marriage of fourteen years had gone from bad to worse, and was now unraveling in rapid acceleration. At eighteen, I married the only boyfriend I had ever had, saving myself and my first kiss for my wedding day. I was naïve and excited for my future – in love with a dream and the promise of security.
Our first year was rough and quickly set in motion a cycle of highs and lows, a pattern that would continue for the next thirteen years. In the beginning, I stood up for myself, expecting to be heard and validated.
It wasn’t long before his adept arguing left me confused and accepting blame, even when I was right. But, I continued to fight, drying tears when he told me not to cry and hiding anger when derided for being too hard. My weaknesses embarrassed him and my strengths threatened him; I moved accordingly, morphing like a chameleon to become whatever he needed.
When I tried to better myself, he took the credit or sabotaged my efforts. When I began dabbling in photography, I was not mothering enough. When I poured myself into my daughters, I was enabling them and not loving him enough. His angry outbursts were often followed by love notes and admonitions from the church pulpit for husbands to treat their wives like queens.
Carin’s Writing Spot
And, in doing so, I lost my voice.
I moved along robotically as long as I could, smiling and patching holes in a life of veneer as I tried to convince the world and myself that I was happy. As dreams of the family I had imagined began to blur, I held tightly to all I had known.
About a year before the marriage ended, we moved closer to his work – a last attempt to salvage what was left, or so I thought, though later events would reveal other reasons.
In a new town, I was stripped of the comforts of familiarity and forced to face the dysfunction I had been denying. I hated my life of dependence and at the same time, was paralyzed by the fear of anything other than what I knew.
Late one night, when all had gone to bed, I started to write. The next night, I returned. Like clockwork, as the last of my family fell asleep, I would prepare my tea, escape to the corner in my upstairs bedroom, and write.
And, in doing so, I found my voice.
As the exterior of my life began to erode, inside were seeds of hope. Words, once dormant, sprung to life as they found their way from my soul to the page, chasing away fear and sadness with their arrival.
The more I wrote, the more I found the courage to leave that life and begin another.
Just after Christmas that year, I filed for divorce and moved out six months later. Four years have passed since those chilly fall nights at my laptop, in the corner of my upstairs bedroom. There is much that differs from my old life, including a new desk in a downstairs bedroom. But there is much that remains, like writing in the hours past bedtime. And, as the dark branches of October brush against my window, I warm my hands around a mug of tea, and I wait eagerly to see what I am going to say.
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Visit Carin Cryderman’s’ blog or follow her on Twitter @carcryder.
Category: Being a Writer, Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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- Here Comes The Sun (Finding Love, Grace and Acceptance) | Matt Bays | January 7, 2015
I have lost my voice several times in my life, but the deepest loss was most recent. After divorcing the abusive husband – who stole the kids away – I was very alone. I kept writing. I also kept working at jobs which paid the rent but which took the life out of me, for example, substitute teaching, a special kind of purgatory – no matter how bad your day, you go home without homework, have your migraine, and wait until the next call. I was living in Maine, had a devastating (to me) realization that I could no longer drive because of a retinal problem, and moved to the Midwest, near to my daughter. I could not write for almost five years, just could not. I had ideas, a few pages here and there, but nothing that worked. I thought my voice was lost forever. And then I went back into therapy and addressed the in-between times of my history as a victim of family abuse, from babyhood, through married years, and into my senior life period. I started to deal with the overall pattern of never taking care of the little girl who survived it all. Finally, I started to take care of myself, and that led to caring about myself, and that led my back to the white paper whic
resonates loud and strong…the love notes…the cycle…when i started drawing…he hated it…he had taken my earlier art work under the guise of being godly and smashed it on a roadside…i thought that was the best thing to do after all he is a godly man…i was his queen…today it has been 14 years…i too do photography…and the voice is being heard…
Beth,
Thank you for commenting. So glad the voice is being heard.
Carin
Thank you for sharing this story. The little details really made it come to life, made it into something that resonates with all of us, whether our situations are similar, comparable, or completely different. Change is always frightening. It’s good to have a reminder that it doesn’t always mean an ending.
I particularly liked this line, “I wait eagerly to see what I am going to say.”
Thank you, K.P. You’re right – change doesn’t always mean an ending.
“When I let go of who I am, I become what I might be.” Lao Tzu
Carin
There is such healing in writing like this; both in the act of writing it, and for the reader. It not only helps the reader to understand, but may well give hope to others in the same position. Thank you so much for sharing this. Your story is an inspiration to us all.
Gill,
I agree, putting it to paper helps so much…it is doing (italicized) something with the dysfunction…sorting it all out and remembering no matter how powerless you might feel, it is there and available to create change in your life. And, then the potential to help someone else gives the struggle purpose and somehow makes it all redemptive.
Thank you for reading and commenting.
Carin
I echo what Gill says. This is excellent and is so helpful for the reader. I survived an abusive relationship myself and have been counselling women in similar situations for many years. Carin, you managed to put into words what is hard to put into words. Thank you for this good work!
And, thank you for commenting.
I imagine your work in counseling has been healing for you. Your passion to help stop the cycle is inspiring. For years, I knew something was “off”, but it wasn’t until I started reading stories similar to mine that things started to make sense.
Thanks again, Karen, and thanks for the twitter follow! My tweets are pretty intermittent, fyi!
Carin
Thank you Carin. Always inspired by women, who have used their experiences of abuse to inspire others.
Danielle,
You’re welcome. I, too, am inspired when silence speaks. Greater awareness is necessary to break the cycle.
Thank you for reading and commenting.
Carin
Thank you for the comment and the opportunity to post.
Martin Luther said, “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.”
Thank you for initiating change in the lives of women and ultimately, the world!
Carin
Carin, Thank you very much for sharing your story. Beautifully written, like a short story, it makes it easier for readers to learn about the harsh and devastating reality of abuse when one person lords over another. We look forward to hearing that you’ve finished the book you’re working on. – The Editors, Women Writers, Women Books