I met a woman this afternoon who had no front teeth. When she saw my baby boy she smiled. He looked at her confused wondering where her teeth were. People like her carry a stigma: she must be poor if she can't get that fixed, she's probably a drug addict, she must be slow. The story of a hard life was written all over her face but her smile sealed the stereotype of a poor, drug addict working a part time job at the grocery store because she wasn't very bright.
The truth is something that most people don't really want to hear. Her teeth had been knocked out by a former significant other. "He took my teeth," were her words. She was working at the grocery store because she wasn't allowed to think of herself as anything other than his punching bag so now this was all she was capable of doing. Thankfully, a shelter had taken her in and saved her from this man, but the rest of the damage had been done. My heart broke.
Society doesn't afford people who have had a rough go to be anything more than a loser. We treat these people who need more love than others as a burden; someone to gawk at and presume we know their situation. I know the despair this woman endured. It's a pain and a fear that no person should ever encounter. The person you sleep next to, the one who made a vow to protect you, is actually responsible for torturing you on a regular basis and may one day kill you. If you are lucky enough to escape with your life then you must deal with the psychological damage. You collapse at the thought of conflict and the walls close in if the exit of any room is blocked. Some nights you wake up in a cold sweat with tears streaming down your face because he's entered your dreams. I know that fear. I was lucky.
It all sounds like a Lifetime movie, I know, but this stuff really does happen. Relationships never start out violent. It's always really good in the beginning until there's an argument that gets just a little too heated. Then the next time it goes a little further. Two or three years down the road you start to realize that you never wear things you want to because they've been deemed inappropriate, you don't participate in activities because you don't want the third degree on where you've been and every time there is a conflict there's another hole in the wall where it met the back of your head. You're too ashamed to admit that you're battered. You're Jennie Garth in Lies Of The Heart or Judith Light in one of the fifty movies she's done on the subject.
My new sister who survived the struggle is not just another stereotype. She is hope. Hope that there is life on the other side of a terrible situation. Hope that even after such trauma there is still a reason to smile. If you bother to open the tattered and weathered cover of her story you can see that she is strong. She is beautiful.
Some of us have a support system praying and waiting for us to make the decision to get out. A lot of us do not. For those who don't there is help: http://www.bayareaturningpoint.org/
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