My very first memory, the decayed brick work upon which I balance the rest of my days, is of tussling with my caramel and chocolate colored pit-bull named Bella, in a dusty, spartan backyard in cookie-cutter housing in southern California.
I wish I could stop this memory here, remaining in the playful swirls of silt, with glittering flakes twinkling down in the summer sun, settling on Bella’s fur like a fine, gossamer veil. But I can’t stop it, time won’t wait for me.
The memory continues playing on it’s own to deliver me blinding pain, as Bella, reacting to my chubby fingers grabbing, my face pushing forward, trying for one too many kisses, bit through the top portion of my lip, creating dark gashes in almost perfect symmetry to each other on either side of my quivering cupid’s bow.
Blood pours out of my face and joins the dust at my feet, mixing into a ruddy muck that oozes up through my toes, glittering with a coppery sheen and coated with sandy bits of gold. My mother is there in an instant, before I can call to her, with a kitchen towel to staunch the crimson flow. My garbled cries are strange and watery without a proper lip to shape the sounds.
This is where my memory becomes hazy. I think I may have developed this talent before this day, but I can’t really remember, which, by design, is part of the charm of dissociation.
My father rushes through the back door with something shiny and black in his hands. His attention is sternly fixed, not on me, but on Bella, as she cowers a few feet away, against the chain link fence. In my mind, Bella is just gone after this moment. My brain has hidden the most gruesome details, slyly gifting me with flashes here and there in remnants of nightmares.
There is Bella, and then, after, there is NO Bella.
I know what happened next, as everyone knows the stories of their childhood, by the countless retellings of others.
The stage is set – there is the gun me, my mother, the blood, my father, and Bella. My father lowers the gun, aims, and shoots Bella squarely in the head. In the next moment, she is gone.
I don’t remember if anyone responded to the sound of gunfire in the plain housing tract and no one in my family ever made mention of the police in all the retellings of that particular story. I am next whisked away to the hospital where, I am told, the most skilled surgeon the Navy could produce, artfully sutured my lip together, from three flaps of dangling skin back into one piece of swollen, purple flesh.
Whenever I look in the mirror I am reminded of Bella, in the tiny smokers’ scars that seem to belong to my face the older I get. When I was younger it didn’t register that I had just witnessed deadly violence, and it only slowly joined my awareness over time as as I heard the story retold. Each time peeling back the gaslighting like edges of worm-eaten wallpaper, exposing more of the sallow truth underneath.
Now as an adult, with the full knowledge of what happened that day, I see all the failings in intricate detail.
The telling of the tale was always hushed, almost reverent. My father had done the “hard thing”, the “necessary thing”, the “manly thing”. He’d “taken care" of his child and done what was “right”. He’d “protected” us.
It was the end of summer in 1976 and animal cruelty still wasn’t considered a red flag for domestic violence and child abuse. Sexism and misogyny were only just being connected to domestic violence. The first Legal Center for Battered Women in the U.S. was newly funded by a grant from the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago and the very first domestic violence shelter had opened in New York City. It seemed that the world was only beginning it’s awareness of domestic violence, while I was being raised in it’s shadow.
I often wonder what might have happened if my mother came across any of these events in the newspaper my parents shared every morning with their coffee & cigarettes. Had she felt pangs of hope? Had she recognized herself in the descriptions of battered wives? Or did she give herself over to the delusion that she, no matter what had transpired, was not among those women?
My parents met on an underwhelming double date and became instantly infatuated. Staring hungrily at one another across the table, sitting next to their dates, they found themselves kindling a romance. My father was stationed in Long Beach and my mother lived a few hours south in in San Diego. For a time they enjoyed a long distance courtship, seeing each other whenever they could. But after six months, when my mother unable to manage the costs of raising 5 children on her own, called for financial help, he came and took care of her.
On credit, he moved them into a tiny apartment until they could find their way into housing on base. My mother, afraid of what the landlord would do, only allowed my siblings out to play in two’s. In the two bedroom apartment, no one would know there were actually 5 children.
There are no photos of the courthouse wedding, however I DO know that my mother wore a bright red dress which was always something of a joke between my parents. My mother was raised as a catholic and over the years, the church fell in and out of her favor.
In her telling, I understood the dress to be an act of joyous rebellion. Perhaps she railed against white dresses on virginal bodies and the hypocrisy of the church? Perhaps she was a fashion rebel.
I would come to realize that this joke had in fact two distinct sides. The first side, was about my mother’s shame, enthusiastically siphoned from the Vatican. Perhaps it included proud defiance, but I doubt that. My mother, who by then, had given birth to 6 children, paid for a special document recertifying her virginity prior to the marriage.
The mother, married in a red dress, was an official, Vatican certified, virgin.
I don’t know how much she paid, how she learned about the certificate or where exactly it came, from but she swore up and down, for the whole of my life, that it had been sent straight from the Pope himself.
The second part consisted of my father’s misogyny, which was equal in measure to his lust. He both desired and detested women. The joke was born of slut-shaming, disgust, and perhaps, some projection. Maybe it was tangled in his confused sexuality, or inherited from from his abusive mother and grandmother.
I know the joke danced between these two partners, sometimes sweet and harmless, sometimes biting and poisonous. I watched in the telling, how their cheeks were pink with shared laughter. And at other times, my mother’s cheeks were hot and wet with tears, while my father, wore a hideous, satisfied grin.
It was 1972 and women were still not legally permitted to have their own credit cards and were rarely granted loans.
I grieve for a lot of potentialities.
I wonder, if my mother, fleeing one abuser, would have married another if she had been able to apply for a credit card of her own. I wonder, what sort of people my siblings would have been if she had a place like that shelter in New York to find safety, support, and direction.
I wonder who she could have been, had marriage not been her only option.
I wonder, how many girls will live worse lives than my mother because of reproductive abuse from Republican terrorists. I wonder how much horror we are serving to our most vulnerable. What will their suffering look like? Who are we preparing them for?