Optimist or Fool?

            I’ve been beaten and bruised, battered and buffeted by the wind. I’ve chosen the path across rugged terrain over and over instead of the paved path. Each time I choose, I stumble. I fall and skin my knees, scrape my palms, break my nails, bruise my soul. And then I get up. I continue on my path. I don’t look for the paved road, I wander down the overgrown, wild trail.

            Does this make me an optimist? Does this mean that even in the most difficult situations I look for the good? Am I continually believing in the challenge in the hopes that it will lead me to the place I want to be? Is this the key, do I just look for the good and disregard the bad?

            OR…am I choosing to be blind? Am I deliberately looking beyond what is common sense in the hopes that there is something else? Is my faith misplaced? 

It's Not Something I Talk About

            It caught me off guard. He knew that I was vulnerable, we had talked about it before. But, when he shoved me to the floor, I still never expected it. We had been drinking Jack Daniels all day and were both pushing one another’s buttons. We were shouting so loud the neighbors were yelling at us to shut the fuck up. And then he pushed me down. I wasn’t hurt, but I was petrified. I ran to the spare room and locked the door. He came and spoke softly to me, apologizing over and over, so I opened it and we passed out for the night.

            I thought that was it. But, it really wasn’t. He didn’t shove me again, but he scared me regularly. He was a big guy, and he would use his size to intimidate me. We would “wrestle” and I would be covered with bruises after, but it was always a “game”. When I would complain that he was hurting me, he would tell me I was a pussy. “We’re just goofing around, I’m not trying to hurt you.”

            Eventually, I believed him. I was an educated woman, from a stable family with a good job. That kind of stuff wouldn’t happen to me.

            I started to get him back. When he would get in the mood to “play”, I would pinch him hard on his inner bicep. I knew that it would hurt and leave a mark. Once he was put on blood thinners, it was easy to bruise him and feel like I had gotten him back. But he was never afraid. I was always scared that when he wrestled, he would go too far and break one of my bones.

            He thought it was funny to try to make me flinch away from him. He didn’t even have to touch me, I would pull away and then get punched in the arm, “two for flinching!” He always made it seem like a joke, it wasn’t until I was far away from the relationship that I realized I was always terrified. The man who was supposed to keep me safe from harm and make me feel secure just kept me on edge.

            For fifteen years, I thought that it was no big deal, he was just a rough person who didn’t understand boundaries, but then he did it again. We had been at a family reunion, our marriage was on the rocks, and we had fought the entire way home. I spent the several hour drive with my body pressed against the passenger side door because he was so incensed I didn’t know what he would do. Once home, while our son was playing in the other room, I went into the bedroom to continue the argument. He was lying on the bed and we started yelling. I don’t remember him moving, but he had me by the hair and all I could see was his eyes. They were black. They were chilling. I tried to pull away, and wrenched my neck, smashing my head into the wall. I heard my son’s little voice, “Mommy?”

            He released me and I grabbed my baby. “If you come anywhere near us, I will call the cops.” I don’t know if I really would have; he got up and left the house without a word, slamming the door behind him and knocking our family portrait off the wall. I put our child to bed and slept on the couch. I didn’t know if I could leave. I knew that I had to, but didn’t know how.

            A few days later, the opportunity presented itself and I took our son and moved to my parents’ house. I didn’t tell anyone what happened. It took a few months before I was able to face it, but I filed for divorce.

            I was with him just shy of fifteen years, and he only hit me twice. For almost fifteen years, I lived under a cloud of foreboding, scared of what he might do to me. If he enjoyed hurting me for fun, what could he do if he wasn’t playing? I’m lucky that I never found out.

Love

            I don’t usually do this. I keep God in my life, but quietly. Sunday’s gospel, though, was the story of the Good Samaritan; and it got me thinking about the things going on in the news lately. I think everyone knows the story, but the crux of it is: A guy gets jumped on the street and robbed. A Priest walks past, and crosses to the other side. A Very Important Person walks past, and crosses to the other side. A foreigner-someone of a different ethnicity and race than the injured person- stops, cares for his wounds, takes him to an inn and pays for his room, with promises to return and pay any remainder due on the bill.

            And there’s the moral. The guy who was different, the guy who was visiting from out of town, the guy for whom it was most inconvenient to stop, is the one who went out of his way to help. He spent his own money, his valuable time, risked the same fate happening to him as a foreigner, to help someone in need.

            There it is. How often do we notice the person beaten in the gutter? More often; do we stop? No matter your religious affiliation, all creeds endorse compassion and generosity. However, we don’t, as a society, take the time to see the argument from the other side. We’re so busy aligning with a hashtag that we don’t stop to think about the greater good. I don’t think there’s hope for us as a civilization until we can see each other beyond the hashtags. Supporting one movement shouldn’t-and doesn’t-mean that you don’t support another movement. It means that you have compassion for another person’s circumstance that may or may not be different from yours. I can stand with the oppressed and discriminated against in #blacklivesmatter while still believing that there are altruistic souls who sacrifice to keep us safe and stand with #bluelivesmatter. I won’t negate their need to be represented by screaming that we all matter, because if we all believed that, none of those hashtags would exist!

            If you’re a Christian, you preach Love. Not for some, but for all. Jesus spent an awful lot of his short time with sinners and outcasts. No religious manuscript, that I’m aware of, preaches “eliminate all people who are in any way different from yourself”. If that were the case, we’d each be alone on this earth, because as far as I can tell, each one of us is a special snowflake, contrary to Tyler Durden’s philosophies. Gandhi said that no culture can live that attempts to be exclusive. We can’t weed out the “different” and expect to survive as a race. He also said that it is easy to be friendly to your friends, but to make friends with your enemies is the heartbeat of true religion. Basically, open your eyes and your mind, and you may learn something new. A difference of opinion doesn’t have to mean the discussion is over. And, most importantly, a discussion doesn’t have to end with all parties agreeing-it just has to end without the parties trying to kill each other. When did we forget that?