Old Age Day by Day January 14, 2012

On Wednesday I talked to a friend's hair stylist.  Ostensively, I was checking out her salon, while my friend got her hair cut, but in reality I was there to give some advice if so asked. The woman is Croatian, and she came to this country twenty years ago with her boyfriend, they married, and have a daughter now 16.  He was a batterer, and she divorced him, but he is still interfering in their lives, threatening them, and scaring them.  She has all this anger at him, the police, the courts, the lawyers.  She has a right to this anger,  but it is counterproductive.  She needs to focus on getting help from a battered women's shelter, and counseling for herself and her daughter.  Otherwise, her daughter will end up in a similar relationship.  She asked me what she should do.  I told her she needed to focus on those who could and would help her, not the establishment.  I asked her if she knew what aversarialism was.  I explained how she needed not to continue to go head to head by herself, but let the shelter use their liasons with the police, etc.  She needed to focus her energies in a way that would change her life for the better.  I suggested she probably had two years at most for her daughter to learn how to protect herself from her father, recognize a batterer, and feel some empowerment instead of victimhood.     In other words, I gave her my old safehouse spiel, and tried to do what I could to wake her up to save her own life.  I'm good at this; I did it for 12 years.

But I will not be coming back, for a haircut or anything else.  Because the ball is in her court, and only she can save her life.  And even then, she needs perserverance and luck.  What I can do is trust she will do what she needs to do not for herself, but for her child.  What I did was talk turkey.  I took the threat seriously and told her she needed a village to get through this.  But she will need to drop the anger, which is keeping her from methodically doing what needs to be done.  She is caught in the battering cycle of rage, woundedness and helplessness.  I hope to god she gets out.