Break free

By Julie Bengston
Special to The Minnesota Women's Press

As far too many women know, it is difficult to leave an abusive relationship. One statistic states that the average woman attempts to leave seven times before she breaks free of her abuser. My experience attests to this finding.

At the young age of 19, I left my abuser for good. It took eight months and too many fights to count. I was terrified of him. But, in one lucky incident, a friend was there to help me. She empowered me to break free of the cycle I was in, and I found myself ready to start over, fresh with the knowledge that I would never put myself in that situation again.

I did not spend a lot of time looking back. Then, one day, I met a woman on the street. She was sitting in her pajamas in the middle of the street during a particularly cold day of winter. She was huddled down, holding her legs into her chest. Her abuser was lurking over her, begging her to get up. She was embarrassing him, of course. How could she make such a public display of such a private war?

I happened to be passing by and did not hesitate to approach this distressing situation. The woman kept shouting at the man taht she wanted to kill herself. It had only been four years since I was making that same public announcement, praying someone would hear me and take me seriously. I was able to talk to the woman and coax her back into her apartment, leaving the man standing alone in the street.

There, she retreated to her bathroom to clean herself up. I looked around her apartment, searching for the signs. But what was I looking for? What would anyone have seen upon entering my home during a fight with my abuser? Being able to fake normalcy is often an art among abusers and their codependents. Her apartment looked like the typical living space of a young student.

When she returned from the bathroom, I made no qualms about assuming the worst. She was embarrassed and shy, having this stranger seeing her like this in her home. I went through all of the questions, and before I left she promised she would lock the door behind me, and no — he did not have a key to get back in.

I looked back to the one year and two months I spent with my abuser with a ferocious analysis. What was I thinking? What made me stay? The questions still unravel as I dig deeper and deeper into the fabric of my young girlhood, the society that taught me I was worth less than a man, the economic inequalities that force women to have to strip in nightclubs to earn the same wage as a man starting out in business. So many factors weaving in and out of each other, adding up to a young woman beaten and raped by her partner every week, maybe every day.

I look back now, and I still wonder: Did she take him back?