When I was ten, my mother remarried. Two weeks later, my new stepfather revealed himself to be an abusive alcoholic with a gun fetish. I’m guessing that the first time he went on a drunken rampage my mother chalked it up to a bad day. Maybe she shook her head and said to herself, “men.” Before long, though, the now well-known cycle of abuse established itself in our household and that was that. Before long, I stopped calling him “Daddy”. It would be three years before my mother could manage to safely and finally remove us from his home and herself from the marriage.
Leaving an abuser can get a woman murdered. I admire my mother’s courage and cunning—yes, cunning—in getting us out of there alive, twice.
In the meantime, my once-good grades dropped (and throughout my academic career, never recovered). One day at school, after yet another night staring at the ceiling and listening to the numbers on my clock radio flip while the drunken stepfather raged in the dining room, I went to the principal’s office in tears, a first for me. “My mommy and daddy had a fight,” was the best I could bleat out. Looking back, what I was trying to say was, “I am afraid my stepfather will make good on his repeated threats to kill my mother and my entire family. He keeps guns—big ones. Sometimes he drinks all day and then keeps us awake all night, bellowing and crying. We walk on eggshells, trying not to do something to set him off, which could be anything—and I do mean anything. Some nights my mother and I flee to safety at my grandparents’ house. They seem angry at my mother but otherwise are silent, as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening. I am scared, confused, exhausted, and desperate. Please help me.”
The adult I needed would have realized that a good student’s grades dropping were a symptom that something was amiss. The adult I needed wouldn’t have stopped there, attributing this downshift in academic success to laziness or lack of motivation (both of which—hello—amount to symptoms of larger problems anyway). They’d have not just pointed out that the student was not working up to her potential, they’d have asked why the good student was no longer working up to her potential. In the parochial school of one hundred or so students that I’d attended for four years—read: they knew me well—they’d have noted that this particular student crying in the principal’s office was an anomaly, and therefore a possible red flag. And then they’d have provided emotional support to me and gently, respectfully, professionally done their best to get to the bottom of it all.
[To read the rest of this post by Agnes Birdsong, click here.]
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