Fear - From Jan's Sushi Bar

One of the great thing about the Internet is discovering blogger voices you haven't heard before. There's s certain joy in stumbling upon them in totally serendipitous sort of ways, too. That's how I found Jan's Sushi Bar. Jan has an excellent post on the JAMES MAMMONE murder trial, which we have posted about here at Dastardly on a couple of occasions.

http://www.jbsitedesigns.com/?p=6622

Fear

This week’s Spin Cycle is another tough one for me to tackle: fear. I’ve got the normal, run-of-the-mill fears – June bugs, heights, my daughter living in Las Vegas; I’ve even blogged about one of my fears before.

But I can’t find it in myself to treat the subject lightly right now.

I don’t know if it’s made national news but here in northeast Ohio the trial of James Mammone, a local man who shot and bludgeoned his former mother-in-law to death before stabbing his two small children in the throat so viciously they were practically decapitated as a way to “punish” his ex-wife for divorcing him is big news.

Mammone had been arrested for domestic violence and given two years probation prior to his wife filing for divorce in 2008; there was also a restraining order still in effect. As Beloved and I read the front page story today, I tapped the newspaper and said, “That’s the reason; right there.”

“Reason for what?”

“The reason so many women stay in abusive relationships. Fear. Plain and simple fear.”

We’d had this discussion before, when Beloved said he didn’t understand why women don’t leave the men who abuse them. I’d also given him that answer before but I don’t think it hit home the way it has now, especially after hearing the recording of Mammone’s confession on the news. When his wife filed for divorce, Mammone threatened her, saying he was going “to put her in her grave.” In fact, on the day of the murders, he tried to break into her home – when that was unsuccessful, he killed her mother and their children.

Granted, this is a worse-case scenario – I don’t think many women who live in and leave abusive relationships think that the man will really kill them (although he may threaten it…oh, yes indeed), but fear takes on many forms, especially when a person has been the victim of systematic abuse.

Because the abuse isn’t just physical; in fact, physical abuse is often secondary. It’s the emotional abuse that is most devastating and what causes the most fear. A woman subjected to emotional abuse hears a lot of things like, “You can’t leave – no one else would ever want you” and “You’re too stupid and incompetent to ever make it on your own.” When the physical abuse does happen she’s told that it was her fault, that she deserved what happened to her.

You know, when the person who is supposed to love you the most treats you like that, you think there must be something to it. You become convinced that you really are stupid and worthless and it absolutely strips you of your confidence and self-esteem. And when you think of leaving, those blows – both physical and verbal – come back to haunt you, especially if you have kids.

What WILL you do? Even if you work, how will you make ends meet? How will you handle the responsibility of single parenthood? Who is going to help? What do you tell your kids? Do you really want your family to become just another statistic? That last one was big for me – the simple fear of failure.

But it was fear, of course, that ultimately led to my divorce – fear for my kids. Not physically, but fear for what they would become. Fear that my son would grow up thinking that it was okay to treat women that way, and even more so that my daughter would grow up thinking it was okay to be treated like that.

That became my biggest fear of all.

As I watch and read about James Mammone’s trial, it occurs to me that there might be a tragedy beyond the obvious one for Marcia Eakin Mammone. I wonder if she’s said to herself in the last six months that if she’d stayed, this all never would have happened. I wonder how much she blames herself. And I wonder if there isn’t some other woman out there being held hostage by fear, being told that if she leaves, this could happen to her, too.