Was it even abuse?

I recently read a book with this title (authored by Emma Rose Byham); I was drawn in because the question so aptly describes what one asks themselves after something occurs that might possibly fall into the category of "abuse." There is so much emphasis on physical violence because that's an area that leaves little room for questions. Bruises, broken bones, and other injuries are visual evidence. Words can be disputed. If someone, say, punched a headboard but not your face, does that count? The silent treatment, verbal threats, name calling, flexing their shoulders while glaring at you, using personal wounds for shaming -- do these things count?

There is quite a bit of behavior we file into gray areas, and those gray areas lead to moving on with your life, and sometimes burying it because you know the apology acknowledging all of the mistreatment is never going to happen. You can't get stuck on it, life keeps lifing. If we held all abusers accountable and siphoned them out of society, we would have to annex entire continents to house them. Where is the line for what's acceptable and what is not?

For as long as I can remember, one of my sister's front teeth was gray. It was like a lightbulb disconnected from power while the rest of her teeth remained bright. The story was that she fell and hit her tooth, and I accepted that. I didn't think to ask for details or where it happened, or to even ask her directly. She fell, she hit her tooth, and this also meant a series of dental appointments including a root canal to deal with the dead tooth. She was seven years older than I was, and from what I know about the story, she was 12 when she "fell."

Only in adulthood did I learn that my sister wasn't clumsy; my dad had punched her in the face.

Their relationship was often contentious. I know she was looked upon as the kid who didn't live up to her potential at school. This was high crime to my parents, both of whom survived childhoods short on money and education. They provided us with a comfortable home -- we each always had our own bedrooms, we never lacked food or clothing, and we were fairly well-traveled. From what I can see now, as an adult, they did what they could to ensure we had what they had both lacked as children. But, whenever my sister seemed to fail in appreciating what she had simply by being who she was, arguments, and physical punishment followed. I don't know what led to the punch, and, it doesn't matter.

My dad's patience was short and his temper was scary. If something set him off, there would be a change in demeanor and a shift in the atmosphere. He'd unfasten his belt and pull it through the loops -- no one got hit with the buckle, but the leather end tip wielded a painful and lasting sting. Once, when I was on the verge of being punished, I fled to my mom and asked what I could do to prevent it. "Tell him, 'Please don't hit me,'" she said. The next time I faced punishment, I did exactly that, and it worked. My dad never brought out the belt or hit me ever again. I was really young, maybe 4 or 5. It would make a great story of redemption except he never stopped abusing my sister.

The last time was when she was 19. Our house was not a home where you could expect to stay beyond society's expected timeline. If you were an adult but not in college, you had to do something, preferably independently funded and away from home. Valerie joined the military.

She signed on with the Marines to be an air traffic controller. Why? Because they had the nicest dress uniform. It's as good a reason as any for a 19 year old with a sense of style. Because it's the smallest armed service, they were not going to have a slot in that specialty available for her until months later. "Go talk to the Air Force" our father said over dinner. My sister being my sister, rebelled, which led to yelling, and finally him standing up and striking her. She left the house for a long walk. And not long after that, she signed up with the Air Force.

The thought of her being in the Marines was laughable, not because she wasn't capable, but because each service has a certain mentality. Even if its uniform wasn't the prettiest, the Air Force was best suited to her personality. She made a career out of it, retired, and still works for the Air Force as a civil servant. Around company, my mom used to joke that my sister was originally intent on joining the Marines because of the uniforms. She always left out the part where her husband hit their daughter for disagreeing with his advice to talk to the Air Force recruiter.

His advice was sound, and his response to her will always be wrong. Abuse is always a means to an end, and sometimes even results from good intentions, as wild as that sounds. It's rooted in trying to control another human being to achieve the outcome you want for them, you, or both of you. Isn't that the twist with abuse? We often receive abuse from people we love, who are supposed to love us, but if abuse is about control, and love is about freedom, the messaging becomes confusing. If they abused us, did they even love us? If I love them, should I soften the story so the good in them isn't completely eclipsed?

My dad mellowed with cancer. We spent the last five years of his life in California, and my sister got married and had his first grandchild. While I was in high school I got into a fender bender; I spent the afternoon dreading his reaction when he came home from work. His only question to me was, "Are you okay?" It was as if some changeling had taken over, sparing me from the lecture that I was careless, or that I'd have to use my library salary to pay for the damage. I don't wish cancer on anyone, but if he never had it, I might never have seen that side of him. From what I know, he and my sister made peace towards the end. She made peace with our mother as well, even though I witnessed her confronting her about "the fall." My mom was in deep denial, and perhaps that's what has to happen when you are financially dependent on an abuser. The moment you are honest with yourself about the ugly truth of your situation, you either acknowledge that you have to change things or remain complicit.

I don't know why our mother gave me the advice to ask him not to hit me. It meant I carried something similar to survivor's guilt because I was spared and my sister was not. As a mother it's hard for me to understand. As a mother, I also acknowledge that I parent my kids based on their individual needs, and that I'm going to get a lot of things wrong.

If you asked me if my ex-husband was abusive years ago, I would have adamantly denied it. His way of exerting control wasn't usually with physical violence, but with shame, threats, the silent treatment, gaslighting, sulking, name calling and physical intimidation. Early in our marriage, when I took over a year to find a job, he asked, "What would your dad think?" I was caught flat-footed. It seemed like an honest question, but also a gut punch. He never met my dad, he only knew he was ambitious and fairly successful in his field, despite not having a college degree; I'm guessing he believed someone like that would be disappointed in his unemployed college-educated adult daughter.

He used that line again, nearly two decades later in our marriage, referencing my affair. Whenever I confronted him about it, he dug in. "I'm not shaming you," he said, "I really want to know what he'd think." Every time I mentioned how much it bothered me that he weaponized my personal loss not once but twice in our marriage, he would defend himself, insisting his question was earnest. Eventually I knocked my dad off the pedestal my spouse had built for him. "I don't know what he'd think," I said, "Maybe he had an affair himself."

For the longest time I believed I deserved the punishment. I figured most couples recovering from infidelity went through this until they sorted themselves out. Sometimes things felt calm, and then something in the moment would affect him. One morning I confronted him about an old relationship injury, a piece of artwork from an ex-girlfriend he'd insisted on keeping. I wanted to know why the compromises I had offered were not enough. When he replied that he was a "knucklehead," I wasn't satisfied with the explanation. "No, what's the real reason?" I insisted. What was the motivation, what did he get out of pushing his agenda? He didn't want to hear it. How could I, the cheater, have the nerve to question him about old shit? We sat in bed, facing each other, and approximately six inches from my face, he punched a hole through the headboard. This time I did know what led to the punch, and, it still didn't matter.

I got out of bed and shouted "This is not okay!" And then I got ready for work. Because life keeps lifing.

When you're asking Google if punching furniture is abuse, you already know the answer, yet I still did exactly that. Had any one of my friends had come to me with that story, my assessment of the situation would have been solid. So why was it so hard to assess things for myself? If part of you believes you deserved it, advocating for yourself can feel like a steep hill to climb, made more difficult because you're starting from the bottom of a pit.

We are so often told to accept abuse because a man lost control of his anger. Strange how that doesn't happen in professional settings with their bosses, co-workers or clients. Sometimes we're even asked what we did to provoke it. I'm tired of living in fear of men's anger, first with my dad, then with my ex-husband, and now, perpetually of all men I encounter.

His behavior afterwards showed me he knew he was wrong. He single handedly disassembled the heavy wooden sleigh bed that I loved, and hauled it down two flights of stairs to the basement. He asked me to choose a new bed that I liked, and he offered to pay for it. The old bed frame remains out of sight -- stowed in the storage area in the basement -- its damning hole in the headboard serving as proof that what I experienced happened, and that I'm not crazy. When I confronted him about it later, in a calmer moment, he'd say the headboard was thin, and he didn't expect his fist to go through, that his reaction was akin to pounding a fist on the table for emphasis. There was no acknowledgement of how intimidating it must have felt considering he was twice my weight and ten inches taller than me. No voicing that he was sorry, and no remorse for reacting in a way that frightened me. There was no apology, but instead, a rationalizing that each individual in a couple has their moments, and that I'd done awful things too. And besides, if I hadn't kept pressing him, he wouldn't have done it. This twist in logic made me responsible for both my behavior and his. More recently, he claimed that I should know he'd never hurt me, and I thought, but he had no problem with me believing for a moment that he would. "What if our older daughter got married and her husband punched the headboard," I said. "I'd investigate what happened," he replied. What was there to investigate? In what universe is this acceptable? More denial.

This isn't the only instance, and I am not even getting into the other examples, or my kids' experiences. I have journals with notes, and have told my kids to write down their thoughts and feelings, especially for those times when I wasn't there as a witness. Having a record ensures time won't erode the memories. I used this example because it's the only one I've got with photos of physical proof of a man who punched a headboard in an effort to get his wife to shut up. Visual evidence gives everyone who sees it a snapshot of the scene.

When I realized I was married to someone who expected me to be okay with how he treated me, who expected his "forgiveness" to be a license to punish me in whatever way he believed I deserved, I could no longer deny the ugly truth. I read books, I listened to podcasts, I did whatever I could to affirm that abuse is never deserved, even if you've done something that hurt that person. I was fortunate to be able to leave. I recognize it's often not an option, and that we celebrate marriages in quantity of years, but not quality of the relationship. There is shame in leaving, in downsizing your house, in being the cause of a "broken" family. If everyone has to be complicit with abuse in order for a family to stay together, isn't something still broken?

What about the good times? That was another excuse -- can't we take the bad with the good? To paraphrase words from a close friend of mine, how much poison in your beverage makes it acceptable to drink? Ten percent? One percent? Three parts per million? The good times are part of the cycle, and you can spend years in good and neutral times. It doesn't dilute the unacceptable.

Another book I read, titled "See What You Made Me Do" by Jess Hill emphasizes that there is no obvious indicator of who is abusive and who is not. When everyone experiences each other differently, and if Joe down the street is cordial and charming to me, how am I supposed to know he goes home to his family and turns into Mr. Hyde? And, families commonly have rules not to discuss their business with anyone not under the same roof. And what counts? A stern look isn't an arrestable offense, but it can be the effective method to keep another person under control. Coerced sex gets into murky territory, and pressing charges makes everyone's life harder. If someone does talk, and the police arrest the abuser, who is also the breadwinner, a family may wind up living in poverty. With all of these factors in play, paired with the confusion of accepting abuse as something that accompanies love, how do we solve it? Is abuse something we are supposed to accept as an aspect of being human?

I drafted this two weeks ago, and have dreaded writing it. Some of my older posts mention my ex-husband in mostly glowing terms, and full of adoration. Some of that stemmed from that need to show the good side of him, to affirm to myself that I had chosen well, and some was genuine affection. The points of contention remained hidden, because blasting it on the internet isn't the way to address problems in your marriage, but if the marriage is over, all bets are off.

Silence works in favor of the abuser; while I don't want my blog to become a series of tales of woe, I also don't want to deny the ugly truth.

The dog who caught the car

For nearly two decades I've wanted to visit Iceland. I first heard of it as a cool destination in the early 2000's and when I saw images of the Northern Lights, I was sold. Something about being on an isolated island with less than half a million citizens appealed to me. I held onto that wish for years. I remember mentioning wanting to see Iceland to my then husband, a Jamaican import who prided himself on loving the tropical climate of the Caribbean. He considered my vacation suggestion and replied in a jokingly pitiful voice, "But it's cold there!"

I filed that vacation away as something that would happen later, when the time was right, whenever my intended would change his mind and be more open to the idea. On hold indefinitely -- on the backburner -- another dream deferred. I spent much of my marriage feeling like an alien, as if the things I liked or wanted were weird, and not in the cool, quirky way, but in the odd and undesirable to "normal" people way.

We traveled to other places, and these trips were mostly spurred on by weddings, or, in one case, a couple we knew had a timeshare opportunity that allowed us and another couple we knew to piggyback on their vacation to Rome. That was a wonderful trip, and at the same time, I wasn't exactly a fan of group trips. I don't believe more is always merrier. That means there is more socializing and small talk to entertain, more people to get on your nerves, and more people jockeying to fill up the trip itinerary with items on their agenda. The group trip makes for great comedic scenarios in movies, sure, but life isn't a movie.

Fast forward to last fall, I was on the cusp of divorce and Iceland was now well known for its tourist attractions. Forecasts for the Northern Lights were optimal because of the solar cycles, so what was stopping me? I had attempted to plan a trip the previous year with a friend, and I bailed. I chose my travel dates and planned for my youngest kid to join me. With four days to fill I had to figure out what to do. A close friend of mine sent an email listing the hotel she chose and the tours she took when she had visited, and that was a decent start. As I planned, I realized it was the first trip I had planned completely on my own.

When you spent most of your adult life married, almost everything becomes a joint venture. Sometimes you get what you want, sometimes each side bends to meet in the middle, or in some third neutral territory, and sometimes you concede what you want because it's not going to work for anyone else. This time I could choose how much or how little I wanted to do, I could choose which tours I wanted to take, and there was no committee to vote on any of it. I booked a one bedroom apartment in the hotel my friend recommended. I booked the flights. I booked one of the tours and decided I would watch the Northern Lights forecast and choose that tour after we arrived. There was some anxiety over it because what if I traveled all that way and something was a bust, or I chose something disappointing? There's no one to blame but myself if that happened, and that felt heavy.

On top of that, we flew out days after the election. The only thing I recall from election day was waking at 2 the following morning, looking at the results and saying, "I can't do this again." While mentally preparing for my trip, I scolded myself. How could I plan something so frivolous in a time of despair? What was I thinking? I know what past me was thinking. That guy isn't gonna win. I had made the fatal error of allowing myself to think it wasn't even a possibility. Didn't anyone watch those debates? This shouldn't even be close!

We flew out on a red eye on a route that curved along the North American coast; every time I looked down, I saw the the Atlantic seaboard glittering below. If I looked straight out of the window, Orion greeted me in the clear black night sky. About an hour before landing, I noticed what looked like thin streams of clouds. But they weren't clouds, exactly -- they moved, slowly, and I realized I was seeing the Northern lights.

They don't look like the photos. Digital cameras have made it easy to tweak settings and see the colors flourish in real time as you're capturing the moment. My eyes couldn't pull out the colors, so what I saw looked like a thin, fuzzy, grayish-white stream. Time lapses speed things up into a mesmerizing and vivid dance of colors fluctuating in the sky, but that's camera magic. Regardless, it was a new-to-me experience, I was still in awe, and grateful I could see them before we even landed.

We arrived at our hotel in Reykyavik at 8 in the morning and the sky was still completely dark. While we were there, the sun rose at around 9:45 and set at 4. It was enough time to walk around and see things, and a great excuse to return to my room after dinner to shower and get cozy. We had one big day tour where we saw waterfalls, a windy beach with black volcanic sand, and a glacier. Everything ran so smoothly, and I simultaneously felt grateful to see it and guilty for being a tourist trampling through in a few short days, piling on and off of the tall passenger vans the tour companies used to cart us around.

We did our Northern Lights tour on the last night we had in Iceland. The tour companies are kind enough to cancel if it's unlikely to catch them, and rescheduling is easy. We piled on to our bus and the driver got us away from the city onto roads that faced unobstructed expanses of night sky. Then we waited. My 13 year old didn't like the tour guide as much as the one we had a couple of days before, and kept making an exaggerated pouty face to show her disappointment to the point that it's become our running joke. As soon as things looked promising, the guide parked the bus and told us we could go out when the lights showed up. It was cold, I was layered up, and I had adjusted my iphone camera settings. This was nearly two decades of dreamy bucket list wishing about to come true.

And we saw them. My 13 year old was not impressed, but I stayed outside capturing as much as I could. Even after taking the photos, I continued to tweak the adjustments on some of the pictures to saturate the colors for dramatic effect, but the landscape ended up looking so red it might have been mistaken for Mars.

Disclaimer: It didn't really look like this

I'd like to go back with both kids and see Iceland in summer, but I'd also like to plan more trips to other destinations. I hung on to Iceland for so long that there's a bit of grief now that I've checked it off the list. I'm the dog who caught the car and is now realizing maybe I didn't actually want the car; I wanted something to chase.

If friend, why not friend behavior?

At almost 50 I have a pretty sizeable number of friends. I read an article once that had an illustration that showed a representation of personal relationships as concentric circles, ranging from the small circle closest to the center to depict those closest to you, to the large outer perimeter -- those who know you because your paths cross regularly enough, but don't actually know you. I've felt lucky in friendship. Almost each new life experience I've had -- a horrible work environment, a local chapter of a writer's club, taking sunrise photos on the shore of a nearby lake -- has resulted in finding at least one friend.

I believe friendship requires mutual respect, a feeling that each person values each other, consideration, and empathy -- the same things needed for love and affection. I haven't had an issue finding this with my closest female friends. Can you guess where I'm going with this? My friendships with men, if you can even call them friendships, have been complicated and problematic.

I went to a college that I believed would provide more insight on men. I don't have brothers and often felt uncomfortable around boys. Going to a service academy that was about 90% men didn't do much to reassure me. There were guys that were nice to me, but I felt distrustful. Do they want to know me or was it like that fortune cookie joke, did they want to know me in bed. My senior year of high school, my own newly widowed mother provided this advice, stated smugly: "Men only want one thing." You don't have to be a master of riddles to figure out what she meant.

It's a pretty dismal thing to believe your value to men might very well amount to how soon and how well you'll put out. I want to believe that isn't true. I don't think I'll give my daughter's the blunt advice my mother gave me, but I'm not going to lie, either. If I only use my life experience as evidence, it may be dismal for them, too.

When I separated from my ex-husband, I had hoped we could maintain a friendship. I never should have burdened myself like that. Like many men, he took friendship to mean I would be available for phone calls or texts at his whim. One Saturday morning he stopped by with my youngest kid and his dog in tow, and let himself into my house because he wanted to talk. It didn't matter that it was 8 a.m. and I was in bed enjoying a slow and quiet morning, and that *I* didn't want to talk. He wanted to talk and therefore, in his mind, I should entertain it. There was no phone call, no warning text. It didn't end well for him. I took that incident and recalibrated my expectations.

He'll ask if I talk to any of my other friends the way I talk to him, and I counter with, "my friends don't treat me the way you do." Isn't that at the core of it -- friendship means each side is holding up their end of the rope. It means you meet in the middle of the bridge, not that one person is perpetually crossing the entire bridge to meet the other. It causes me to question the ideas men have about friendship and causes me to suspect many of us are operating from vastly different definitions.

I remember whenever anyone who fell into the category of former-fling-but-not-ex-girlfriend-who-still-held-a-torch reached out, my ex would reassure me that this person was a "friend." This all inclusive bucket category confused me. Why do men get angry when they are "friend-zoned" when many of them refer to former people they fucked as "friends?" Do men see friendship with women as the catchall for before and after sexy times? In these cases, friendship seems to be a waypoint in the course of pursuit and inevitable retreat phases but not a valuable destination in its own right.

I've had other men befriend me, but they only like the agreeable, fawning version of me. The moment I raise an issue or want to take the focus off of their interests, or, gasp, criticize them because I don't like how they treat me, it's a problem. They seem to want to call the terms of the relationship, as if I don't get an equal say. My ex is hurt that I don't consider him a friend. The solution to that is simple -- act like a friend! His hurt feelings aren't going to bully me into a change of heart, not anymore. This post is not intended as a slam on him; he's not the only man in my life who unilaterally seemed to think he could declare the status of the relationship.

I have a long running joke with three of my friends on our ongoing group chat. They're all college classmates of mine, and the joke is about the previous class president, who was also a friend of mine. As cadets in our senior year, we had taken a trip to the mall with the goal of buying his fiancee a few gifts. At one point during this excursion, he said "It could have been you, you know." That's it, that's the joke. Anytime he did or said anything on social media, the joke would re-emerge in our group chat. In life's typical you can't make this shit up fashion, at our twenty year reunion, his wife wasn't there, and I, who was in my hotel room because I had not forked over the money to pay for the dinner event, was summoned to the hotel ball room to star in the role of plus one. This was comedy gold for my friends, who were all in attendance. As I've matured, I see how little this "friend" actually cares about me. I looked good in person and on paper, and therefore was deemed worthy enough to consider a "could have been." But does he know me? Did he consider that I had a choice in that declaration or was I supposed to melt and feel flattered that I had been chosen?

It's the same way with friendship. Friendship doesn't happen because one declares it. Friendship requires practice, and, hard to believe, friend behavior. I suspect the entitlement my friend the class president felt is a widespread phenomenon that expands into all of those concentric circles of friendship. Paired with that entitlement is a warped perception of love. There are people who think love means you can treat the other person like shit, and if they put up with it, they're a keeper. Notice how the decision making is one-sided. I imagine this entitlement is why my couples therapist had to emphasize to my ex that only one person has to want to leave to initiate a divorce. When you think everyone is living in your world, you may start to believe that your way of seeing things, including the labels you place on your relationships, is all that's required for validity.

This is a societal problem, and I have not quite worked out the dissertation to explain all of it. When someone is raised to see the opposite sex as inferior in every way, how, as an adult, can this person be a true friend to anyone of the opposite sex? When someone is raised to believe they will be the head of the household someday, and everyone in that household "under" them will adopt their last name, simply because they were born with the chromosome combination that indicates it's their birthright, a friendship enacted as a valuable connection between equals appears to be a contradiction.

I don't think any of that is difficult to understand. The women in my life seem to get it; the verdict is out on the men.

The people who ask why the black kids sit together

About two weeks ago, West Point released a memo disbanding certain cadet clubs "effective immediately" with the reasoning that they were complying with executive orders. The twelve disbanded clubs are: the Asian-Pacific Forum Club, Contemporary Cultural Affairs Seminar Club, Japanese Forum Club, Korean-American Relations Seminar, Latin Cultural Club, Native American Heritage Forum, the Vietnamese-American Cadet Association, and the West Point chapters of the National Society of Black Engineers, Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers, and Society of Women Engineers. The letter states the clubs are "not authorized to continue informal acivities using Government time, resources, or facilities."

These clubs were not exclusive; anyone could join, whether they identified with the group personally or not. They were also privately funded. Some of these are national organizations, which allow cadets to network with civilian students at events outside of the granite walls of West Point. There are graduates outraged, and with that outrage came news articles. Apparently due to the category of these particular clubs, they were disbanded while other clubs, the Polish Club for example, and all religious clubs, were spared. I read comments on LinkedIn from the colonel who signed the letter. He backpedaled, stating that these clubs were under review. The words "disbanded effective immediately" don't exactly paint the picture that there will be any reviewing and re-banding.

When I was a cadet, I was part of the Contemporary Cultural Affairs Seminar Club, better known as "CAS." This was the "black" club, with a history of being overtaken because black cadets could not start a black student union, but that is part of another story in academy history.

CAS was my social outlet in a place where I felt I didn't belong. This was my way of knowing people outside of my barracks and classes. For an introverted cadet who seemed to struggle with everything at that place, this club offered a brief reprieve and an occasional weekend trip. Joining this club privided a sense of belonging that wasn't hinging on my academic grades, athletic performance, or military bearing and I imagine cadets and graduates who were members of the eleven other clubs feel similarly.

I was a suburban middle class kid who didn't appear disadvantaged on paper, but that didn't tell the whole story. My dad had died February of the year I entered West Point. The domino effect created by losing the family's breadwinner, meant my mom sold our house in the fall of the same year and moved overseas to be with her family. My sister had an active duty careeer in the Air Force, a spouse with his own active duty career, and young kids. I didn't have the support network of cadets whose parents drove up for weekends in their cars proudly adorned with West Point decals, or a nearby home to visit when I wanted a moment away without having to wait for an extended break. Mine was the family who didn't show up, and it wasn't anything personal, but a pattern of repeating what they knew. We didn't plan a trip around my sister's graduation from basic training. Instead, she flew home and we watched the videotape of her training, and laughed at the instances where she appeared among the patched together clips, like when she was struggling through an obstacle course. There was a stark practicality in my family that bordered on coldness, a you're-an-adult-now-so-you-don't-need-us mindset. For example, instead of sending packages, my mother would send money -- which is also nice, but she didn't seem to understand the importance of knowing someone cared enough to buy what they knew you liked, and carefully assemble a package especially for you. Explaining would be pointless; I'd only hear "But it costs less just to send you the money so you can buy what you want!"

I entered West Point in a time of personal grief that I had to push away in the name of getting through my first year. The mental health support at West Point at the time (early '90s) ranged from being an unhelpful waste of time to feeling like a deterrent. I remember going to the Cadet Counseling Center to deal with my grief and being told to work through a personality test first. I never returned. I'm saying all of this to share that I felt a lot like Mayo from "An Officer and a Gentleman" at West Point, like I had nowhere else to go. There was no "home" to go back to, as my mom had sold the house and moved to Italy after my dad died, and moving in with my sister and her growing family was not an option.

All of this backstory isn't my attempt to garner sympathy, but my way of saying CAS was my place to go.

I don't remember how I got invited into the club. I know in the flurry of walking to and from classes, several black cadets would look you in the eye, ask questions, and act friendly, as if to break away from that initiation ritual of breaking you down into nothing and rebuilding you until you were ready to graduate and commission. The club met in a designated academic classroom in the evenings, and much of the discussion revolved around activities. I got to travel to Manhattan one Saturday. A cluster of us in our white over gray uniforms were heading down a sidewalk on our way to the Blue Note Jazz club and a man who was watching us smiled and exclaimed, "Cadets!" As much as some of us hated the gruel of our daily lives, we also had occasions that gave us the feeling that we were lightning in a bottle -- special in our uniforms during this brief time in our hopefully long lives. The delight that stranger showed us, this group of black cadets -- validated that feeling. We planned and organized, held CAS "jams" where you could socialize, dance, and shed the mask that came with being among the "best and the brightest." I got to take a trip to Washington D.C., when the Museum of African Art first opened, and that trip included a group of us going to the home of a member whose family was local to relax and have dinner. These clubs formed with the intent to connect people, not divide them.

In a place where I struggled academically, athletically and militarily, CAS gave me a glimmer of something positive, a much needed break, especially in the years before I was allowed to have my own car and move around freely. We had fun, and we also talked about real things, like the importance of cadets choosing certain career specialities when they graduated to ensure some of us would represent in the higher ranks.

As a cadet, there were clear markers that others didn't think we belonged, or that we should group ourselves together -- people that did not delight in our existence. People asked why we sat at non-mandatory dinners together, or why we sat together at the football games. I got the sense that the people asking didn't actually care about the answer, and they lacked the ability to empathize with feeling like a token at a place that was just as much yours as it was theirs. These people didn't ask why we had a barracks building named after Robert E. Lee, even though he was on the wrong side of history, or recognize that they themselves had the privilege of blending into obscurity without the pressure of feeling like any misstep would be a reflection upon an entire group of people. The disbanding of these clubs feels like these people that questioned why we sat together achieved the goal of ensuring we can't gather to have fun, feel a moment of comfort or talk about what plagues us. I can't help but think there are miserable people in the world who somehow think the answer to solving their misery is to ensure no one else is having a good time, either.

This quickness to disband these clubs is alarming, as if implying these clubs existed out of something nefarious, or they are somehow no longer needed, and it also sends the message to current cadets that places where they feel a sense of belonging are going to shrink or disappear entirely. It sends the message that fitting in is more important than belonging, and I can tell you, even when when I wore the same uniform as everyone around me, I still stood out. I don't know what's going to happen, and my realization after attending a recent discussion with other graduates is that West Point has always been reactive, not proactive. My hope is that this action was a punt by the leadership with a hope that they wouldn't get fired and replaced by loyalists. A quote I've heard and read since receiving my West Point prospectus as a candidate is, "Much of the history we teach was made by people we taught."

I can only hope we remain on the right side of history.

Now It Can Be Told

 Almost three years ago, I took both of my kids with me to visit my best friend Heather and her family in California. My best friend and I have been an item since the first day of eight grade, when we met at the bus stop. We were both new kids at school -- I had come from Rockland County, New York while she was from a different school district in the same county. We bonded over our observations of the school, the other kids, and feeling out of place in rural, coastal Half Moon Bay. She lasted a month before arranging to return to her old middle school, while I stuck it out.

We reconnected in 9th grade, and this time we stuck together for our high school years and beyond. Now we had kids who were in middle school, and because everyone's spring break dates aligned, we had time to explore, share stories, and rest. One morning we went out to breakfast and Heather talked about an incident from nearly twenty years ago.

My husband (at the time) and I had visited California with his family to watch his cousin graduate from UC Santa Cruz. This meant most of the trip would include his extended family but we had one day set aside to visit Heather, so we drove to her house to meet up, parked, and piled into her car for a trip to San Francisco.

We hit the tourist spots -- Fisherman's Wharf, and even did a tour of Alcatraz. On a walk through the city back to the car, my husband split off to a parallel street. I remember feeling anxious about it, while Heather looked annoyed. It felt like a loyalty test -- was I going to follow him, or stay with Heather? We are so often expected to place our romantic relationships above our friendships. If your spouse doesn't get along with your platonic friends, it can isolate you. Loyalty tests are not part of love.

There were many little things like this in my marriage, unspoken rules that I learned along the way all in place to ensure I remained considerate of his feelings. Meanwhile, I never seemed to look closely enough at his actions to decide what was abnormal, or what felt inconsiderate of my feelings.

Towards the end of our day out, Heather drove us across the Golden Gate Bridge. I sat in the front passenger seat, laughing and joking with her, while my husband had the back all to himself. At some point he decided to remove his sock and shoe and foist it into the front, on my side of the car. Heather made light of it by laughing and pointing to the splatter shaped glittery sticker she had affixed to the inside of the passenger door that said, "What's that Smell?" I snapped a photo with my disposable camera. We joked and laughed and I had never paused to think, this isn't normal. This is not a thing I would do if the situation were reversed and I was in the back seat while my husband and his friend spent time catching up in the front. 

This was the story Heather shared with my kids about their dad as we sat in a restaurant booth eating breakfast. They didn't know. While that incident really happened and I still have the photographic evidence, I had filed it away. There were a few things like that -- so outlandish and weird that I kept it to myself, partly out of not wanting to tell on my spouse (which is the type of thing that keeps experiences of dysfunction and abuse quiet), and partly out of shame. If you let it sink in that you married a person who resorts to removing their sock and shoe to place their bare foot into the passenger seat where you were sitting instead of opting to use their words, it can feel like you supremely fucked up your choice in your person. At the same time you can play it off. Oh, it was just a failed attempt at humor. It's harmless. Lighten up, Francis!

The kids were incredulous. Mommy, did he really do that?! Oh my God! It shifted their view of their father and at the same time made them pay attention to incidents with him that felt off kilter. The story has become a litmus test my oldest kid uses when she meets a friend of mine. "Did she tell you about the foot?" The friends that don't know all have the same reaction. WTF?!

We are no longer married and I don't have to "protect" him out of a sense of loyalty anymore. The foot incident was shocking, funny and harmless, and one of many things that happened in the course of over two decades that I remembered but buried. We marry as adults on the outside while being emotionally immature, resorting to playing games, being shocking, getting revenge and testing our loved ones all in an attempt to get attention, and under that, be loved. I'm guilty of my own embarrassing antics, but I am also done being ashamed and staying quiet. 

Doing good all by myself

We've all heard that phrase "I can do bad all by myself," usually spoken by someone disgruntled within their partnered relationship. It never sat right with me, because isn't the idea that you can do good all by yourself, or at least do better than the current less than optimal situation? Why veer to saying "This is bad, but if it's going to be bad, I'll just do it alone." I want to understand, because I haven't had the thought of wanting to leave someone so I could just own credit for all the badness, alone. I've left relationships with the thought that being without the other person would be an improvement.

In the case of my marriage, I stayed on the fence for a long time, concerned that leaving would be akin to "fucking up my life" (no, I never understood that either, because why would leaving something that is not working be considered "fucking up your life?") This is the narrative we buy, though, and overcoming that to pursue an unseen life on the other side of what I had known for decades, was scary, especially when knowing that choice impacts people you love who had no vote in that decision. Fear can keep us safe. We are constantly trying to survive and fear can tell you, "Look, maybe you're not happy here, but it's familiar, and you know you can live in this situation. Just stick around awhile longer, and who knows, maybe at some point things will even improve." Leaving looked like, "Can I even pay all of the bills on my salary alone?" Living alone means thinking "I might die in alone that house and no one will know until someone  happens to find me." It means all of the tasks I don't want to do will still have to be done by me, or I have to hire someone (which means picking up he phone and calling someone, and then paying them, ugh). It means if I fail to flush the toilet, and I open up the lid later to find a big shaggy turd stewing, there's no one to blame but me (and somehow this seems like a fitting, albeit stinky metaphor).

I'm not doing "bad" all by myself, I'm accountable to myself. I don't have a partner to blame when something goes sideways. When my kids are here, I don't have back up and have to plan accordingly. I've also reduced my exposure to emotional abuse, recurring unresolved issues, and the pressure of being a food shopper, meal preparer, alarm clock, sex provider, personal motivator, appointment rememberer, security blanket, and unskilled therapist for someone else. I've increased my responsibilities for running a household, while also reducing my personal stress level.

It isn't for everyone, and this isn't me looking down on those who are partnered and/or living in a full house. In my case, I missed that step of living alone as an adult, and I skipped it on purpose, out of fear, and because I believed I could tip my life towards security by pairing up with someone I believed was a solid bet. If you don't give yourself the chance to learn whether you could do something alone, you also spare yourself from learning if you might have failed at it. Time to find out.

And then...

This is a follow up from the not at all predictable cliffhanger of a previous post. As suspected, my coworker asked me out. As suspected, I am sure he's perfectly nice, but I don't have the energy or motivation to participate.

The asking out came with a lame job joke ("I'm applying to the position") and I let it slide, then, but when he repeated it later, I said, "I'm not hiring." Look, if I didn't laugh at the joke the first time, the solution is not to repeat it because you think I didn't hear it, but to understand I heard you just fine, I just didn't find it funny.

There's no "position." I feel like so many people know how to take those first steps to express interest, but they don't want to actually connect. I don't have confidence that many men can pursue friendship with a woman without treating it like it's a path to the big prize of romance (code for SEXY TIMES). They want to look at a pretty face across a restaurant dinner table, hide the hard to accept parts of themselves, and have someone to receive the texts they send throughout the day.

I know how terribly jaded that sounds, and this guy did nothing wrong. He's entered my life at a time when my trust in men is at an all time low. I do not trust that I can communicate how I want to be treated, be heard, and then be treated in the way I requested. When he asked me out, I am pretty sure I let out a sigh and said "Get to know me." I said the selves we show each other in a work setting are not really who we are, it's just a small part. The friendly, funny, and yes, pleasant version of me one will encounter in a professional setting is the side I am choosing to show because I like to receive a paycheck. It is a means to an end. If you decide that's who I am, and then proceed to get angry or disappointed when I then begin to exhibit behaviors of a whole human being, that is on you. It's been known to happen.

Strike two, he asked my age, and when I said it, he replied, "You look good for your age." Sigggh. Please, take this as a hint from me and every other human being on the planet, adding "for your age" onto a compliment that could and should stand alone, is unnecessary and backhanded.

Strike three (let's just get there, shall we?), when discussing how Saturday turned into a "really beautiful day" he responded, "Ohhh, you mean beautiful like you?"

What is anyone supposed to say to that? Just, why? Is he saying something genuine or what he thinks I want to hear? Am I supposed to gush and blush? "At what point do I cut slingload and spare us both a lot of pain? John Mayer is a douchebag, but I have to agree with this statement: 

"If you're pretty, you're pretty; but the only way to be beautiful is to be loving. Otherwise, it's just “congratulations about your face.”