Embracing New Dreams and Starting Again

Valentine’s Day is nicely behind us now and although many people enjoy the excitement that fresh cut flowers and dinner out might generate, there are plenty of folks for whom the day is a sad reminder of what might have been.

I think that’s one of the things that makes divorce so difficult: most people take on the commitment of marriage with hearts full of dreams for the future and when reality turns out to be anything but dreamy, it can be extremely difficult to release the hope that it might get better and drive on. Most mature people realize that successful relationships require a little compromise. We can’t have everything our own way. But how much give and take is reasonable?

The issue is even more complicated in the case of an abusive relationship, where it can be extremely difficult for a woman (or a man, for that matter) to recognize the serious and damaging imbalance of power that’s at play in their lives. I’ve noticed that it can take a miserably long time for people who are in the midst of an abusive relationship to recognize that they are being abused. Doing something about it is even more difficult. And no-one likes to throw around the “A-Word.” Abuse is one of those dramatic words that hint at hysteria and craziness.

In my experience, by the time an individual has embraced the reality that their relationship is emotionally damaging to them, they simply want to get out.

That’s one of the themes I had the most difficulty with while writing “Shades of Teale”: what is it that triggers Teale’s understanding that her marriage is an unhealthy one? How does she break through the numb blanket she’s wrapped around herself and begin to realize that the marriage she thought she was getting is very different from the one she wanted? In talking to real-life women who have been through abusive relationships I realized that the triggers vary from person to person. One woman I know realized it was time to leave when her husband started beating her while she was holding their two-year-old son. She was pregnant with her second child at the time. Another shook her head and woke up when she hid for hours in the spare room closet while her husband was “entertaining” his girlfriend in the living room. Yet another found out, by accident, that the business trip her husband had been on was actually all about monkey business. That he enjoyed with her best friend.

I don’t advocate getting lost in the dismal realities that some people experience in their relationships. Yes, life can be perceptively miserable. But I do hope that in reading my book there are women out there who recognize something of themselves in Teale, embrace the truth, get some help and walk out of their abusive relationship with their lives, and the lives of their children, fully intact. It may mean putting an end to the hopes and dreams of one segment of a woman’s life. But it also means starting to create the hopes and dreams to fuel a new era. One that doesn’t hurt.