We argue about the garlic in the guacamole. He storms outside. I stand at the bathroom mirror, my shaking hand focused on my mascara. I hear the front door open, his footsteps coming up the stairs. He opens the door, and silently pounds his fist into my gut.
“Now you can tell your friends I abused you,” he said calmly.
A feminist activist and fierce advocate for victims of intimate partner abuse, my own life had become a constant eggshell dance. I justified buying a two-dollar tube of lipstick or a lunch with a friend. I defended a night at the movies with a girlfriend or a class at the community center. A professional meeting that kept me out past eight invited accusations of infidelity.
It was extraordinary how wrong I could be about so much.
I knew that domestic violence was the misuse of power and control. But when in its midst, I was blind to the myriad of forms it takes. I compared myself to those I considered “real” victims—those in my office with black eyes, broken bones, and battered children.
For over a decade I stayed with the person who threw the bowl of pasta across the kitchen, cracked the windshield with his bare fist on our way to a Lamaze class, and smashed a vase of flowers against the mantle.
