Domestic Violence
...inging the doorbell, but the person’s head was down, and I could not see their face. All of the sudden I noticed someone peeking through the window. I realized it was my daughter’s father. I was on the phone telling a friend I was getting ready to call the police, when he jumped through the window on me and he nearly beat me within an inch of my life. In Lloyd Dangle’s essay “Trouble Town, Freeze or I’ll Shoot,” (257) the cartoon illustration is showing that the officer is a friend of family, and the man comes to the door with his gun drawn and so does the police. The officer wants to explain that his son wrote a disturbing Haiku essay and was suspended from school. The father tells the officer that the mother should hear what is being said. The mother asks if he was alienated or full of rage like another classmate that was arrested for another project. The officer responded, “Worse.” In the essay, the student was writing that he wanted to take away guns so that all the school shootings would stop. The mother says, “He’s never taken to guns like a normal child and maybe some serious time at an arcade would help.” The father responds to the mother “It’s all your fault”. The illustration is showing the police officer, mother and father holding guns. I learned later that my daughter’s father as a young child saw and endured violence within his home. Unlike the little boy in the essay, he chose to promote guns violence rather than stop it. There was mental and physical abuse along with the presence of guns. I was lucky that he did not have a gun at that particular time, because he had ample access to them. Jealousy is also a source of domestic violence. In a relationship I experienced with my son’s father that was of a violent nature, he at times would become very jealous, and would often abuse me mentally, and sometime physically. I was always the support and backbone of our relationship, and this made him very envious of me. He had a lot of insecurities. As I spoke with my neighbor and friend Zina, I found out that she too had experienced mental abused by the father of her child. They were in a somewhat secure relationship until he was incarcerated early in her pregnancy. Unlike my experience of living with my abuser, she did not. Her situation was very different, but the jealousy from her former lover was very similar. When she tried to break off the relationship, which was one year after their daughters’ birth, he wrote her a letter saying she was fat, nasty, a lousy bitch, and no one would want her, and all kinds of things that would make a person have very low self esteem. He was jealous because she had gone on with her life while he was incarcerated. It seems the changes she was going through I had also. My son’s father was lashing out at me because I was doing something with my life, and he didn’t have the things that I had. He would always tell me things like I wasn’t going to ever amount to anything, I thought I was better than him, remarks about my weight, and all kinds of derogatory remarks to me. He would follow me to different functions, break car windows and flatten tires, he would try to destroy things that I had and he didn’t have, questions my friends about our whereabouts, and accuse me of flirting all the time. He was even jealous when I spent time with my family. But the breaking point of our relationship is when the jealousy turned to rage, when he fought with me outside of my mother’s home, pulling a gun out on me. That was ultimately the end of our relationship, and trying to build a family foundation. The image I remember, the anger, the rage I saw on my so...