INfusion 47 ebook - Summer 2012 - NMIT

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Aaron Hughes
‘I walked into a door handle.’
‘I fell over.’
‘I missed the swing of the punching bag.’
‘It was my fault.’
‘I made him angry.’
I sat, staring at the other occupants of the room, listening to the excuses
that these battered wives had used in the past to explain their injuries and
bruises.
I looked to my feet, thinking how stupid I was not to have realised what
was happening to me every time ‘I love you’ was said. All the apologies. The
remorse. I looked up to see the head of the group staring at me expectantly.
‘Would you like to share your story?’ she asked me.
I didn’t know what to say. When I go home I’m scared, but I didn’t think
they would understand. I act calm, confident, in control. But my spouse scares
me. I’m alone when I go home; my family doesn’t know, how can I tell them?
How do I tell them that the day I said ‘I do’, I lost my soul?
‘I married Jordan when I was eighteen. We were young and in love. I
thought I was going to be that happy for the rest of my life. But something
changed. Work got harder … or maybe we just weren’t old enough to realise.’
I paused. How do I explain this? How do I explain what happened to us?
What happened to me?
‘It started when she wanted to have a baby.’ I thought back to that day.
She had walked into the house and thrown me onto the bed. Our usual slow
love-making was replaced by a fast, painful bout of sex. I only lasted ten minutes,
but the torture she put me through felt like I had been restrained for
hours. I had woken up the next morning covered in bruises, my ears filled
with her apologies.
‘She said she was at the right time in her cycle, and I believed her.’ Two
months later she told me she was pregnant. I was going to have a child, when
we were still children.
‘Leslie, my sister, said I was too young, that we were fooling ourselves
into believing we could take care of a child. She was right. We couldn’t.’ Jordan
went back to work three months after Tara was born.
27
S.L. Higgins
Jordan