Newscoma

Yesterday was a very odd day and I own it. It was one where I couldn’t breathe trying to make sense of some things that have happened over the past couple of weeks and how things had snowballed. This might get a little personal, so if that’s not your thing, look at this picture of a skunk on a leash.

After awhile, I thought that I was, to put a personal spin on it, grieving. Grief is a funny thing. Sometimes it just shows up, gives you an asswhupping and then you have to heal from an emotional beating. I admit, I froze up yesterday like a statue.

Rex and The Vol Abroad write about being positive and I think that’s excellent. We don’t need to be frozen, as Rex writes. And this post by Christopher Penn is a must read.

Now, let me explain my worries as my grief will make more sense. About eight years ago I had a medical emergency that tapped every bit of my savings and I spent five days in ICU (it’s something I don’t want to get into, quite frankly.) Two years ago, I had major surgery and what little savings I had built up were gone. Again.

That’s neither here nor there really, but I’ve spent the best part of eight years playing catch up. I had health insurance, campers, but the bills were overwhelming.

There are people like me who are panicking a bit, but as an optimist, I think I’m going to be all right. However, I’m not alone. There are thousands of people like myself that made sound business decisions that were annihilated due to unexpected emergencies. And what happened in our government in the last few weeks is overwhelming. I heard yesterday that the Domestic Violence Program that I spent thousands of hours trying to secure here is going to shut it’s doors. I got on the phone, called people and am trying to assist the best that I can. I grieve the loss of that program not because of my involvement, but because people need it.

Because that’s just life.

This isn’t a geographical issue, it’s a just a reality. Sometimes folks get bad breaks. I have had it MUCH luckier than other people I know and for that I’m grateful.

And that’s where the grief comes in.  But grief is fleeting.

For me, I’m looking, as Aunt B said so sweetly in an email to me, to get into the lifeboat to escape the sinking ship and that’s really scary. I love Hoots, but I also know that I’m up against a wall.

But, I’m the woman that says do something every day that scares you and I haven’t changed my mind on that one.

So I’m looking to blog against despair as The Vol Abroad says.

I’ve always thought that good things come out of bad ones, but you have to get through the murky fog to see the sun.

And that’s all right too.

I had to recuse myself from a story yesterday. Just like the judge and the district attorney, I had to say no to a story and I’m going to have to stay away from it.

Editor Bates will do just fine with it. It has to run. She’s a rock star anyway, although I don’t think she knows it. She’s amazing.

And I’m dealing with the emotions that go along with seeing someone that I know, that I grew up with and that is part of my family behave, how do I say it, absolutely awful.

Why, you may be asking? A distant family member was arrested. If he did what he’s accused of doing, then he will go to jail. For a long time, I might add. What did he do? Well, and the reporter is coming out in me, he allegedly beat the hell out of his girlfriend and held her captive. How bad was it?

Let’s just say the TBI is involved.

And the nieces found out about it at school. We knew over the weekend but we waited for the details. We didn’t tell them because we didn’t know the extent of what was happening. We knew it was bad. We didn’t know how bad it was. Some kid spilled the beans in all of it’s horribly glory to the oldest niece.

It’s bad. It’s heinous.

I talked to the oldest niece this morning. I told her I went to court and watched the arraignment, let those folks know that because of the family connection, I was out of it. Yesterday, she cried, according to Homer. I asked to speak to her which Homer said might be a good idea.

I own that this morning, as I talked to this 7th grader, I told the truth and another brick out of the wall of her innocence I personally knocked out. I’m not a mother, but we needed for her to know that Mister Right died a long time ago. I explained that it wasn’t a reflection of her but sometimes we get hit by emotional shrapnel. Being an adult in the life of a young person whom I adore is not always fun, but it’s necessary for her to know the realities.

Damn.

Note to young journalists in small town news, sometimes you have to just go look people in the eye because sometimes you will run things that are going to hurt feelings including your own. Own it and move forward. If you don’t make people mad, then you aren’t doing your job. It’s best to make both sides of an issue mad, because then you know you are doing your job well.

But it’s news. And despite the personal connections you might have, you HAVE to run these things because if you didn’t, then you become part of the problem.

There are no favors in news. There can’t be.

And, my dear friends, these things are the downside of working in small town news. I have put relatives on the front page and it’s never fun. With a writing staff of two and a half people, you can’t run from these things. And, although it can be painful and everyone thinks reporters are barracudas, we really aren’t. We are human and in the coming days,  I will see the hurt look on the faces of people I care about. Sometimes the news biz is amazingly wonderful, but there is always a flip side. This is a social business, a business where trust is crucial. We have to maintain that trust by reporting things we might want to hide our heads in the sand about but we can’t. Journalists just can’t.

And, although I recused myself, I’m still the editor and my name is all over that newspaper.

I say again, there are no favors in news and no one is above the law.

Is this person guilty? I am not a judge but I will say that the evidence thus far is overwhelming. And the sad fact that it’s not the first time.

I have put him on the front page before.

My day yesterday was one of the busiest I’ve had since I rejoined the news biz. And last night, I had to put on my Mary Sunshine face and go to a local event.

It took everything I had in me as I found out a friend had died just moments before I went.

I’m not a robot and there is a hole in the pit of my stomach this morning.

Sorry about the rambling. One week from today, I turn 43-years-old and I feel every bit of it this morning.

And we move forward.

This is, of course, my opinion and I’m stating it as such because I don’t want anyone going nuts on me.

Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and you could still buy Country Club ponies at, ironically, the country club in a vending machine in the men’s locker room here in Hooterville for fifty cents (true story), I used to work with battered women.

It was one of the most difficult yet satisfying jobs I’ve ever done. Now, with that said, let me tell you what would happen when it got hot outside.

The heat pisses some people off. And although I don’t know if there is any documentation to back this up, I know our numbers went up. When I lived in Nashville and also here when I was the coordinator of a domestic violence program, we would brace ourselves for the backlash of Mother Nature. This is completely unscientific, mind you, but my staff and I would psych ourselves up for the police calls we knew we would get. And, although my opinion is still unscientific, it did appear our calls would indeed increase and we would even have staff meetings about it in preparation for the heat making abusers into Neanderthals. (My apologies to all Neanderthals reading this post.)

Wait, let me see if I can find something. Got get a cup of coffee, I’ll be right back.

Okay, I’m back.

There is this study but it’s about eight years old.

I don’t know why I’m bringing this up but I do believe that the climate does impact human behavior. I’ve said more than once that just because a person is drunk is NOT an excuse to be abusive to their partner/wife/lover. Alcohol just makes people more uninhibited to do what is lurking in the back of their brains. And the heat isn’t an excuse either and this is just my thoughts on what I experienced.
There is no point to this. It’s just something I was pondering this morning because its wicked hot outside and it doesn’t look like its going to get any better. We are looking at a nice brisk 100 degrees outside today. I’m sure Rachel probably could find some official data on all of this that would be more “bonafide” but I do know what us folks in the trenches back in the day were talking about, and dealing with.

And that is what I’m thinking about this morning.

I’m going to go to work in a few minutes. The Groovy Chicks From Work have been very sympathetic to my headache from hell and the puking that has accompanied it. Puking is such a gross word. I may need to rethink writing it in the future.

What a sexy beast I am.

Anyway, I was thinking of activism. I used to aggressively pursue legislation in helping battered women and sexually and physically abused children. I’ve wrote the grant to bring Domestic Violence services to my little part of the world here. I’m very proud of this although after time my emotional well-being needed to be nurtured and I left after working in such a world filled with pain. I was burned out so I passed the torch. It’s now run by people who are fresher than I am. We lobbied to get laws changed where women and kids would have a fighting chance to get out of their homes safely. When I started in DV work, sometimes batterers would just be given a summons to appear in court. Then, he’d go back in and give his wife/girlfriend/partner another ass-whupping. Now there is a cooling off period.

We did work that I thought was of value. It helped people. I did this for years. Along with some other beautiful and wickedly smart men and women, we did get some things done in the legislature and I’m proud of what we did.

I say that to say this. I’ve noticed that the blogosphere is a wonderful place to present grassroots efforts. An example that comes to mind is the attention given to the Claudia Nunez case back last fall. On the other hand, anyone who puts their views out into the blogosphere is, in some cases on more controversial issues, immediately labeled. And that bothers me. One is automatically a wingnut or a moonbat if the issues even have a sniff of what “the other side (for lack of a better term)” believes is partisan.

In working to create a better world for battered women, it was always an uphill battle. We had to deal with labeling and prejudice. I was constantly told these statements from more people than I could even count. Statements like “They ALWAYS go back” (which is not necessarily true and although some women do return, I can write you a fifty page dissertation on why the emotions create lines of fear that make women return to their abusers. Another statement I’d get a lot of is “What did she do to make him so mad?”

Huh. Adults do not have the right to discipline another adult. That is crap, my friends. I still reel years later from that comment and sadly, I still hear it today.

Some fine men and women fought these stereotypes and worked for fair and equitable change that laws would be adhered to in giving these women and children a chance. The question we started to present for legislators to understand what we meant was one that we hoped they’d ponder. We talked about love. No woman I’ve worked with ever put in their dairy when they were 12 years old with romantic hopes of finding Mister Right that they hoped he would beat the shit out of her. Serial batterers are usually very charming during the opening of relationships. Many times, the abuse came later. And remember, batterers don’t always abuse. This is called a cycle of violence. And abuse isn’t just physical. Emotional abuse can be just as dangerous. When a woman is told everyday more than once that “They are stupid” or “Lousy in bed, “I’ll take the children” or “No one will ever have you” sort of comments, it creates deep wounds.

Why am I writing this this morning when I should be headed to work? Because I was one of those women who married a great guy who tormented me. He had a good job,always wore a suit and wined and dined me to the point my head swirled. I never saw any indication that he was abusive. He was Prince Charming.

Three weeks after we got married, I had a black eye. He swore he’d never do it again and it was a one-time thing. I thought I was in love. I believed him. About two months later, he started throwing dishes at me because, ironically, I didn’t load the dishwasher the way he thought it should be loaded, and one cut the back side of my calf open into the meat of my leg. I still have the scar. I left. I was shocked. I had no idea, saw no indication that this was coming. He told me all those horrible statements I wrote about above.

I thought it was me. Being that I had good friends and a wonderful family who cried foul when I FINALLY disclosed to them what was going on (I was so embarrassed and freaked out), I left the third and final time and this time I was issued a beating of astronomical proportions. There was some internal damage.

I left. He refused to sign the divorce papers. He said he owned me.

Over time (two years later when he finally signed them and Big Daddy threatened to kill him with me screaming that this jackass wasn’t worth it), I started to heal.

So, today, I’m asking you to put the labels aside. And, hopefully this explains why I do believe in the mantra of “Let’s talk about it.” People do things because of whom they are.

Not everything can be fit into a nice box. We all have our war wounds. And sometimes we fight because we don’t have a choice. We have to.

It keeps us sane.

For more information in Tennessee, go here:

Tennessee Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence
P.O. Box 120972
Nashville, TN 37212
(615) 386-9406 Fax: (615) 383-2967
(800) 289-9018 In State
Website: www.tcadsv.org
Email: tcadsv@tcadsv.org

Here’s chart that we used while I was training concerned citizens on how to start their own support group. I hope it will give some insight.

Thanks for listening.