A father's rights

“Hope, you evil little thing,” she thought to herself as she reached out with her open palm positioned just below where the moon hung in the sky.

It was a cynical twist on a moment from her past she was playing out. A memory of someone who’d told her he would reach up and take the moon from the sky for her, present it to her on the palm of his hand.

That hand, the one that had wrapped around her neck some few years later, the night she woke him to ask for a simple thing, and when, in that moment just out of sleep, his truth he’d practiced hiding from the world all his life had come screaming out.

It wasn’t the first violence, and while this world thinks there has to be bruising and blood for it to be abuse, it was far from being the first of the daily abuse she'd endured for years.

But, he’d been smarter up to that point, slowly breaking down her sense of self, or any belief she had a right to see herself as worthy of being treated better. It's really much worse than any act of physical violence, but you can't call the police about it, and you won't get much sympathy even if you notice it happening, which you probably won't.

At work, he was a friend to all, even admired. Before he got his own office, he’d make sure to call her regularly in front of his coworkers in order to play the doting father and husband. Once there was no audience to perform for, his only calls were to reinforce to her how worthless she was.

There’d been a punch once before, but it had come in the heat of an argument, and not knowing there are men who have never punched a woman, or even so much as pushed one in anger, she had let that go. After all, he always made snide comments about "those wife-beating rednecks," so surely he couldn't be like that.

But that night, as he throttled the life from her body, he had finally gone far enough to make her realize there was something genuinely evil deep inside him that he worked very hard to keep hidden.

You’d think, with them having kids, she would have taken the children and run. Well, maybe not you. You might actually be the kind of person who wouldn’t be confused that someone in a wheelchair has difficulty with stairs. But most people, looking at the circumstances of strangers whose skin they’ve never worn, tend to have expectations of what they would do with roles reversed that reminds of someone who thinks they’d look like Bruce Lee if they ever had to fight off a mugger.

Anyway, there’s no running in the Land of the Free, not for women and children.

No, we have Amber Alerts for that, in one of those great twists of irony where the thing meant to offer some protection to the weak and defenseless gets twisted to the advantage of the strong and destructive.

And there’s so many victims of abuse who would recognize the tales of escaped slaves running for Canada in their own stories of trying to outrun the authorities – the slave catchers – that some well-spoken, professional, white man who “owns” them has set on their trail.

So, there’s no escape, and there’s no running. There’s just “We don’t have any reports of domestic violence from before” and “We take domestic violence very seriously in this state” and people who don’t get that one person saying both phrases in the same conversation is a cruel joke.

And there’s hope. Everyone wants to offer hope, and like sugar being force-fed to someone suffering malnutrition, it’s just a different kind of poison in the victims’ mouths.

And in America, we don’t listen to victims. Oh, from time-to-time, if a man manages to accumulate enough victims to fill a conference room, we might. Of course, isn’t it suspicious that they only now came forward, now that someone else said something? They're probably just after a payout. I mean, that's how women get money, right? By ruining innocent men.

Now, if there was only one victim, or even two, we might not be as concerned about the piling on, but how can we possibly believe what just one or two people say? Surely, if it were true, his victims would fill a conference room...

Oh, the children said it. Well, obviously the woman has poisoned them against the blameless, guiltless man. She can’t really help it. Women just tend to be evil that way.

I mean, sure, any study to see if children can be manipulated to turn against an innocent parent show you've a better chance of winning the lottery, and that trying to do it pretty much always turns children against the person trying to do it.

And, sure, studies show that women and children in a divorce are no more likely to allege abuse than in any other circumstance.

Still, we have cultural prejudices and "common sense," so we’re going to have to go with those.

And, hey, we have “Women Do It Too,” the great motto of those who failed statistics in college.

Much better to leave millions of women and millions more children imprisoned to the men who own them than to risk sending an innocent man to... therapy.

Anyway, it’s still not child abuse, because he only hurt the children’s mother, in front of them, as they were forced to watch. How could that possibly harm the children?

But it doesn’t matter now. It will never matter again for her.

As her hand slowly drops toward the horizon, well-outpacing the moon, whatever argument or hope or bitterness that was left in her is draining out along with her blood as it soaks into the earth.

They’d been so concerned, in family court, that the two of them reach some kind of “agreement,” that the children have both a father and a mother. In this age of single parents and foster parents and adoptions and all else, a judge can say, with no sense of irony or anachronism, that children “need to have both a mother and a father,” implying it’s more important to risk abuse and protect the rights of a sperm donor, than to even consider the rights of either the children or the other genetic contributor’s responsibility to protect those children… or herself.

But now, they will have neither a father nor a mother.

And while all those people, from the judges to the officers to the legislators to the parents and friends of the abuser who stood by him, while all of them will have blood on their hands, not a one will ever acknowledge the stains.

But for her, at least, it’s over. Though the children will live their lives with permanent scars, though cycles will repeat under the careful watch of those too cowardly to try to interrupt it, though millions will suffer, silenced by their supposed protectors, and will never make headlines the way she will – “Husband held for questioning after wife’s body found” – at least, for her, it’s over. And in a way, perhaps she has finally escaped him – even if it was by his hand – to take her rest in the one place in this world where victims actually have a chance of escaping an abuser.