There Is A Woman

There is a woman whose story I must tell. Her name will remain unknown, her place in time will surely show itself as her story progresses. In her life there have been many challenges, fears, woes, and much strife. She has experienced many hurts and harmful times, yet in her heart she sees herself as fearless and free.

She is in the midst of a terrible war, a war that is being waged out in the world and inside her body. Her war started many years ago. It is hard for her to really imagine the beginning and she is not happy to be having to do so. But, because she knows sometime in the future a young woman needing guidance will read these words, she is willing to have her story told.

It started 50 years ago, 50 years ago for her that is. Her parents were very poor, immigrants from another country. Her father was a laborer. He left very early each day and returned late at night, exhausted from the 15-hour days he put in. Her mother was home with the 6 children, of which she was the third from the oldest and the first-born girl. On most days everything seemed hard. Hard food, hard floors, and hard hands whipping out with slaps that stung. From the very beginning the slaps rained down, from mother, brothers, but never from father. No, from father there were no slaps, no stinging backhands, but there was something much, much worse.

She can’t remember when it started, it seems like it always just was. The visit in the night, the touching and the groping, the horrible fear and the sickly desire. It seemed like it happened almost every night, but now she can’t be sure. All she knows is she couldn’t make it stop, and when the crooning started and the kisses began, she wasn’t sure she wanted it to stop.

Was this the only love she would ever have? That’s how she felt then, as an innocent, terrified, love starved child. Was this the only way her father could love her? Did he love the others that way too or just her? She tries to remember, and forget, how it was. The pain, the humiliation, the threats. ”Don’t you tell, you will never tell. I am your father, and you will do as you are told. My loving is what you need to keep you good” he told her. “You are not good, you are evil and all that will save you is my loving”. And she was so young, just three or four, and she worshipped him, and she believed him, and he hurt her and humiliated her and made her believe that was love. In the night pain, in the day pain, all disguised as love. So much pain for such a small girl to bear.

By the time she was ten she knew she could never love a man. She knew she had been ruined by her father for too many years in too many ways. Her fear of men was only outweighed by her loathing of them. Why didn’t her brothers help her? Why did her mother just stand by? How could she save her little sisters from the same fate or was it only her she wondered, only her.

And then her father died. One day he just didn’t come home. And she wept. She wept from fear, from love, from pain, but mostly she wept from the first inkling of joy she had ever experienced. A joy that started deep inside of her and threatened to turn her quiet weeping into hysterical wailing, for her freedom from her father, and her birth as a new person. At least that’s what she thought then.

As time went by, she grew into a strong vibrant young woman; she thrived in all the aspects of her life that were valued in her society. She learned to cook, to sew, to grow plants and vegetables. She learned to read and write and ventured out into the world. But at her core she was in a war zone. Men were the enemy, fathers all in the making, reaching for her, groping her in crowds. Her fear would rise up and start to suffocate her and she would find herself huddled in corners unable to breath.

One day she found herself in a very dark and unfamiliar part of town. She had been daydreaming as she walked and must have taken a wrong turn somehow. She looked around and didn’t recognize anything, and she began to panic. She turned and tried to retrace her steps, but just got more and more lost as she turned corner after corner. Finally, she came to a café she thought she recognized and went in to ask for directions, and hopefully get her bearings. But once she entered the café she knew she had made a terrible mistake.

The room was filled with strange faces. Men and women who seemed like they were waiting for someone or something to enter the door and change their lives. Hungry faces with hungry eyes, all now looking at her. As she tried to back out the way she had come a hand touched her shoulder and she jumped. She turned to face a woman who was so tall she seemed to reach the ceiling. She was dressed in a black tunic and wrapped in a deep ruby colored shawl. Her feet were covered by heavy boots and her eyes were ringed with black like a gypsy or an exotic dancer. The girl was terrified and mesmerized all at the same time. The tall woman took her hand and wordlessly led her to a nearby table and motioned her into an uncomfortable looking wooden chair.

“Your pain has brought you here” the woman said. “All of us here have had too much pain to bear in our lives. We are here waiting for that perfect moment in time that will allow us to shed our fears and our torments and move on with our lives. But somehow that moment has never come. We wait, we share our stories, we cry, we rant, we dry each other’s tears, but the pain never leaves us. We are trapped in an endless loop of misery. Many of us have been here for years, some have just arrived, but you are here at the wrong time, and you are in the wrong place. You have something in you we have never experienced. You have that one moment of joy that came to you upon the eve of your father’s death. That joy is what we are looking for but cannot find…we would take it from you if we could, but it is not ours for the taking. But you, you have a choice. You can let the fear and the loathing you so obviously wrap around you keep you here with us, or you can embrace the joy and find your way back into the world.”

And as the girl stared at the tall woman in black, she saw the truth, and the unbearable pain and suffering, in the woman’s dark ringed eyes. At that moment she realized that her strength and her future lay in reaching for the joy, however fleeting it might prove to be, and letting go of the fear and the loathing that had inexorably drawn her to this café of the damned. With all the energy she had she broke the mesmerizing stare of the tall stranger, pushed herself up out of the wooden chair and fled the café leaving the tall woman and the rest of the hungry, hope starved faces behind.

It would be a lie to say the young woman’s life totally changed that day. It would be absurd to say she never feared or felt pain or panic again. Nothing like that happened at all. What did happen is she told herself the mad café and its misery trapped patrons were just something out of a bad dream and by the time she found her way back to streets she recognized, she had almost completely regained the whole of her fears and loathings. But, in amongst the stories she kept telling herself of the pain she had experienced a slight glimmer of the hope and joy the woman in the café had reminded her of began to glow. For brief moments in the days that followed its light would shine within her and each time she felt its heat that glimmer grew just that much brighter, and finally the joy became more real than the fears that had possessed her for so long.