A New Line in the Sand

If you love someone and that someone often disappoints you, maybe hurts you, lets you down, wrecks your stuff, or gives you a black eye you can’t explain to your boss, you are often compelled to draw a new line in the sand.

This goes for parents who go cold on you, adult children who are addicted or mentally ill, friends whose extreme needs soak up all your energy, and lovers and husbands who compartmentalize their gentle and gentlemanly behavior in small cubes, an occasional sweetness on the tongue, so potent that you will forget what happened before and what will happen next.

I’m glad for all the people who don’t understand this. I’m glad they haven’t ever had terrible trouble with someone they loved. Glad they haven’t been embarrassed and shamed, made to feel stupid and weak. It’s wonderful to be in that position, knowing exactly what one would do if a loved one punched them in the face. That would be it for them. One punch and they’d be gone. Zero tolerance. Life is so terrific in the abstract.

The same culture that hypes forgiveness and second chances and claims everyone can be changed with religion or therapy or magic also insists that women whose partners punch them in the face immediately leave them and, in so doing, leave their homes, their children, their incomes, their relationships, and their man. But because leaving is so difficult, so terribly painful to contemplate, the women who have been punched in the face concentrate on drawing new lines in the sand. They decide that it will be the next worst thing, not the current one, that will push them out the door, If he does that, she thinks to herself, if he hits me in front of the children, if he hits the children, then I’ll leave. If this, if this, if this, then that. It’s negotiation, deal-making with fate. It gets done in a lot of areas of life, almost all of them around survival, emotional and physical.

When women who’ve been punched in the face draw a new line in the sand instead of leaving, we judge them.

The judging is expressed in seemingly harmless questions: why did she stay? why did she marry him? why did she let him abuse her? Questions asked as if there was no point to wondering why a man would punch his wife in the face.

It’s her job to get out of the way. Her job to protect herself. Her job to make sure he doesn’t get too angry. Her job to hide the fact that she’s drawing a new line in the sand because she can’t face the alternative. Her job to make sure that she doesn’t get herself killed.

What’s his job?

Why is the dissection of Janay Rice’s decisions so thorough while Ray Rice’s thought process is chucked in the bin with all the other used balls? What is he made to explain? His is the behavior and decision-making that needs analysis and parsing. We would all benefit from a microscopic examination of every single factor that would lead a successful, accomplished and wealthy person to punch his wife in the face.

If we weren’t so preoccupied with why the abused don’t leave, we might figure out why the abusers abuse. Radical.

Meanwhile, all across the country, women who have gotten punched in the face today are looking at Janay Rice to see what she does next. It’s not fair and it’s not right but I think it’s true.

We want her to have the answers.