I am taking a couple of weeks off from Souls to lock down and write a series about domestic violence for Lagniappe in Mobile. Stories of victims and abusers, the causes, why victims stay, the effects on kids and the community and how we can all help.
Will re-post Souls stories from the first two years during this time, but there are great stories that are ready to go when the break is over. The story behind this tattoo is one of them.
“I started fishing at the bay when I was about 18. I am 62 now and still love to fish. I catch redfish, sheepshead,...
A couple of weeks ago, I posted the story about riding around the Mississippi Delta with my mom and taking pictures....
“When I was a little boy, I spent the summers with my Grandparents in the country town of Akron, AL. I eagerly...
“I was a freshman at Blount High School in Prichard when integration changed everything. Students from Blount were...
"My teacher drove several of us from Bald Knob, AR, to Memphis to see Elvis play at the Cotton Carnival in May 1956. I...
“I was born in 1935 in Walker County, one of the poorest counties in Alabama. My dad was a coal miner. He also worked...
Domestic violence is a cycle of behavior based on adverse childhood experiences in how individuals were treated, continued to allow themselves to be treated and have an ingrained pattern that this behavior is a way of life and acceptable because this is the type of environment they were surrounded by for most of their childhood.
In my life, It is not just a cycle of physical abuse but of verbal language that is spoken by those individuals who brought you into this world and whom you thought loved you. Until the day you woke up and realized that you were never wanted because you were a girl and wasn’t born a male firstborn. It is also a reality that parents ‘pi,p’ their children out for their own benefit – when you do something wrong, they tell the whole world. When you do something right, they give you accolades and set you on a cloud that you are special and are worthwhile. Oops, then it all bursts. That is what pimping out your children means.
Then, you become an adult and realize that the two husbands you chose were truly “mama’s boys”. Not in the sense that they loved their mothers, but in the sense that they disliked their mothers for the controlling manner in which they were treated as their children. Then you wake up one morning and realize that your own relationships were identical in a choice to that of your parents who raised you in an upper-middle-class family – behind the white picket fence! That is, you realize after two divorces and examining the men you were attracted to had the same behavior as that of your father and he did not like his mother but tolerated his wife. My father’s controlling behavior as a partner was substantiated at my mother’s funeral when he used the term “I allowed her…” in a conversation with me. Thanks dad for validating what I saw for most of my life
On the flip side, I met many women whose husband’s were Mana’s boys but not in a good way – they never left home without Mama. So I formed a support group in 2004 and called it “Mama’s Boys Survivor Club.” It resonated with so many women who were attracted to the behavior of the same type of man and that they also married and then divorced.
in my case, my two husbands went back to Mama after our divorces!. No more said!!!!