Imperfect Abuse
It is often times easy to look in from the outside and make judgements. Case in point, the LeBlanc family. I don't know any of them, so what I say comes from the outside looking in, but it also comes from having lived the imperfect life inside an abusive household.
Perhaps the phrase "imperfect life" seems a mellow term when used to describe abuse, but the fact of the matter is that 9 times out of 10 the abuse going on inside a household is nothing more then imperfect people making imperfect choices, with the number one problem being an inability to control overly strong emotions. Life is not black and white.
Yesterday a letter from Mr. Geoffry Carson appeared in the Monitor condemning the father because he waited two days to bring his daughter to the hospital. Perhaps time will reveal how guilty he is as well. For now, I reserve judgement. It sounds to me like Dad worked a 2nd or 3rd shift at the state prison, a job that I have no doubt is filled with enormous stress itself. If he came home after children were tucked into bed, if he was distracted by his own stresses, if he is not a perfect parent, does that necessarily make him a monster? He brought his daughter to the hospital knowing full well what would come of doing it. If it took him a day or so to get up the courage to completely disrupt the lives of everyone else in the family in order to get the help his daughter needed, who are we to judge? He knew his wife would go to jail. He knew he would be suspected. He knew he would lose custody of the rest of the children. I know that fear, that intense anguish. I would like to believe that is why he hesitated. Maybe I'll be disappointed in the end, in which case I have no doubt he will be paying a price for his inability to protect his daughter. Although, guilty or not, he will pay a price for the rest of his life anyway.
Do we love the people we live with? Do we love them despite their shortcomings? When you live in a household where abuse is going on, everyone is involved, but love, trust and commitment is also involved. Dad may have felt that things were "amiss" but his wife, whom he must have loved or he wouldn't have married her, may have been hiding the enormity of the problem from him. The abuse might have been only going on when Dad was at work. Or Dad may have been aware of it, but believing his wife when she told him that she wouldn't do it anymore.
Allegations made by a woman who claims to be a friend of LeBlanc, who claims to have called DCYF, lived as an outsider in the household for months it would seem before she decided things weren't right. So when a police officer or social worker comes into the house for a few minutes and determines there is nothing to support ripping apart a family, why are we so quick to blame them later?
I had two friends come to visit me when I was married to an abusive alcoholic. After only a few hours they left my house with pleas that I come with them. They never came back to visit. They knew what was going on nearly from the moment they stepped into the house. They worried about me for the next four years, but they didn't interfer. They hoped I knew best. They hoped I would "come around". These were just friends. Imagine it's someone you love. Imagine wanting to trust and believe in the person you love, that this "angry" side of them just needs some work. Imagine that you are a parent who believes children need some discipline and are glad to have found someone who seems to have the same belief. Imagine thinking you can be the sanity that holds it together for everyone else, that as long as you're there, the angry monster can be held at bay.
To believe that the abused will report the abuse is naive. In most cases, the abused is too afraid to tell others what is going on because they are understandably afraid of what the consequences will be if they "tattle". Abuse is all about out-of-control emotions and control. It really is that simple and that complicated. As a child facing abuse, I once got up enough courage to tell my mother. Or I tried to. But it came across to her as a child just tattling and blowing things out of proportion. I had called her at work. I remember the conversation well. My mother does not. She was distracted, she was at work, I was complaining about being chased around the house. It was a conversation like any other and she ended it by telling me not to bother her at work with such silly calls. I am now a parent myself who has had the exact same conversation with my own children. I have even been so mean as to tell them the same thing my mother told me all those years ago.
LeBlanc's friend, Kim Allen, says that she witnessed the children being sent to their rooms and to the corner more than seemed warranted, but did nothing about it, saying the parent's "ran a tight ship". I have a relative who, like me, lived with an abusive alcoholic. I visited them often. I very much loved my relative and her children. She was good to my children. Ms. Allen's description of excessive time outs immediately brought back memories of my relative and her husband doing the same thing. Life in their household often involved sending the children to their rooms simply because they were being demanding and annoying. I often thought how sad that they seemed so absorbed in their own dramas that they didn't see how they were just pushing these children away. The children exhibited signs of stress and unhappiness, but never complained about their life. To them this was simply the way of things. Mom was not abusive, but she and her husband fought often and he was abusive to her, but not the children, not physically anyway. This lifestyle had it's effect, one that my relative didn't see. Instead she became part of the problem, and in the end bad choices ended up ripping the family apart anyway. She's no monster. She's a woman who loved her husband and children, but didn't love herself very much. Perhaps she was a mother who thought sending her children to their rooms all the time was the best way to protect them from the monster that did live in the house. It has been many years since they lived together and the healing continues, slowly. Resentment still gets in the way at times.
I found the courage to try to break the cycle of abuse in my household. It involved ripping the family apart. It involved sending 3 children I loved as passionately as my own to South Carolina to live with their mother. It involved moving my 3 year old from the only home she'd ever known to an uncertain and lonely home. Through it all I wanted to believe that things could be different, that the loving, generous man I loved could defeat the angry monster he harbored, but emotions and control aren't all that simple. There was an occasion when my oldest step daughter faced a situation I should have, could have prevented, but didn't. I live with that guilt still, and it's been nearly 20 years.
Abusive relationships are not simple. They are not black and white. They are not perfectly mapped out and easy to judge. It is easy to sit in our happy little homes, read a newspaper or listen to a reporter on TV describe the atrocities that occurred in the LeBlanc house one fine day in July, it is quite another to understand what has been going on in the minds and hearts of these people for years.
I'm sorry Ms. Allen, but Cara LeBlanc is a monster and should be punished to the fullest extreme. The bottom line is, there had to be a little voice in her head at some point during those 8 or 9 hours while she tortured that girl that had to have been telling her that she was out of control. If so, she ignored it and that makes her beyond help. If not, that is truly monstrous. And I'm sorry Mr. Carson, but I will reserve judgement on Dad until I hear the whole story, if we ever do.
