Welcome.
I’m staking out my own little corner of the internets for my own take on a few things.
Actually, I’m staking a claim on some cyber space to say some things that By Goddess need to be said.
First, though, an introduction is in order, I suppose.
I’m a lot of things, like most of us out there. There’s not a single one of those things that defines me; let’s just say it’s a synergy of them all.
I’m a scientist who’s endlessly agog at the neatness of the world. I’m an unrepentant intellectual of the populist sort. I read gossip mags and peer reviewed journals and JRR Tolkein and don’t really see any sort of disconnect between those things. I love culture and history and politics past and present, and classical Latin poetry. I even like the French and Goddess forbid, physics and chemistry. I am an unabashed combat boot wearing heavily tattooed radical feminist with post baccalaureate degrees happily married to the hottest and most wonderful MALE ever. I have a truly sick sense of humor. Deal with it.
I’m also a survivor of domestic abuse of the truly crazy-making sort. I got out, by Goddess, but thanks to the amazingly fucked up politics in family law here in the great state of Georgia, my abusive ex sought, and won, primary custody of our son.
Being a mother without custody is kind of like being biologically male without a cock, I think. There’s this overwhelming assumption that you have to be a child beating crack addict who burns kids with cigarettes for fun to lose said kids. Not true. But it’s always awkward for me to discuss this with acquaintances. I don’t like to explain it. It’s no fun, and if it’s not fun, then why do it, right?
I don’t cry about it anymore, but you bet your butter beans I’m here to raise hell about it. And many other things. Because if it makes other folks uncomfortable, then maybe they OUGHT to feel uncomfortable. Because there is something deeply wrong and sick and outside all realms of logic in a system when a man who threatened to kill himself in front of his wife and kid can go on to get the kid in a custody battle. And yes, there are police reports to that effect.
What you’ll be reading about the most here from me and my fellow bloggers is life after living with abusers. There are tons of common threads, and lots of uncommon ones, too. All of us here are unique, and many of us still have to deal with our ex-abusers. Some of us still have kids who have contact. Not one single person here that I’m aware of actually received the full protection of the law and the system the way that it’s written down on paper, though. Our society and our legal system turns a deaf ear and blind eye to an astonishing amount of abuse, and the so-called “Men’s Rights” Groups have made it amazingly hard to reach people in the legal system.
Dispose of forever, however, the notion that anyone here is a helpless victim. Oh, HELL no. We’re all here to raise hell and raise our kids and whatever it takes, we refuse to shut up until people listen and truly hear us.
