A couple weeks ago, I started getting up at 5am to go to the gym every day. I also joined Weight Watchers again. It’s been two weeks, and I’m down 4.8 pounds. It’s a start. (And I’m ridiculously motivated by those little stickers they give you for every five pounds. I was so pissed that I missed it by two tenths this weigh in – WHY DID I NOT GET MY EYEBROWS WAXED BEFORE WEIGH-IN?) Anyway, this is all back story.

Earlier this week, Dave bought a gym membership. I’m very proud of him.

Finally, to my point: Yesterday, Dave walked in to the kitchen and said, “I’ve been to the gym four days in a row. I can honestly say, in all the years we’ve been together, this is the most we’ve ever worked out.”

Two things immediately struck me about this statement. The first was a thought that went a little something like this: “Hmm. We’ve been together 15 years and my husband really doesn’t know me at all, that’s kinda weird.” The second was a rapid-fire sprint down memory lane….

I’ve had a gym membership since ninth grade. My friend Jessica was two years older than I so she had her driver’s license, and she used to drive us in after school three days a week. Afterward we would hit TCBY for m&m-infused frozen yogurt.

There was my first personal trainer, the blonde. I used to call her at home to ask if it was okay to put mayo on my turkey sub. I was seventeen.

There was the year I had four valid gym memberships at once: Princeton Club, Supreme Health & Fitness, Bally’s Total Fitness, and that little gym in Stoughton.

My first year at UW, with a different personal trainer. It was the era when fat was bad. She taught me to buy natural peanut butter and keep a paper towel in the jar, so when the oil rose it was soaked up.

The year I trained for Outward Bound, and the two months I spent out there in Colorado. The 17-mile run I did at the end, and the six miles a day I kept up for quite some time once I was home.

Trainer Duke Harvey, the wonderful man who nurtured me gently back from anorexia, helping me to gain 30 pounds and never commenting on my weight, just my muscle, just how strong I was becoming.

Then the babies, the weight gain, the countless diets, the other times I joined Weight Watchers, and the last personal trainer I had, Eric, who came to my home twice a week, courtesy of my father-in-law….

…and now, this new era. One I brought upon myself, where the sole motivation is how good I feel. No trainers, no gimmicks, no pressure outside myself. Rising in the dark, before the Chorus of Craziness in a quiet house, driving alone on deserted streets, the familiar smell and bright lights and cold water and humming of the machines and clinking of the weight stacks and my lungs, filling, expanding, clearing, blood pumping smoother, brain buzzing clearer, breath coming easier, driving home renewed, energized, ready to face the day, a day filled with healthy choices, good, local, fresh food that fuels instead of attacks this beautiful body of mine, healthier and stronger every day, cancer-free, mine, all mine, for as long as it will have me.

I have to say, it’s definitely different this time. Maybe that’s what finally got Dave’s attention.

Annie Ruth Brown grew up in a slave shack on the Blue Lake Plantation beneath the whithering Mississippi sun. She and her children worked the surrounding fields for little to no pay, sometimes to the point of passing out, from 1964 til 1994 — an era when slavery had supposedly been illegal for more than one hundred years.

Annie has since moved to Itta Bena, a tiny town a couple miles from that four-room shack. She helms a comfortable home with a revolving screen door of kids, grandkids, neighbor kids, and strays, a loving swirl of chaos eddying around its matriarchal island. Annie has stories like you wouldn’t believe, as you can imagine, but I started thinking about her today for one story in particular. It flashed suddenly to my mind this morning when I had to physically restrain myself from hitting my child.

I’ve only met Annie once. I sat in an uncomfortable concave hole in her threadbare couch one March morning last year, and listened as she told me things I will never be able to scrape from my memory. Indignities and violence suffered on a daily basis simply for being born the color of lovingly shined mahogany. She testified her life story to me that day, spoke things that had me shedding torrents of silent tears, had me terrified I’d be unable to survive the hearing. But she told me a story that made me laugh, too. It was about the time her new neighbors called the police when they saw her take a belt to her grandson. The local officer approached her front door cowering. He was the age of her children, and he’d known her all his life. He knew she wasn’t abusive. He believed she’d had a good reason to do what she’d done. That grown officer of the law, armed with a gun and strong as an ox, respectfully shrunk in the presence of that proud southern mama. He slinked inside her house, saying, “I’m so sorry to bother you, Mrs. Brown. It won’t happen again.”

In Wisconsin, in the gorgeous pocket I live in, we don’t have a whole lot of heartache. That’s not to say we don’t suffer the same horrific car accidents, the same percentage of domestic abuse, the same incidences of random violence, it’s just to say that our level of basic economic comfort is higher than many. The poorest of the poor kids don’t go hungry or naked, and there’s not a single homeless person on the streets of our town. And around here? You don’t hit your kids. You don’t spank them, let alone take them behind the woodshed. If you do? If a cop responds to a call at your house? He’s not cowering.

I don’t know what my life would be like if I’d been raised in a different setting, among different cultural mores and norms, but in this life, I don’t hit my kids. The rare gentle swats to the behind have come in moments of grave danger, or in play. My husband doesn’t hit my kids, we don’t believe in hitting our kids, and I cringe when I see others do it. It doesn’t escape my attention, though, that every single one of the children that ran past Annie Ruth Brown that day called her “ma’am” as they stopped to quickly snuggle with her. These were not abused children.

Emma is the challenge that Gretta never was. She has the ability to boil my blood to a temperature I never knew it could reach. I even wonder, sometimes, if it’s more than the normal tantrums of her age group, if there’s some underlying psychosis driving the worst of her behavior. If I put her left sock on before her right sock, she will have a full-on meltdown. If I lift her out of bed from the left side instead of the right, she will work herself up into such a froth it takes hours to come down. To be clear to my social worker readers, it’s not the order of things per say, it’s that I’m not doing it exactly as she demanded. It’s beyond being bossy, though — she is utterly unable to control her emotions in these moments. She always, always apologizes later. “I’m sowwy I fweaked out, mom. I’m so sowwy.” And each time we go through this, at least daily, I feel more and more helpless. And so angry, so angry in these moments, I hate myself. I shrink beneath the weight of my own self-control, and the horror I feel that I need to work so hard to use it.

I know I’m not the only one that goes through this. I also know that child abuse is a very real issue, and that’s not really what I’m talking about here. I’m sitting here this morning, coffee gone cold, wiped out from another episode that made us 20 minutes late to school this morning. I’m thinking about Annie, and I’m thinking about Emma’s uncontrollable rages, and I’m swallowing down a bitterness born from more than just dime store java. I’m asking myself hard questions, the least of not being this one:

Am I doing it all wrong?

**Incorrect links have now been fixed**

Remember this letter that came home with Gretta a month ago? There is a new letter today, this time published in our small community newspaper. My heart squeezes for this kid, and leaves me searching for the lessons.

Dear fellow students, teachers, parents, Administration of the school district, and citizens of [town],

My name is [name] and I am here to say that I am sorry for all of the commotion caused by the incident at school involving me writing shooting 3:00 Wed, which would have been November 7th. At the time of writing this I was completely unaware of how many people that would be frightened for the safety of there children, friends, relatives, and even for themselves. I have made a big mistake and I know most of you were frightened, because my mom was one of them. If you could just find a little space in your heart to forgive me and give me another chance it would mean the world to me. So all of the citizens, parents, students, and staff, I’d like to say “I’m sorry.”

With forgiveness,
[name]

So what are those lessons? I don’t believe this kid ever intended to harm anyone, but I don’t think that makes the situation any less serious, or the lessons any less important. I want to know, was he bullied? What kind of environment has to be in place to make a kid do something like this? How difficult have these last few weeks been for him? Has anything been done to get to the root of this? How many other kids ache like this?

In my daughter’s classroom, the kids were told not to speak of it again. I’ve heard it was different, better, in other classrooms, but even so, there never was another letter from the school after that original one. It seems everyone just wants to forget, ostensibly because the kid never meant any harm. But I feel like an opportunity to learn something was missed here, and it makes me sad.

We dodged a figurative bullet here, and I’m sure a lot of people think a mountain was made of a molehill. But if we aren’t talking about it, and we aren’t asking these questions, what’s to stop it from happening again? And even if it’s not something as huge as an actual shooting, why does bullying feel so timeless and hopeless? Why do I feel like it’s never going to change? Why can’t we all just be kind to each other? Why is that so hard?

I was shocked beyond words at a story that made national headlines this week. I didn’t even attempt to blog about the way I was feeling, especially when others were saying it so well. I don’t know anything about the circumstances surrounding the kid at my daughter’s school, and I don’t know if he was bullied or if he was just joking. My interest is more global, and the worry I feel for this culture is beyond my descriptive capabilities right now. I guess all I can say is, peace begins at home.

Peace begins at home.

I realize they’re calling it a “conflict” now, but my point is, politics aside, people are still fighting every single day. Those yellow magnetic ribbons are nice, but does anyone even see them anymore? Don’t we all kind of look right through them?

I’ve been talking to Iraq war veterans for an upcoming story. It’s not a story about the war, it’s just about those fighting it. Sometimes my ears go numb listening to these guys. I simply cannot fathom the things they have experienced.

Sometimes I feel like my life is a Bruce Springsteen soundtrack. I don’t mean that his life experiences have paralleled mine in any way, I just mean that I tend to hold his songs up like a prism through which I take a peek at everything around me.

Here is today’s soundtrack.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zi92rsVsEQ&rel=1]

I thought about deleting last night’s post, but the comments are already too valuable. I wanted to do away with the post not because I regret the message, but because I could have and should have done better. I was tired, and I was sad, and I was angry.

I’m no night owl — I do all of my writing during the day, when the coffee’s hottest and the light is least depressing. It’s interesting the way a post comes out differently when you write it long past bedtime, half dressed and freezing on a living room sofa, cloaked in the heaviest of darkness, the screen barely visible through the tears. I’m going to try to do better right now.

On last night’s post, Elizabeth commented, “How many people are aware that October is Domestic Violence Awareness month? Most people associate this time of year with pink ribbons and fundraising initiatives to support breast cancer research. ” She had no way of knowing that simple sentiment is what started this all for me a year ago.

I’ve bragged endlessly about meeting Gloria Steinem last year. The reason I met her was because she came to town for the 30th anniversary of Domestic Abuse Intervention Services in Madison. Our city magazine scored an exclusive interview, and they gave it to me. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with her, and then she invited me to be her guest at the banquet, and that’s where we snapped that picture. From her, I learned how incredibly pervasive domestic violence is, and how even though we’ve come a long way, an honest community conversation is still very much lacking. I’d also interviewed a close friend who is a TV news anchor for the same article, and she told me how frustrating it was to sit there in the newsroom and listen to the scanners trumpeting all of these arrests and know, because of safety and privacy concerns, that she couldn’t say a word on-air. I learned that in our own highly-educated, affluent, white-collar county in Wisconsin, between one third and one half of all arrests are domestic violence related. But these stories most certainly did not make up one half or one third of the news. They were only reported when someone died. Murder-suicide.

The article with my Gloria Steinem interview ran in the October issue last year, right alongside a stunning portfolio profiling breast cancer survivors (written by someone else.) I thought to myself, why can’t we do an article just like this for domestic violence victims? But I knew why. It wasn’t safe. Where would I find women who were safe enough? Brave enough? Whose situations were uncomplicated enough? It would never work.

I decided to try anyway.

Thanks to the help of a prominent local advocate, seven women — seven women — agreed to be photographed, agreed to use their full names, and agreed to let me tell their personal stories. The article will be on newsstands before the month is out, in time for Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

This is the cruel, hard fact: One in four women will be a victim of domestic violence in her lifetime, according to a 2000 report by the National Institute of Justice. Tell me, do you know four women? Believe me, the men and women who are victims of abuse are all around you. They look exactly like you. They are sitting next to you at the PTO meeting and they are pumping gas in the next stall and they are your sons and daughters’ friends and they are your sons and daughters. And it’s not always easy to tell. And it doesn’t start out violent. Men don’t walk up to women and punch them in the face, to have women say, “Gosh, you’re romantic, let’s get married!” It is slow, creeping, insidious, until you wake up one day and find you are not the person you once were, and you have no idea how you got here. It has happened to me, and since starting this article I have learned that it happened to many, many people I thought I knew. Listen to me: Every nine seconds in this country, a woman is beaten. How many seconds did it take you to read this post? If you read fast, maybe you can do it in a two minutes. 120 seconds. That’s 13 women while you read these words.

The several months spent living inside the words of these wounded women have not been easy. I’ve mentioned before the unfortunate tendency I have to sponge up the emotions of the people around me, and the interview and writing process for this piece affected me deeply. It cut, and it itched, and it burned. But it also healed, and it evolved, and it surprised. These women were such a gift to me. Their stories are now forever entwined with mine, deep inside.

That’s what brought me to my knees about Viviana. I did not know her. She was not one of the women profiled in my article — but she was exactly like them. She lived in the same town as my seven women. She volunteered with other victims, just like my seven women. She had managed to leave her abuser, just like my seven women. She knew several of my women, and they knew her. To me, reading that article, it was like I’d lost one of mine. And in addition to the mourning, part of me felt a sick lump of fear forming in my stomach for my new friends, and what the exposure from this upcoming article could mean for them. Bravery is not a strong enough word. It just isn’t. So, please: we owe it to them to listen.

In my article, I speak these women’s names, because the fact that they are using them is the most powerful thing of all. That’s why Viviana’s name squeaked painfully out of me last night, why I whispered it over and over again. Why I’ll continue to whisper it in my heart, along with the seven others I’ve come to know as well as my own. Why I’ll continue to listen for their stories.

May they all be heard.