Guarding a Daughter From All-Too-Familiar Pain

We stand in line. My daughter has the baby. I have the diaper bag over my shoulder and fumble through a sheaf of papers. Both of us are tense.

It has taken us until now, 4:30 p.m. on a Friday, to get all the papers typed in what we hoped--after desperately reading and rereading the pages of instructions--is the correct legal form.

We want this order filed before the weekend.

She’s seeking a temporary restraining order against the father of her 4-month-old baby. Two-and-a-half years of laughter, verbal abuse, affection and erratic behavior ended the previous Saturday night. With a blow to the head, she was no longer the one girlfriend he said he “would never hit.”

He hit her hard enough to knock her out.

So here we are, waiting in line, worried and, in the midst of the tension, playing with the baby. Part of me wants to grab the strangers in line or the friendly clerk in the cat-eye glasses and tell them: We aren’t the kind of people who have to file restraining orders.

Sometimes I think I resent him most for what he has brought into our lives. I can now talk about outstanding warrants and jail time, even which jails have the best food. The makeshift world of those on the fringes of the law and society has become familiar to all of us as it eddies in and out of our house.

He hit her. That’s the reality. Her therapist says how we got here is important, but the first rule is survival. Do what we have to do to protect her, the baby, our family, and our property.

So, here we are. In line. Waiting.

None of this makes sense and it makes perfect sense. People ask us in all kinds of ways: How did this happen? What they mean is how did a nice girl like her get involved with someone like him? Someone who seems to spend a life of intermittent violence and incarceration, interspersed with hanging out and dead-end jobs?

What can we say? That the person he was when she met him isn’t the person he is now? That we didn’t raise her to choose her friends only from among “our kind?” Or maybe that she wanted adventure and a walk on the wild side?

That maybe she loved him?

I want to scream at him. We gave you a place to live. Your friends became our friends, your family our family. We gave you kindness. We paid to get your teeth fixed. We gave you love.

Love works miracles, doesn’t it?

I loved my father. He was funny, warm, generous--the one who would slip me a dollar when my allowance ran short, take us for walks in the woods on Saturday instead of mowing the lawn.

He was also the one whose emotional temperature I learned to take as soon as either he or I walked in the door, learned so young that the reaction was visceral, not cerebral. To this day, I cringe at the sound of a raised voice. “Is Dad mad?” was the fundamental question of my childhood. Everything else depended on it.

I loved my father. He was warm and funny and he worked hard for us.

And he loved me. He loved me so much. When he yelled, when he hit, that was only because he loved me so much.

Times change. I’ve had the classes on abuse. I can tell you no one deserves to be hit. I know all this. My daughter knows all this.

But when a male voice is raised in demand, in anger around us, she and I provide. Pacify.

It’s easier.

When she told me she had been hit, she quickly added, “I didn’t do anything, I didn’t say anything to cause it.” Pause. “Not that I would ever deserve it, I mean I know nobody ever deserves to be hit, but I know sometimes I can be really . . . . “

She can be, too. Really.

But times have changed. We have shelters now, we have restraining orders and I remind my daughter about the women who have fought for these. We have protection these days. We have progressed. Haven’t we?

We reach the head of the line and the smiling clerk stamps our papers and sends us running for the courtroom for a judge to make them legal before the courts close for the day. Baby and bags in tow, we dash for the elevator.

We make it; 5:15 sees us leaving the halls of justice, our stamped and filed papers in hand, ready to deliver to all the law enforcement agencies my daughter might have to call.

I’m angry. I want someone to apologize, to say I’m sorry you have to spend hours filling out forms so someone can’t come close enough to hit you without going to jail; I’m sorry women have to organize shelters so they can hide from abusive men in their lives; I’m sorry you have to keep your doors locked all the time.

I take the baby to see his father. She still let him see their baby. After all, how angry do we want him to be? And, in everyone’s best judgment, he isn’t dangerous with the baby. Not yet. And he has no money, no place to run with his son.

So I take the baby over. I do it twice after his father knocked out his mother.

The first time the father is angry, defiant, and the second, quiet, eager to please, maybe even remorseful.

I look at him, this beautiful, sad, sulky young man who has enough strength to kill my daughter.

My grandson’s eyes are his eyes. He loves his son. He tells his mother he thinks he’s losing his mind, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

I cry all the way home.

The events described here occurred in March. The author’s daughter, 21, lived in a battered women’s shelter, then left the area with her baby. She is doing well and going back to school, her mother says. The baby’s father, 22, is in jail , convicted of beating up a security guard.