Day Makes ‘Worthless’ Women Feel Like a Million Bucks
Some columns you want to write so well, you end up blowing it. This may be one of them because I’m wondering if I can capture the spirit of a moment last weekend. It was a moment that lent itself much more to abstractions like soul and goodness of heart than it does to the black-and-white of a narrative.
In a way, you almost had to be there. If you had, you would have been moved by what you saw.
The setting was a church in Newport Beach, encircled by the aesthetic comforts of that city and not far from the shadow of Fashion Island.
All day long Saturday, physically abused women from Orange County shelters were brought to the church and allowed to binge on free work-world clothes and accessories, hair styling and makeup services and job counseling. The people providing the services were all volunteers, all working women from throughout the county, with the exception of one man I met who was interviewing potential job applicants.
I don’t know how much you know about the battered-woman syndrome. National statistics indicate that 25% of all relationships may involve some form of physical abuse. In Orange County, judges issue about 350 restraining orders a month, according to county records. Last year, those records show, about 1,000 women were sheltered after reporting abuse.
That’s the numbers part.
In the abuse syndrome, all the damage isn’t physical. Women often end up feeling worthless and hopeless--worthless because they come to think they somehow deserved their treatment and hopeless because they can’t see an escape hatch.
Imagine how you’d feel about yourself if the person who professes to love you the most beats you up. As one shelter director told me, sometimes the abuse is triggered by something as simple as the woman fixing lime Jell-O instead of her husband’s favorite, lemon Jell-O.
With incidents like that having shaped the lives they’ve come to know, it isn’t so hard to imagine why Saturday’s experience might have reduced some of the participants to tears.
As Ellen Patelson, one of the job recruiters, said: “The minute you say to them, ‘Do you know how pretty you are?’ they all start crying.”
That doesn’t mean they’re emotional basket cases; I think it means that they haven’t taken many drinks lately from the cup of human kindness.
Often, while they were coordinating outfits for the women from the shelter, the volunteers said things like: “I think this is you. You need a black skirt with that. Do you like it? I think it’s gorgeous.”
Lyn Bunch, who has an employment agency in Irvine and who was the only man I saw all day, had reddened eyes when I met him, apparently from emotion.
It wasn’t that they unloaded sob stories, he said. His emotion stemmed more from his growing sense during the course of a long day of the roads the women had traveled and of their intention to regain control of their lives. “I don’t walk away with a sense of woe,” said Bunch, who said he had never been exposed to battered women before. “I walk away with a sense of potential, of what they can be.”
Jill was one of the women from the shelter who was there Saturday. She left with half a dozen outfits, a new hairdo and a makeup job. “If I buy something, it’s for the children because they need a lot more than I do. My income right now is almost as much as my rent. To do anything for myself, it just hasn’t happened.”
Jill checked into one of Orange County’s several shelters on Valentine’s Day this year and left 51 days later. Her husband wasn’t a pummeler, she said, but would grab her by the throat, occasionally slap her and leave marks on her body that would be hidden by clothes. The abuse, often of a sexual nature, she said, spanned about three years. “There were times when I felt worthless, but not all the time, because at times I would say: ‘Why are you doing this? I don’t deserve it.’ But I would try to fix it. He would say that he was screaming out to me to help him, and I’d say: ‘What do you want me to do?’ ”
Jerri Rosen, who owns an advertising agency in Irvine, is one of the driving forces behind the event. Part of the motivation is the sheer “sisterhood,” Rosen said, and of the working women’s realization of the vulnerability they would face if confronted with starting over, as women in the shelters must do.
“The other thing that is so prevalent is that we all at some level understand the abuse,” Rosen said. “It may not be physical; it may be emotional, verbal or mental, but I think women have a sense of wanting to help anyone who’s gone through that. The thing is, there’s a tremendous amount of pain in these women and just for a few hours, they don’t need to deal with that. They can get beyond that and see it’s possible that they don’t have to carry that around.”
I’m already out of space and haven’t come close to re-creating the feeling inside that church or praising enough the women who donated the clothes from their closets, or the hairstylists and makeup artists who gave up lucrative Saturday businesses to volunteer their time, or the countless others who made Saturday memorable for some troubled women.
That bothered me until I realized something: People like that don’t need to be thanked in print. They don’t need their names mentioned in the newspaper.
They just need to hear the women like Jill say: “When I first heard about this, I asked someone at the shelter what the cause was. They said there wasn’t any cause. They said it was just some people who wanted to do something for you, for us. It just made me feel good that they were doing something just for us and for no other reason.”
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.
