THE WOMEN’S SHELTER (1997)

Cow Bitch

Johanne is a thief sI x W ords spray- pa I nted I n black on the shed and on the front of the house. The house where I’d brought up my three children. The house where my family fell apart. One day Nathalie, then twelve years old, discovered the violence of these words when she came home from school. They had been written by her father, with whom it was not possible to discuss the consequences of our separation. This January afternoon, Nathalie was completely devastated.

Since our separation fifteen months earlier, the problems had been accumulating. This was one event too many. Nathalie contacted me at work to let me know what had just happened, and I decided to call the police to put an end to this behaviour. That same evening, my father convinced me, as we talked on the phone, to go to a shelter for victims of domestic violence. “You have to learn from experience so that you don’t find yourself in this situation again,” he’d explained. To make him happy, I’d got in touch with the Coup d’Elle shelter in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. The building was within walking distance of the children’s school. The routine of Nathalie and my son, Dominique, would not be affected by a temporary move. As for my elder daughter (who prefers to remain anonymous), she had chosen to live with my father after we separated, a decision I respected. The people who worked at the shelter had then explained to me that even if I hadn’t experienced physical abuse, I had certainly experienced violence. Domestic violence isn’t just bruises all over your body.… They helped me to understand that sulking, lying, manipulating, and so on are all violence. Their approach convinced me, and I resolved to find refuge in this shelter to give me and my children some measure of safety. I admit that if I had been the only person involved, I wouldn’t have gone there:

I was too proud. But Nathalie had been extremely rattled and humiliated by the graffiti and by the fact that her friends had seen it; I didn’t want her to have to live like that. I wanted to protect her, and I didn’t want her to go back to the house alone. In fact, that was my greatest worry — Nathalie going to our house alone.

I can still remember our arrival at the shelter. I can still see those steps leading up to the door and the small office on the left as you went in and where you had to register. There were lots of posters on the walls about domestic violence, and one of them opened my eyes to something: that violence = control. This was a lesson that was to follow me for my whole life. Controlling another person’s comings and goings, stopping them from doing things, constraining and limiting them, abusively questioning them, manipulating them, lying to them, putting them down, acting impulsively, and slamming furniture or punching a wall, all of this amounts to violence.

Publicly humiliating someone is also violence. I promised myself that no one would ever be violent toward us anymore, not to my children and not to me, in any shape or form.

Thanks to the people at the women’s shelter, I understood at that moment that I was safe. That this was a place where I would be supported and listened to. However, even before I got through the door, I also knew that I would never come back there. This was the first and last time in my life that I would set foot there.

In the shelter, I met women with whom I could discuss our sadly shared reality. We ate together, played board games, talked quietly. These women had all lived through a love story gone sour. Every story was unique, but we often recognized ourselves in other people’s stories, because the pattern of violence is almost always the same. Being together made us stronger, gave us a sense of solidarity. In our toughest moments, this community was something we appreciated.

I also took part in workshops about violence against women. After that, I saw my situation differently. I had learned to recognize the various forms of that violence, and to understand its cycle. It was from these workshops that I understood that certain actions can tell you a lot about a person: you should always be suspicious of a man who needs to isolate his partner, who doesn’t like her friends or family, or constantly criticizes whatever she does. I also understood that a lot of female victims of violence suffer from depression. In fact this is one of the first results of a domestic violence situation. How can you get yourself out of such conditions? How can you hope to swim for shore when you can’t even get your head above the water?

During the workshops, we talked about our respective family situations. Sadly, many women admitted that their fathers had been violent or at least controlling. This was not the case for me. After having convinced me to seek refuge in the women’s shelter, my father phoned practically every day to get updates and to encourage me. Even the shelter workers recognized his voice. His phone calls did me good. I was touched that he would ring long distance — he lived in Florida at the time — to talk to me and keep my spirits up.

Despite the situation, I can also say today that this was a happy period, where I felt safe. Recently, my son, Dominique, who has a master’s in social work, told me that this stay in the shelter even influenced his choice of studies. Which shows that even on the hardest days it’s always possible to have hope.

I can still see myself watching Nathalie and Dominique sleeping in the same room as me. I loved those moments. It calmed me to know that they were safe and close to me.

It was in this quiet, gentle atmosphere, one Saturday morning in January 1997, when four or five of us women found ourselves sitting in the kitchen. Some were still wearing pyjamas, others wore casual clothes. The children were playing around us. One of the women talked very little. I never saw her during the week; her schedule was different from mine, because she left for work before I even got up in the morning. That Saturday, she seemed closed in on herself, her shoulders hunched, staring at the floor. Without knowing much about the situation, we could still tell that she was depressed. Her story was hardly a bunch of roses: the mother of two young sons, she’d had to flee a husband who was psychologically and physically violent.

I felt she wanted to talk, but she was hesitant. Was she afraid of being judged? When you are a victim of domestic violence, other people’s judgment weighs heavily on you. People who have never experienced this situation wrongly believe that you can easily disentangle yourself from such relationships. Moreover, this woman was finding her stay in the shelter difficult, and her sons were constantly complaining: “It’s so boring here without our video games!”

“If you’d behaved better, Dad wouldn’t have got angry with you!”

“Everything that’s happened is your fault!”

In the face of her children’s insistence on returning to their usual environment, the mother told us she’d decided to go back to the father. She’d arranged a meeting to discuss this with him. For her — as for many mothers — the relationship with her children was all that mattered. And to maintain that she was prepared to go back and live with a violent husband, convinced that he would accept the conditions she set for returning to live with him. That Saturday morning, we were so disappointed when she told us that her husband had agreed to “take her back” while imposing his own conditions on her. We were very surprised: none of us had expected this unfortunate outcome.

Nathalie was sitting on the floor beside me. She was in grade 6 at the time and dreamed of becoming an international journalist. She was a chatty, intelligent young girl and wasn’t afraid to say what she thought. With all the wisdom of her twelve years, she listened to the whole discussion like the rest of us, and then didn’t hesitate to express her opinion. “What? You’re not going back there, surely? You’re so dumb!” Nathalie’s harsh words were like a cold shower for all the women present in the room!

So judgmental! This was definitely not what that woman had needed to hear. Our conversations were usually very respectful. Embarrassed by my daughter’s frank words, I tried to minimize what she’d said. At the same time, I was convinced that if my beautiful Nathalie was denouncing a situation in which a man was using his power to subdue his wife, she would be able to avoid having the same thing happen to her when she was in a relationship. At the time, I was genuinely convinced that this stay at the women’s shelter and her ability to recognize the precursors to the cycle of violence would protect Nathalie forever from situations like this. We never know what life has in store for us.

How could I have suspected that barely five years after this declaration, my daughter would become a mother, but also a prisoner in a toxic relationship with a violent partner, on the other side of the world, without any support? How could I have known that I would have to spend more than fifteen years fighting to try to get my daughter and her children back to Canada?