In two days, I will co-host the third annual benefit at my professional suite to raise money for two KC area domestic violence shelters, SAFEHOME in Kansas and Rose Brooks Center in Missouri.  During my recent lovely sojourn in California, someone whom I had just met asked me why I developed and help organize this fundraiser.  I hesitated to respond, thinking, What story should I tell?

The story of the many women, men, and children whom I have met over my 33 years of practicing law whose lives have been forever marred by violence in their homes?

The story of our foster children, Mikey and Jacob?  My son remembers them, but what he might not know is that at age six, Mikey had three documented suicide attempts, due to having been severely abused in his home by his mother’s boyfriends.  And by severely, I mean what you think I mean.  In his last attempt, Mikey threw himself from a moving vehicle on I-70.  When the paramedics lifted his small body from the ground, he whispered, Just let me die.  Five years old.  Just let me die.

Should I write the story of my friend Jilli Nel, a phenomenal artist who, with three other artists, will show her art for this fundraiser?  Jilli has worked tirelessly to raise money for SAFEHOME, because it helped save her life.  Should I tell her story?

The story of my friend Ruthie Becker’s daughter, whose anguish speaks from her portrait, which Ruthie painted and has donated to our benefit?  Ten years in an abusive marriage, barely able to escape, now building her own life.  Her story?

The story of hope, the story of despair, the story of learning to let go of a diseased and twisted tree to which one has clung for so long that the terrible malaise has entwined with one’s own arms?  The story of learning to stand alone shaky and scared, but alive?  The courage of women who have dragged their children into the night, into a waiting car, into a shelter — not knowing where  or how they will find food for tomorrow but knowing that survival requires escape?

My mother’s story?  She stood in the kitchen talking to me once, when I was in college.  Her arms were covered with flour from Thanksgiving pies.  We were speaking of someone who remained in an abusive marriage.  My mother said she could not understood why the woman didn’t just leave her husband.  I looked at her in astonishment.  Why didn’t you leave Daddy, I asked.  Her head snapped up; her eyes met mine.  Oh your father wasn’t abusive, she said.  He just drank.

I thought about a time when my father threw my mother across the dinner table, slamming her into the French doors to our sunroom, breaking several ribs and shattering the glass panes.  I felt again the shards of glass showering across the floor of the darkened sunroom where we children were hiding, waiting to surprise them with an anniversary cake.  Should I write that story?  Lucy’s story?

Or should I write my own story?

My siblings and I rarely talk about what happened in our home, in the decades before “domestic violence” became the catch-phrase for what we experienced.  Several of my brothers and sisters seem to have risen far above the tragedy.  Several have blocked it from their minds.  Some, myself included, seem indelibly damaged by the savagery of our childhood, doomed to ask ourselves over and over, Why? Why? Why?

And so that brings me to the answer, to my motivation.  I help raise money for the programs which save other survivors of family violence so that those survivors can write their stories, stories with happy endings, or at least the possibility of happiness.

In helping them, I forge a new chapter in my story, one which might have been a long time coming, but which could one day end in joy.

It’s the fifteenth day of the thirty-third month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

 

 

CHECK OUT OUR BENEFIT WEBSITE HERE.

To contribute to the cause, please attend our benefit this Saturday, 17 September 2016, 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., at 4010 Washington, Suite 100, Kansas City, Missouri.

Or send a check made payable to SAFEHOME or Rose Brooks Center, in care of me at the above-noted address.

THANK YOU.