Linor, watched Brave Miss World last night and was still shocked by the many rapes to women all over the world (later watched miner women in Bolivia). Admire your bravery in public, your youth and determination in looking for justice, speaking out, removing the blame of the victims and the injustice of silence.
Myself, I was raped by my late husband when I was 34 years old and after 8/9 years of marriage when our children were only 2 and 4 years old. After being a loving and fun husband the first years of our marriage and after our first son was born he started to neglect me, emotionally and physically. I was conscious of my physically appearance and took care of myself and couldn’t understand his behavior. Had our second son after 18 months from my older one thinking I wanted a brother a sister for my baby. Being away from my family and siblings and friends who were in another country I felt alone and didn’t want my older son to feel the same when I would be gone. After our second son, he became an animal. A psychologist wanted to put me in a hospital and I refused because I was afraid he would rape me while I was under medication. Indeed the news about these rapes came up in the news two weeks or so after I went on with my decision in spite of my husband’s ef forts for me to go into the hospital. He would separate himself from the family in the garage and read until he would come to bed and wanted to have sex with me. I took him at first but then I couldn’t be with him without the previous closeness, caressing and talking to me as we used to be, something most married women want as I found out at a workshop at my local community center. Told him my feelings and he would just smile or mock at me really. It saddened me, killed my spirit slowly and ‘killed’ me the night I resisted and he raped me. I had never seen him so violent, aggressive, so physically strong restraining my arms with his hands, and the look in his face, his eyes, I FROZE!!!, I couldn’t believe myself this was the man I had so patiently waited for and married. He had become a brutal, sadistic man who traumatized me at night and whom I started to fear and hate. Told some women at the catholic church where I was attending about the rape and I was told it only takes once but no one told me what to do. These were all American women and they knew I was a foreigner born in Peru. They acted like the Gestapo but no one lent a hand to be rescued from him, the abuser abuses his children as well, I realized that and I stayed together to protect them as having them alone with him would make his malice be free and my children defenseless. It was a christian lawyer who forced me to sign the 50/50 custody of a divorce which I dismissed when he forced his way into moving back into our house. She was referred to me by a catholic lawyer I had met along with his wife at the local church I had been attending until the congregants shunned me and the priests offended me. If keeping me as a member of the congregation was their way to protect me and my children after I was raped by my late husband and biological father of them, it was not enough. Like you, I got closer to G-d by getting involved in religious activities, pray er and maintaining our/my house while working outside my home occasionally as an Interpreter without neglecting my family, they always came first. I was fine during the day and being active with others; however, when evening came and had to live with the reality I wanted to kill myself many times. The love for my children mainly and the thankfulness to Adonai for giving me the strength, health, the willing and willingness to keep on living, the wisdom to fight him peacefully as years passed, to still be his wife sexually until he stopped it on his own (and this was hard on me too since I was in my late 30’s and went into my 40’s), if it were not for my FREE WILL TO CHOOSE LIFE AND LIVE what these catholic and christian women and priests did for me was CRUEL!!! since my abuser and rapist was left at large, respected and later converted to catholicism against my will, reason that I didn’t attend his conversion ceremony neither took our children to partake, previously he was an episcopal.
Eight years went by that we were physically separated in our house, everyone in my family admitted he was sexually impotent and for me to be good to him by not raising hell, it became peaceful for me to continue mothering and raising my children in what has been for many years a foreign country for me. I felt as if I were single again without sex, except that I had become a mother and had my children to raise. My professional career went out the door, there was no time for it. Protecting and guiding my children from their american father who always knew nothing when asked, I was busy learning and educating myself in this busy for nothing society. Support is not the same as taking physical action, make new laws or changing them back to the ones that gave a woman respect, entitlement to her children (she bears them for 9 months and gives birth) and her choice of sharing them with a husband who becomes a bastard and mistreats her. I was born in Peru, he was born in the USA and as you might have discovered or soon to discover, this kind of american men believe they are the maximum and do whatever they want with whoever they want. They believe money making makes them kings as if they were the only ones on earth to do so and their chauvanism and pride is handled by them through sarcasm, cruelty, cheating and neglect. Children are removed from their mothers to go with their fathers and their mistresses. These kind of american women are the cruelest of all, especially the ones who chose not to have children from any of their lovers or previous husbands. They wait for the men with money and children to seduce them and ‘behave’ caring for them better than their wives, closing their eyes to the work wives do while taking care of their home, raising their children and caring for both sides of their families where they came from.
I have been and am friendly with men without having sex and feeling comfortable because I grew up with my brothers and had friends without sex during my adolescence and early adulthood. When I started having sex, I felt it had to be with a boy friend, not a stranger and with someone I liked, loved and cared for otherwise it was an empty feeling and for long periods of time preferred to be on my own, dedicated to my work and just have friends without getting physically intimate while having fun with them, dancing was my favorite activity. But now there is still this pain that won’t go away in spite of being at peace and in a way happy with my life.
I married a 39 year old man who was single and I was 24 years old and was single myself, never lived with a man before. It was only after 14 years of not having sex with a man that I met a sweet Jewish man, his family opposed, maybe because I was a catholic and by not being born in the USA most likely they believed I wanted to depend on him and he already had his share of it with his american late partner! He was sweet to me and I felt free to be myself and felt cared for and protected; however, he would break up, then we would be together until we broke up for good. During this time, I couldn’t understand what was happening to me, even though I felt ‘safe’ with him an awful feeling was growing within me. After flashbacks of my late husband’s abusiveness came when his ‘mistress’ revealed herself after 5 years of him being dead and I tried to heal, a worse flashback came to my mind after the breakups with this new man in my life that made me desire to die on the operating room when I had my hernia repaired. It was the rape!!!! I couldn’t keep on living, I didn’t want to keep on living and my children were adults, felt they didn’t need me anymore. No one in my family, siblings and niece & nephews cared for me, or shared compassion when I told them what their ‘beloved by them’ brother in law had done to me, isolated me and worse they rejected the man who was making me happy, giving me Life again and making me feel a woman being loved, respected, protected and cared for.
Linor, with my responsibility to my children and my willingness to live I wanted to forget the rape and blocked it in my mind, I pushed the memory of those moments back in my mind until so much happened to me since I widowed (identity theft) that I couldn’t block them and suppress them anymore. I just had to let the world know what happened to me, that I am not crazy, that I am not a nun, that I am not a lesbian or bisexual, that I am not a weirdo, anti-social, anti-american, anti-immigrant, anti-all. When I talked about it again I found no compassion, no understanding and no protection from others and I desired death because I felt dead inside of me when I couldn’t go on in my sexual relationship with this man who chose to go with other women and he then destroyed the little left of sweetness that we had between us. Maybe my crying drove him away because I wanted him close and wanted him far. Guess this was the beginning of the flashbacks of the past which I hope it never happens again and I can one day lay them to rest and bury it.
Linor, I looked for justice, for support, compassion, care and love and found none. My rapist and sadistic husband is dead so many choose to turn their faces away from me. Women go to jail in the USA for killing their violent physical abusive husbands or becoming physically violent with the men. The provoker goes unpunished almost celebrated while the victim who strikes back is the aggressor and found guilty of doing harm, hence jailed. In my case, I could have lost complete custody of my children if he acted upon it. Men are the ‘victims’ in here, jails are cheap hotels so this punishment doesn’t change the individual from going back to his criminal and sadistic behavior towards others, especially women and children. In this crazy society, crazy people live unharmed while the real victims, women and mothers, are scrutinized, spied on because they have to live like puritans, punished severely if they fight back, and it is the bitches and whores who want the children bore by other women or after a man’s money and properties who win these battles.
I have not had another relationship with another man in the past 5 years, nor a woman, am straight and don’t want a woman for me. However, I realized that although I notice some men are liking me, I find myself sabotaging myself, am acting detached from their feelings as if I don’t notice them, I isolate myself when getting too close to others and bury myself in my gardening activities, reading and intellectual activities. Already felt the fear of rape when I liked another man who seemed to like me but he would talk softly at times and reminded me to my late husband and the flashbacks came back and the fear of intercourse was unbearable. I couldn’t pursue his friendship. After watching your program and hearing the young girls in Africa, yes, I have a death inside of me too even though this happened to me 28 years ago. Could it be the death of the man I married when he raped me? Could it be the death of the woman who was loving and wanted to be taken with love? Could it be the death that only malice, cruelty and sadism brings when one is incapable of escaping it? What a torture my life has been since 1987 until 2002 when he died and what a torture it still still when the memories of him come back after his death. I still feel pain, hurt and cry. Let it go and live for another day and when I feel alive again I thank Adonai for it through the Schecheyanu prayer which always leads me to move on gracefully, and today I feel as if I am passing on the torch to you, for your generation and the next to come to continue to fight against the brutality towards women, to educate men by letting them know that we are more sensitive than them while emotionally strong, that we bleed to renew our uterus for them to help us to procreate and keep our bodies physically well balanced and that we are the vessels to bring life into this world and need to be taken care of and protected by them, not to be destroyed!
Must tell you that in 2011 I went to therapy and my therapist told me I would never forget being raped. I read books from my local library and damaged them because they were full of shit. Those books were written on the ‘theory of rape’ even mentioning ‘when a woman gives up.’!!!Shit one freezes and gets in shock, this so very different from giving up. It is unbelievable that some men and women would write about rape in theory while there are so many women and girls and boys who have been raped and are still being raped nowadays. Rather than taking the truth from their testimonies and writing about it, these writers prefer to be stoical and objective, almost giving a scientist approach in this matter.
Men, young and old, in my opinion, should be instructed and educated by learning that they were/are born from a woman and that mothers are women too. Prostitution should be legalized, it will help societies better than marihuana or other drugs, so that men would know who they can mess up with or have fun only sexually and who they must respect at all times and have sex with only if they want to share their life with that woman.
The mentality of having intercourse with a bunch of women as it was in biblical times has not gone away and the animal behavior of not controlling themselves has become worse. The lack of self-discipline, respect, the belief of life is short live it now good or bad is exalted and whatever good is made, bad seems to be overwrite it. Puritanism is a sick mentality taken to the extreme of cynicism and mental disorders due to suppressed emotions even when actions are not carried on and hidden secret actions known to offend the religion. The anger and envy for the people free of spirit and the jealousy for others because they have chosen to live pretending who they are not inside of themselves and faking to the outside world. The world is the world and to make it right will be impossible while cruelty comes from other women like it has been in my case, even after my late husband’s death. This woman and her friends had not taken their eyes and cruelty away from me, neither the puritans and anti-immigrants.
Mozaltov Linor on being the Mama – Ima of twins, lots of work and lots of joy. Focusing on my children made Motherhood a blessing and joyful, giving me the strength and love for life, same when I cared for my pets and now my plants. May Motherhood be a Blessing and Life for you too Linor. Make your family the center of your life and your husband your best friend, he loves you. Don’t put the world in front of them or of your parents ever, we can (tikkum olam) add a grain of sand to make it better little by little, generation after generation, but we, as individuals, cannot be the shore… there will be work to do when your own children grow up into wonderful and mature adults.
May Adonai bless you and protect you.
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