Lauren’s* Story
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Lauren doesn’t dance anymore. She told her husband that and he didn’t know what to think.
It’s the battle dance, she explains, the games we play for relationships.
“You do this little dance that you don’t realize you’re doing. He knows how to push your buttons and you know how to push his.”
The day she stopped swaying to the “destructive” battle tune and learned to say no was the day she took a little bit of her power back.
“I disarmed him. Now that I’ve got my power, I’m keeping it. I’m never letting anyone take it from me every again.”
In order to get to this point and decide not to do the dance, it means Lauren had to dance for awhile. In fact, she got quite good at the dance. She got quite good at living for other people and their happiness. There was a time when she did everything she could to keep the peace, and took on her own mother’s role.
“I used to think if you’re in an abusive relationship, you’ve married someone like your father — that’s a common perception. But no, you don’t marry your father. You’re behaving like you were conditioned to: just to be a good little wife.”
She flashes back to her mother’s final days. Lauren’s father rook on the grieving husband role and he played the part too well. She cringes as she remembers how he rubbed her mother’s feet and called her sweetheart. That doting man was not her father. Lauren only saw an alcoholic who made her mother’s life very difficult.
“The nurses were there and he was making himself look good. My mom couldn’t speak at that point, but she was looking at him and she was speaking with her eyes. I know exactly what she was saying to him: ‘Get your hands off me. Don’t touch me.'”
This is the man Lauren’s mother had attempted to leave many times but was told by her own mother to ‘Go back to your husband’. So she “buckled down” and “got on with it” to eventually join him in the self-medicating act of drinking.
With this glimpse of life regret, Lauren decided then that she didn’t want to settle for misery.
“I remember thinking: I don’t want to hate the person I’m married to.”
For Lauren, La maison Rosewood Shelter helped make that moment into a major “turnaround” in her life. It started with a call.
“I said, I’d like to come speak to a counsellor. I believe that I’ve been in an emotionally abusive relationship.”
Through a counsellor’s understanding ear and patient guidance, she came to learn pain is not weakness, and in order to heal, she had to feel it. She had to talk about it and she discovered power in talking about it. It’s been months of talking and growing inside the sanctuary of the shelter.
As Lauren settles into this peaceful place of personal happiness, it’s hard not to think of her mother. Lauren knows her mother didn’t live life. She learned to take whatever came her way but Lauren can still see what could have been. If only her mother had known she had a choice.
“She was an intelligent lady, a passionate lady. She had a love for the arts: theatre, crosswords, reading. I think my mom would have danced.”
And it would have been the good kind of dancing, with laughter and elegance and energy. The kind you don’t have to refuse.
*Name changed to respect privacy.
LINDSAY EVELYN GROVES. 