The Keys to My Success
I pulled the plastic bag out of the bottom of the box. It was so heavy. What was in it? A treasure of coins? Jewellery? Gold ingots? Was the plastic going to break from the weight of what it held?
When it fully revealed itself I saw a large zipper lock freezer bag filled with keys—no—stuffed with keys. They were every size and colour. Some looked like house keys, and others were old car keys. Still others looked like locker, luggage or strong box keys. There had to be hundreds of them.
All those keys and no idea what they unlocked!
My mother died three August’s ago at age 95. My father had already passed away in 2003. My brother and I needed to empty my mother’s place quickly and after the main items were done, we each took a share of her boxes of “history” to deal with later. Last year I started to go through a few of them. That’s when I found the keys.
I had no idea what to do with them. Keys have a way of creating anxiety. Will I need them but don’t know why yet? Are they the missing keys to forgotten mysteries? Why had she kept them? This was a lifetime of keys, gathered by my mother, who had been purging her keepsakes and belongings so thoroughly for so long that when she died there wasn’t a dress or skirt in her closet to give the funeral home!
But she had kept that huge bag of keys.
Now, you may think her mind had started to fail. It hadn’t. My mother traded stocks until she was 90 and continued to do well when others failed. She was sharp as a tack until her last breath. She kept the keys for a reason. That much I knew.
As I felt the weight of them in my lap, tears fell. I felt her presence. She wanted me to see these keys. They told a story. So many things to protect. So many things that are precious. So much to lock away in life. And so much anxiety about all of it. How had she managed it all?
In the end, it’s just a lot of keys left behind. And no idea where they fit.
I wasn’t about to take on that anxiety, but I was prepared to think into that anxiety. These keys kept a record of how much protecting, hiding, securing, and locking away she had done in her life over the years. I’m sure that much of it was reasonable, prudent, and necessary. I’ve done as much in my life. But in my experience as a covertly and overtly abused wife of a compulsive-abusive sexually disordered man (a CASRD man rhymes with “hazard man”) as Dr. Minwalla identifies them—I had refused to do it as women have been asked to do all their lives.
I refused to lock it up. I refused to stay silent. I refused to protect him. I refused to protect others from the painful truth of who he really was. I refused to live as if there were no emotional affairs victims, indecent exposure victims, other sexual partners, addicted, abused, endangered, and trafficked girls and women who were a part of the porn world . I refused to hide the truth of him, the harm he did to me and many others. I refused to protect him or others from facing the hard truth of how he used their trust and deceived them about who he really was, just as he had deceived me. I talked about it. Right here. I. talked. about. it.
The power of a key is often how we indicate how important something is. Not in this case. It’s how others want us to say how important this trauma was.
Misogyny is stunningly predictable. Cowardice lacks imagination. So, like every woman told one way or another to shut up, never speak, and protect others from truth, I endured the rebuke of gossip, lies, being disparaged and critiqued, shunned, and disappeared. I just refused to play along. I held myself even as I was humbled through my PTSD episodes that made me look even stranger. But I kept going. The more I stumbled, the more opportunity I took to accept myself and love myself. Eventually, I made fewer stumbles and could pull myself out of them faster. This was great progress in healing and rebuilding my life.
Instead of taking on the shame that belonged to him and those who were collecting keys as they protected him, I showered shame off with spiritual resources. Instead of backing down I doubled down, accepting who people were and stepping away from them as needed. Some did not want to know or accept the truth. That was their right. Who knows what horror they were already facing? I was learning that horrors were everywhere. I could not waste my energy trying to get their attention and I could not divert theirs from their own struggles. The hurt was slowly transformed into accepting them and myself both and letting them move away from the inner circles of my life.
I am outlasting all of the bad stuff, as it turns out. Most people get tired of keeping up a lot of negative energy against someone who just won’t go away and makes enough sense now and then that she’s still useful. They do. It’s not how friends are made, but it is how a more sinister version of social distancing is worn down. The possibility of relationships re-visited is mine now. They will not be the same. But lies are not in charge anymore and I do not need their approval.
So—keys.
Don’t believe you need keys to guard the truth of his abuse from the light of day. Be wise. Be safe. Be strategic. But don’t let anyone tell you that you have to lock up that truth. That’s not how you protect yourself. It’s how you protect him and those who want you to wear a piece of his abuse compliantly, so they don’t have to use that word “abuse.”
Protect your core values, not the truth of his wrongdoing. Protect your core values, whatever they may be. In my case integrity, faith in transformative power for everyone, honouring the sacred value of my life, and bearing witness to those things for my children and others that guide and interpret my life. I don’t always get it right, but in this case I did. Locking the truth away that tells the biggest story about all those values at work in my life to save my life would leave me, at the end, with a zipper lock plastic bag full of keys I can’t use for anything that matters. That’s not the way I want to live. And it’s not the legacy I want to leave behind.
It’s astonishing to see just how many keys we may gather and use over a lifetime. It’s even stranger to be holding that number in a zipper lock plastic bag. I have no idea what they locked up, or what they would open. Like a wisdom teacher, my mother set that choice of my life legacy before me. If she had figured it out herself the only way she could lead me to it was to throw out her best outfits, and leave the keys for me to find. Too hard to miss that. Thanks, mother.
I put them in “recycling” to become something more useful. Kind of like what I did with myself.
Are you done locking up your truth? Your story is safe here.
With you,
Diane.
A Special Note:
Thank you for the kindness of donations in this time. They are a “key” part of how I keep going.
Every once in a while, I link that button here. Thank you for understanding.