Victimology

“Have you given any more thought to the idea of being a victim?” my husband asks.

Said Husband and I have been deeply, heavily, excruciatingly wrapped in a series of conversations, arguments and debates about the state of our union—and muddled if sincere attempts to improve it. We haven’t broken much ground. In part, probably, because when we ask each other such questions, the response tends to be visceral and defensive and angry. How dare he ask me if I’ve thought about being a victim? Has HE thought about being a victim?

The reality is that I have thought about it. Been thinking about it. (Evidenced, in part, by the creation of the blog you’re reading.) But the whole victim thing is slippery. When you are talking about a relationship between two people, it’s hard to parse victimhood. Each person plays a part in whatever is going on. Blame is very easy to mis-place. And when you are one of the people in that relationship, it’s easy to slip into the self-righteous role of victim. For some of us, martyrdom is easiest on the ego.

What makes you a victim, then? Even if you have been assaulted or disrespected or hurt in some way, what of that did you invite or allow or provoke? Wait. Stop. Invite or provoke is too loaded. We don’t say that a woman who has been raped “provoked” it by her attire or behavior. We wouldn’t justify someone’s assault of another person by using the excuse that, “She just made me so mad I had to hit her.” AND…. And, if we’re honest, we know that there are the masochistic among us who do actually try to provoke ill-treatment. Okay, so erase invite and provoke. Too much to contend with here. But let’s deal with allow.

Allowing something to happen that is hurtful or wrong, falls in that also slippery concept of the-lines-that-must-not-be-crossed. We all have these boundaries. (Some of us set them far from us and guard them too fiercely; others make weak, wobbly fences that we guard not fiercely enough.) And these boundaries will be approached and possibly breached, somewhere, somehow. The issue, then, is how we respond. What we do. How quickly we do it. How well we assess the damage and how we repair the breach. And—here’s where the victim thing comes in: How do we think of ourselves and the other person and the situation afterward?

What keeps us in victim mode: If we continue to focus on “how dare you?” If we keep looking at and lamenting the hole in the wall without doing anything to address it. Or if we mix up tons of quick-dry cement and build a higher, thicker, more impenetrable wall–where nothing can get in, but nothing can get out, either. (Yeah, it’s smart to fix your fence—but it needs to be one that you can see—and see your way—out of.)

A less victimized way of thinking is, “Why did that person think he should approach me this way? Are my boundaries clearly defined? What sign can I erect to indicate that my borders are not to be breached? How do I plan to respond if the breach is attempted again?

One of my computer dictionary definitions of victim is “someone who experiences misfortune and feels helpless to do anything about it.” For me, victimhood lies not in the misfortune, but in that feeling of helplessness. But I like to believe helplessness is only that—a feeling. Ultimately, we are never truly without help. We possess resources. We can gather information and support. There are hands outstretched. There is Spirit guiding us. And, most importantly, we have the strength of our own will, wisdom and motherwit. When we know that and when we own it, victimhood is out of the question.

The Fiction of Potential

We weeded and turned over the earth, mixing in manure and compost until the garden spot was black, rich and fecund. Then Little Bitty and I carefully sowed string bean seeds. Within days, they sprouted, strong and green. The tomato vines surged up and spread before I had a chance to stake them. The squash leaves were as big as my hand, their blossoms bright with potential.

Since then, one of the squash plants yielded a single yellow crookneck—then the leaves turned moldy and the vine split and rotted at the root. From three long rows of string beans I pulled one handful of beans—not enough for a meal. I got three plum tomatoes off the overgrown vine; the other plant dried up from the ground up. A few stunted green tomatoes are clinging futilely to the brittle, brown vine, but they have no way to pull nourishment from the soil.

It is sad to see. But sadder, still, is the nagging thought that my fruitless garden is a metaphor for my life. I am a woman of ideas. Lots and lots of ideas. Good ideas—for myself, for my career, for my partner and my child and my friends. “We could do this!” “You could do that!” “Isn’t this brilliant?” “Let’s try….” “Let’s start….” “Let’s do….”

The attic is full of boxes with concepts for novels, lyrics to songs, article ideas, beginnings of business plans. A publishable thesis manuscript, unpublished. Three issues of a lovely newsletter, now defunct. Just over my head—nestled into fluffy, itchy, pink insulation—live boxes and boxes of potential. My potential. Defunct. Fruitless.

Carolyn Hax, in her take-no-prisoners syndicated advice column, recently wrote: "Potential is fiction."

Fiction? Potential is something we hold up like a candle to light our way. We hire it. We vote for it. We marry it. We give birth to it—and nurture it with our whole hearts. Because we have been taught to believe in possibility. We have learned to believe that “may” or “might” or “could” or “should” is enough to stand on.

But in the movie Amistad, there is a scene in which Djimon Hounsou’s character— the enslaved Mende, Sengbe Pieh—is told by his American lawyer that something that “should” have secured their legal victory and freed Sengbe to return home to Africa, didn’t. Sengbe shouts in frustration, “What is this word ‘should’?” There was no translation for it in his language, he said. Either something happened or it didn’t.

And that is not fiction. We do or we don't do. We bear fruit or we don't. It doesn't matter how green the string bean plants are if there is nothing on them we can eat.

Potential is the story we tell ourselves so that we can sleep at night. Frankly, I’d rather stay awake if it means that I am doing something instead of making dreams that will disappear in the light of morning. I want to do more than just send up green leaves. I want to flower! What would it take for me to finally, decidedly bear fruit?

I have to admit that I am only a potential gardener. Once my vegetable plants were sturdily in the ground, I left them to their own devices. Though it has been scorchingly hot, I wouldn’t break the rules and cheat the water restrictions in our drought-stricken city. My approach to organic gardening is to leave it to The Gardener. I could have done more to nourish the plants and protect them from parasites and blight. I could do more for myself.

My first step is to step away from the notion that potential is something I can stand on. I have to remember what Iyanla Vanzant wrote: “There is nothing between doing and not doing that can be trusted.” Between doing and not doing lies the quicksand of potential. And that's no place from which anything can grow.

Know. Do.

She started quietly, lifting one picture off its nail in the wall and placing it in the hallway. Then she carefully took down another. By the time she started moving the furniture, she didn't bother to tiptoe. The bedside table slid along the floor. The nails she was wrenching out of the walls came free with a squeak and tinked to the floor. When her husband finally roused from sleep, the only thing left in the room was the bed he was sleeping in. "What are you doing?" he asked, trying to make sense of what he'd awakened to.

"I am MOVING!" she said, leaning in, looking him square in the eye. "You can stay. You can go. But I am moving."

That's my girl Rox. She'd started quietly, she says, months earlier, talking about how quickly they were outgrowing their apartment. It was time to move themselves and their two young children out of the two bedrooms they rented, she'd said. Over the weeks, she kept bringing it up. And he kept saying, "We're gonna..." But nothing ever actually happened.

That morning, she'd had it. Totally. After she emptied the bedroom, she started on the kids' room, and she kept going until finally everything but the bare necessities was stacked in the living room or packed in boxes.

All this talk about Plan B? She didn't have one. Hadn't looked for a new place. Had no idea where they would find one. She just knew it was time to go and that she was going. She was not asking. She was not suggesting. She wasn't waiting. She was moving.

What she had was more powerful than a B-plan: She had clarity--a crystaline certainty about what was needed. And she trusted herself and her God enough to know she could make it happen--whether her husband came along for the ride or spent the rest of his days lying in the middle of their empty room.

Her story made me realize something: a plan B is just courage in a bottle. It's something we stir up, distill, and label Our Saving Grace. But what really saves us is our own willingness (willingness) to leap right past fear, self-doubt, second-guessing or whatever else has been holding us back, and put our feet down on what we really want, need, deserve and demand.

The best plan is simple, really: Know. Do.

As for Rox, it was barely two weeks after she emptied the bedroom around her sleeping husband that she was moving into a quaint house on a hill in a lovely old neighborhood. Husband and children in tow.

The Child That's Got Her Own

“Have your own money, girl.”

That’s what my mother always preached to me and my sister: “Have your own.” (Interestingly enough, she was repeating a lesson she’d heard all her life. From her father. My grandfather was a minimally educated laborer who worked to send his (six!) girls to college because he said he never wanted them to have to depend on a man. An impressively enlightened idea for a guy born near the turn of last century.)

But Mama and Daddy only had joint accounts, which they always seemed to manage carefully and harmoniously together. I wondered if she just thought she’d gotten the last trust-worthy guy, and that her girls were going to have to be extra careful—though she never said a man-bashing word to that effect.

It wasn’t until I was out of college that I realized something: My sister and I each had a bank account where birthday money, Christmas money, random windfalls and after-school job paychecks were dutifully deposited. As minors, we had to have an adult’s name on the account. Our sole co-depositor? Mommy. And as the years passed—and my parents never, ever let us withdraw any money—all those Christmas club deposits started to add up to quite a little nest egg. And Daddy couldn’t have gotten his hands on it without some kind of court order. Mama would never have touched it. She never did. But it was there.

One day I’ll ask her if she did that on purpose. Knowing her, she’ll say something vague and imply that I’m making too much of it. But I also know she’ll still say: You just make sure you have your own.