Playing Fair and Being Kind

“AND I’LL COME BACK…”

That’s the moment she stopped hating herself.

Most of these women are serving terms of several months; some are going to be incarcerated longer, maybe up to four years. In some cases the women are doing the bid for the men in their lives. Then the men abandon them, disappear. She’s no different.

Maybe going to be here for a few months, again. She came to the group room having seen the sign-up sheet. Learn to be less violent she’d heard. That might be helpful. Take a shot at it. TV was a wasteland anyway. Spend the weekend with that old man who the other girls said is gentle and sometimes cool. She sits with ten other women and maintains her control strategies. Hair tied up with a bunchy so that it flares out frizzy; makes her look wild, uncontrollable. Keeps that half-smile on her lips bordering on sneer. Eyes busy, alert, foot going up and down, fingers grasping her other wrist and feeling her heart pound. Casual, indifferent, half-panicked however. At one point early in the workshop she declares, while we were still getting through introductions and communication exercises, I am not going to cry in this room. You can’t make me cry. That’s not what we do here, he says. But if you want to it’s o.k. Either way it’s all good. She figures the other girls may know something. He ain’t scary at all. They all are pretty relaxed and she begins to. Next day they are talking about ex’s and how people slam doors on the way out. She is feeling scared about her ex and how things always were loud and chaotic and doors were slamming. Yelling was the plan of the day. Sometimes physical shit too. No matter, it always hurt and crying was not allowed. Now they were all practicing what to say when disagreements come up. She speaks up and tells everyone that when the slamming starts that’s the end. Just tough it out. Fuck it. Goodbye, Charlie. Get over it. He tells her to explain a little. She does and sits there looking back at him. Dare you to fix this, old man. He shifts the scene into a role play. He demonstrates by saying, I don’t know what to say right now and I need a little time to figure this out. I need to leave the room for a few minutes. I’m just going out the door and think this over. I’ll be right back. I’m just going out the door and I’ll come back. Something, some word, some tone he uses jolts and kills the tough inside her. She hears I’ll come back and that does it. She bursts into tears and some of the other girls come and touch her and hold her and she continues to weep and sob. He sits a little closer and reaches out his hand and she takes it. She has never heard a man say that he would come back. She goes on crying and crying.

G. M. Goodwin 16 March 2017