.

Finally, after that, she broke up with him for good. Abusive relationships are no joke and extremely hard to escape, but she did it.

      Later, my mother found out he’d done terrible things to all these other women he’d been with before and after her. He’d gotten off every single time in court, playing the system. He even got off the molestation charges. The cops loved him. He got off all the time. No one would listen. Eventually, Lawrence kidnapped his son’s girlfriend and raped her across three states in the cab of his truck, holding a shotgun on her. He was finally arrested and sentenced to jail time. I hope he’s dead. I hope someone drove a stake through his heart.

      I think of how many kids are abused, and how heartbreaking it is that no one helps them. And then it just begets more abuse. I don’t know where Lawrence’s kids are today. Poor Mary. I hope that poor girl is still alive, and I hope she’s doing okay. I hope her and her siblings haven’t had their lives totally ruined.

I remember thinking as a young girl, How is it possible that women can be so gullible? They just ignore the reality of what is happening and believe what they want to believe. I think women in general, and my mom for sure, got sold this bill of goods, the story that a man will save them. I don’t think that’s really changed even for girls today. We’re still getting sold the same story. I had to unpack it because later even I was ensnared in an abusive relationship.

      We need to look at why so many women believe a man is going to save us. It’s not because of evidence of saving. I haven’t seen a lot of dudes on white stallions pulling up to single women’s homes. In fact, I have seen most women get on their own damn stallion. It’s just male-dominated society that snows us into not noticing it’s we women doing the saving. We are the white stallion and we have to wait for no one but ourselves.

      Even though I had these early experiences with men who were horrible beasts, I still somehow got it imprinted in me that a powerful man was going to come along and make my life easier. In reality, they usually just complicated things. Even though rationally I knew it wasn’t true, there’d always been this feeling deep inside me that I was bad, and men were, somehow, the superior ones. I was bad because I was tempting. I was bad because there was want attached to me. Lawrence was truly a psychopath, probably the first true psychopath that I met. I would go on to meet others, but he set the mold. There’s a direct correlation between my relationship with my father and Lawrence, and later on my relationship with men for the rest of my life.