A True Life Story: The Day I Took Back My Freedom

Today’s episode of Changing Lives With True Life Story is written by Deborah Hamsho.

Title: The Day I Took Back My Freedom.

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It all began so many years ago on a beautiful spring day, one year to the day that I graduated Brooklyn College.

I had been in a funk since October and Now came March.

Emerging out of my bedroom, the cocoon of a black hole of a depressive episode, I returned to my previously failed job search.

I enrolled as a Kelly girl. The Temporary office work company got me a temp job and my mother and I went clothes shopping only to find I had dropped two sizes down to a 10/12 medium. 

          Dressed in a beige pair of  slacks and a clingy muted colored top, I  entered the World Trade Center Elevator bank feeling happy.

Little did I know then that what was about to hit me was a tornado from another mother.

Gingerly entered, I pressed the 34th floor and swooshing slowly, then shakily, the car deposited three of us ,all women, into a suite of elevators.

It was the now defunct bankers trust co. I had walked into. I blissfully was unaware of the rumblings of a tsunami far out at sea. 

At lunchtime entering the employee cafeteria, a brown gentleman approached and sat down at the table near the chow line.

I ordered my food, grabbed the tray and sat down. As I passed the brown man He smiled at me.

I ate my food alone, happily gazing at my photo employee card, when the same man approached me from behind and sat down in front of me asking to join me.

I should have ran, flown, yelled, plunged, gagged, gotten away from him, if I had Only known then what I know now, 50 Some odd years later.

I was like a bug in a hotel room nearing to enter the baited “room” or roach motel as they called them.

I was a fly clinging to the silken but spiked edges of A Venus flytrap.

Falling into the precipice of attraction, amusement, and unwary of consequences of drinking the kool aid offered up to my supplicating eyes, the lips On my mouth closed against each other like prostrating monks.

Oh to be spoken to in poetry like he did, third rate sentimental hogwash written on a Winston cigarette box, a relic of my coming destruction.

This is only the prelude, The intermission consisting of a steamy day of lovemaking , just heavy kissing, in my cave, my boudoir smelling faintly of lanvin and rose talcum.

Since you have come this far with me, I seek to favour you with a happy ending.

I will not drag us both through the muck and mire and filthy debris left when the tsunami of our marriage hit.

Suffice it to say it was a 5 year hiatus into the illness of a depraved and sadistic mind. 

He never broke any bones, and he always rested content in the sarcophagus of his madness.

I suffered a bump in the head from a heavy glass object, was forced to clean out an intentional mound of defecation left in the bathtub as a punishment for some tribulation I put him through.

The waves kept coming until finally after 5 years we broke land and our ship crashed into the reef that held the shattered glass of our misery. 

I don’t know what the provocation for this last sad episode was, but i remember running into the hallway to escape his wrath.

He followed me and the heavy front door of our apartment locked automatically without either of us having taken the key.

We stopped and turned in horror as we both heard the siren call of our two year old child calling out in a high pitched scream,

“Mommy, mommy, mommy” I don’t recall how we got back in.

But while kneeling and speaking to my little girl who was behind the locked door, a vision of myself appeared and I saw how low I had come in my life with this man, my husband.

I was crouching down with my ear and mouth alternatively shushing and crying silently while her father sought out the janitor.

That was the day I took my freedom back. How I did it is an unnecessary detail.

But I remember the shopping cart full of his possessions next to the front door and A suicide threat written in a letter pleading with him to leave or I’d kill myself and our  child.

It worked!  

I returned home a few hours later to find that the blessed tide had sucked back into the raging sea the shopping cart with the desperately written letter tucked inside the clothing. 

So the end was happiness until the longing came back several years later.

But I won back my freedom and the rest is just another chapter to be continued God willing.

Thank you so much Deborah for trusting me with your story. Although, I can relate a little I learnt a lot.

And it also assured me that I am on the right path. And I believe many women and girls would tap from your courage and strength.

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