Hard but Necessary Post to Write

My head has been filled with not much else since Sunday night, though I've gone through motions, a sense of disbelief and inevitability at the same time. The phone rang and I could see from caller ID it was my friend and former colleague. I was scheduled to meet her and another friend for lunch the next day so assumed she was confirming time or location. There was a quiver to her voice, and then I could hear the tears, if that is possible, as she started. "Have you had the news on?" she started, "That mother shot was... She is gone." I learned Sunday night that a former coworker of ours, a woman I had hired and worked with for over a decade, had been killed by her husband, with three of her four children at home. My friend had just seen her a month before, bruised cheek, black eye, and had implored her to get help. She promised she would.

She had a hard life.  A single mom of two kids, looking to start life again if someone would just give her the chance. I hired her, seeing and hearing the determination in her answers, her voice, and her mannerisms during the interview. She was going to be doing entry level work, but work that supported other young mothers, struggling mothers, mother's like her trying to do right by their kids. She worked hard each day; sometimes she came in with bruises, sometimes with a fat lip.  Pregnant again, she left the latest abuser, and did her best for the two kids, and prepared for the new baby.  She continued to work hard, struggling to keep her little family afloat, but she did it. Child number four, with absent father number four, came a few years later. She was estranged from an alcoholic mother, didn't know her father, but built an extended circle of support with friends and coworkers, and of course her children, yet that circle was not enough.

Still she did her job, ethically and with compassion for the clients we worked on behalf of.  She had her rough days, but continued to take advantage of training opportunities, and volunteered in cross department committees, where more formally educated colleagues raved about her drive and knowledge. She received a promotion, and then a slightly higher position in a different department.  By then I was now the director, of all the programs, so still could see how hard she worked. She also worked fundraisers, and extra shifts at second jobs to help find the funds to keep her kids in a private school, better equipped for their needs than the overcrowded public school. I thought she was really going places when three years ago, she accepted a position for more money, more influence, and better hours. These would be hours she would have back with her kids, who we knew  she loved more than life, so much so that she had portraits of each child tattooed on her arms. 

Yet, this need to be loved by a man, must have been ever present.  It is beyond my comprehension that each man, a word used loosely, could treat her even worse than the one before. None of us that knew her and saw her daily could understand how she could be so strong for her kids, her clients, her friends, and keep repeating the cycle of finding men that treated her badly, escape to start anew, only to find another that would treat her worse than a pet in need  of rescue was treated. This latest, was the first one she was actually married to, introduced to him while he was serving a prison sentence. I don't know what he was in prison for, but the news reports were that he had a violent past. 

The caring heart she had; the compassion for others, was this a trait that led her to these men?  Did she think she would save them, rehabilitate them, make them truly into men of substance? I am worried for her daughters, I pray the love she gave those girls will give them strength to accept nothing less than a partner who treats them with respect and awe.  I am worried for her sons, who consistently saw abuse of their mother by a revolving door of men. I pray they pick up a banner in their mom's memory and do what is right and just in every interaction they have with women and girls. I pray for all of us that didn't do more, didn't figure out how to ensure this cycle stop before it was too late.  May we not blame ourselves, but put this anger towards  doing more to prevent the next act of violence against  a woman.