I owned a children’s clothing store on the North Shore of Lake Tahoe in the ’70s. The community was very small. My then-husband was one of those big, blond guys everybody liked. No one knew he was abusive except my Lutheran minister and later, just as I moving away, I told my trusted friend, the librarian.
And those two humans, Pastor Green and Julia, the kind librarian, were the only ones I trusted with that information for more than a decade.
When people asked what had gone wrong I said what we said back then — we just grew to be different people. My children were 3 and 5 at the time of the divorce. I was 26.
My high-end clothing store had high-end clientele with society names from San Francisco who summered in Tahoe. I was a public person — with my business, my work with the pre-school I chaired and my time at the Lutheran church. (I joined that church because my children’s pre-school was there. The kids needed all the stability I could muster. My own religious upbringing could best be described as Country Club Christian — you dress up/show up at Christmas and Easter.)
It didn’t take long before well-meaning friends wanted to “set me up.” Since they had no idea how damaged I was, they didn’t know I wasn’t ready to “look for another husband.” And since the only person I had dated all through high school and my husband of seven years were one-in-the-same, I didn’t honestly know how to date.
I didn’t have a primary care physician. The kid’s pediatrician was the one who gave me sage advice and kept me grounded. He looked like the movie actor Lee J Cobb. Distinguished. He and his wife, who weren’t able to have children, had abruptly adopted the child of their housekeeper who had unexpectedly died. The young Black child had no living relatives they could find. That boy and my son were the exact same age. So, on our visits, Dr. Scott would ask me about my son’s development on certain milestones to compare with his new son. And somehow, he would have me talking about things unrelated to the health of my child. He was the person I was the saddest to leave behind when I moved to Park City in the spring of 1979.
Some mutual friends introduced to me Michael. He was about my same age — handsome and kind — just too, too kind for words. My girlfriend had said — “just go out to dinner and I’ll watch the kids. It will do you good.” He arrived in his BMW convertible on a night when my ex had the kids. He thoughtfully planned a drive to a fabulous restaurant more than an hour outside of Lake Tahoe in Grass Valley, where the odds were I wouldn’t know a soul to interrupt us.
Michael always did and said all the right things. He was polite, smart and had resources of his own. He had not been married. He was good looking. And did I mention nice? So so nice. To my kids and my friends and customers when he visited me in my store. So nice. Which is why I secretly nicknamed him — Norman Nice.
My day-to-day life was increasingly frightening — after the divorce, my ex got worse. The threats were more frequent. His plan for killing me and burying me in the Nevada desert was formulated and retold to me any time I wanted to change his visitation days. He stalked my store and my home. The abuse had been both physical and emotional and very psychological. But we had no language for abuse in those days. The sheriff told me, the one time I called, if I wasn’t bleeding there was nothing they could do — “sounds like he was just blowing off steam.”
Soon every other weekend when I was childless I would head to San Francisco. I had friends I could stay with. And when there on business, I stayed in old revered San Francisco hotels. I was fearless when I was in The City. Given how crazy it was back then, I probably should have paid more attention. One day — I sat with a handsome Vietnam vet in Golden Gate Park at an outdoor festival — who just seemed to need an ear. When he broke down after about three hours of conversation and produced a gun I realized he needed a lot more than my ear. And I had no skills to help him. I changed my patterns when I was in The City after that.
Michael continued to be a good friend. But there were never any sparks. I knew he was what I should want — but I just didn’t. One day we were sitting on a pier and I described some mythical creature — my perfect dream man. Michael just listened.
When I moved to Park City, two years after the divorce, Micheal left for New Zealand for a long trip. When he returned, he came to Park City to see how the kids and I were doing. He brought me a beautiful shawl in hues of blues and lavender. It was stunning — but the time and space hadn’t changed my feelings. In fact, I was really liking the craziness of Park City. So, he returned to Tahoe and a few weeks later sent me sent me a handwritten poem.
If I had taken that poem to heart I would have saved myself decades of heartache. And another marriage and another — almost-marriage. And really bad judgments in looking for men that I wanted to be “perfect” without understanding those creatures don’t actually exist. Neither do “perfect” women by the way. All humans are flawed. That’s what makes us human. And abuse comes packaged differently for/from different folks.
I hadn’t thought of that poem or Michael in years. I was on a hike with a friend recently and we were talking about relationships. She told me how perfectly perfect her new guy was. She listed all the too-good things. I started to give her some sage advice but instead, out of nowhere, Michael’s short poem fell out of my mouth.
A man coming forth, with stardust in sheaves, is hardly to be believed, without some of the rust, of life, on his sleeve.
My friend cocked her head and asked where that had come from. I said, from a real person. Someone who wasn’t shiny but so very, very kind.
Women and men who have been abused now have access to therapy, great legal advice and healing — so they can be part of new and healthy relationships. They do the work and like a piece of Japanese pottery that has broken — they repair with a kind of gold leaf to create something even more beautiful, made whole again, after being broken. Wabi-sabi of the soul.
The Peace House here — our shelter for abused women and men — will hold its annual spring luncheon on May 12. You should come hear about the powerful work they do. It is remarkable to have a facility like this in a town this size. It was decades in the making. This safe space with kind souls ready to listen is open all day and night — even Sundays in the Park…
Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the founder of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts. She has been a member of the TED community since 2007 and founded TEDxParkCity in 2009.