SILENCE

On an episode of my radio show/Podcast that is conversations with survivors of domestic abuse I tell my daughter Jackie that knowing things would get worse if I left was part of why I stayed. Then we realize together that when I did manage to escape, the terrorizing did indeed ramp up for both of us.
https://archives.weru.org/lets-talk-about-it/2021/02/lets-talk-about-it-2-12-21-domestic-abuse/

There is actually a name for what domestic terrorists do when their captives manage to physically escape: Post-Separation Abuse. And their tactics to maintain control, and punish, are pretty much all laid out in this uncanny graphic created by the Duluth domestic abuse programs (with whom we are collaborating but more about that in a future newsletter!).

While I was drowning under the weaponization of the courts, the media, and our two children, what kept me mentally afloat was daily lap swims at my local "Y", 40 times back and forth in watery silence.

I am now five years out of the worst of the abuse, and a year and a half into marshaling the experience of abuse and journey out of it, and gathering other survivors to join me, and all of us together empowering others to recognize, avoid, safely leave and heal from, what we went through, and educating the general public about how pervasive, insidious, and dark it is.

https://www.pressherald.com/2021/07/15/banner-news-domestic-violence-awareness-project-comes-to-lakes-region-towns/

https://www.boothbayregister.com/article/finding-our-voices-receives-national-recognition/149680

In the year and a half since COVID started, we have put up 1,600 huge window banners and distributed more than 20,000 bookmarks from Eastport to York, featuring the faces and voices of 35 Maine survivors aged 18 to 81; empowered women to Get Out and Stay Out of dangerous family situations and get and keep their children safe as well, through paying for items and bills essential to that journey; and given peer-to-peer comfort and insight to countless women through an online support group and domestic violence-themed book clubs, our website, and one-on-one correspondence.

Now with the pandemic that prompted our bold outreach surging back, we are doubling our efforts to get the banners in as many Maine business windows as possible this fall, including in Portland and Augusta.

Tiffany, one of 35 survivors on our banners and bookmarks, in the window of my local Camden National Bank, a statewide business sponsor of our banners along with Martin's Point Health Care and Baker Newman Noyes and joined in Midcoast Maine by The Lahner Group and Gartley & Dorsky.

Eve Jamieson, Finding Our Voices Survivor-Star, with Markos Rigas of Boothbay House of Pizza. Between them is Olivia, a nurse, on one of the 35 Say Something banners that Eve got up in that town, and big-hearted business owners/managers gave over a big chunk of their prime marketing window-space to display at the height of their tourist season.

Maegan Graslie, with a sample of our Finding Our Voices Book Gift program: Survivors in our project write loving messages inside books that we then gift to women needing the illumination and support that helped us get out and heal.

A leading, national domestic abuse victim-advocacy group has just applauded our banner campaign and we also won in the category of "Outstanding Awareness Event" for our Love/not Love art/poetry community-wide exhibits in Rockland last October and Belfast this June!

Just as swimming helped restore me five years ago, this summer to refresh from 16-hour workdays with Finding Our Voices I took to Maine's lakes, rivers, oceans and quarries.

Twice-daily swims in such sacred spots as Fernald's Neck, Ducktrap River, and the perimeter of Curtis Island -- last week I made it all the way around! -- proved to be the perfect balm. Mingling with seaweed, communing with loons, cormorants, and thick schools of silver porgies, I was in mermaid heaven.

I channeled Vita Sackville West in the poem that winds around her stone writing studio tower at Sissinghurst, and that I marveled at during a rose garden tour of England a number of years ago:

A tired swimmer in the waves of time
I throw my hands up!
Let the surface close
Sink down through centuries to another clime
And buried, find the castle and the rose.

Swimming lessons learned:
Nature heals.
You are stronger than you think.
You can do more than you think.
And in order to get louder, sometimes we need to go silent.