Abuse Is Not Always Physical In Nature, Nor Something Visited Only Upon Women and Children

Since very early childhood, I have had an intimate personal knowledge of abuse in all of its myriad, shades, hues and colors.  For as long as I can remember I was  both afraid and intimidated by my father, his pointing finger turned in your direction enough to make you tremble.  Still recall at the age of three the first time I witnessed him strike my mother, a back hand across her face as she was knocked into a wall.   Spare the rod, spoil the rod, my father's weapon of discipline was a 2x4 about three feet in length or a ornate piece of picture frame molding welded in the most lethal fashion as he indiscriminately would beat you until his anger had been sated.  By six sexual abuse was introduced into the portfolio of events that made up my normal daily routine...at 58 I thought I had pretty much seen it all when it came to abuse...sadly, I was wrong, now am surviving another kind of abuse that is just as insidious as any physical, mental, emotional or sexual abuse that one human being can visit upon another.

In a matter of months I have seen my credit destroyed, watched my accounts that were all in good standing ruined, am sitting here on a Sunday morning wondering if my car is still waiting for me outside my door, or has  been repossessed?  My checking and savings accounts are both overdrawn, I no longer have a usable credit or debit card, and I cannot pay my bills.  Even worse, my now destroyed credit makes it hard if not impossible to be hired for certain jobs, your credit rating used against you in the interviewing process.  My phone rings off the hook, and with difficulty I ignore its demanding tone knowing if I pick up it is a credit collection agency seeking payments that I just do not have to give them.  This is no way to live.

Sadly, destroying someone by ruining their finances (financial abuse) is not an unusual occurrence, too often a weapon deployed at the end of a relationship, a tool of retaliation and ruination employed with just one purpose in mind...absolute total annihilation of  a person's ability to survive...most times a attack deployed by men...perhaps that is what makes me unusual...I am a man who is sitting in the shambles of what once was a pretty good life trying to figure out what I can do to survive, what I can do to get through one day, then another as I wonder now what the future holds as I sit in the ruination of the "Ground Zero" that is currently my life.

“If it's fair for a husband who earns more to pay his wife, then it is fair for a wife who earns more to pay her husband. Gender should not be an issue,” 

Even worse as I endure this egregious injustice upon myself, am finding out that our American Court System seems, in my opinion, to both condone and facilitate this insidious form of abuse employed by one person against another.  A judge's code of ethics says all parties with an interest in any given case are allowed to be heard, yet if you try to speak you are quickly shut off, quieted, with no choice but to become silent out of fear of having the person welding the gavel holding you in "Contempt of Court", your sin nothing more than wanting to be heard.  Suffer in silence, we do not want to hear your story, get over it, pick yourself up and rebuild your life...MAN UP!  This is usually followed up with a threat thinly veiled in the guise of some sage advice that reads something like, "Take the settlement offered you, or I might not be as kind to you when this case comes to trial."

Right now I have five dollars to my name, one think crisp bill in my wallet which will be gone in about one hour when I drive across the Tappen Zee Bridge to put in a 12 hour shift, knowing ahead of time that I will not even earn minimum wage for my day's labor, will be hoping I get a few cash tips so I can put some gas in my car and have another $5 bill to make it to work again tomorrow.   Upon returning home around two in the morning I will open up a can of Progresso Soup that expired in June of 2013, heat it up and be thankful for some nourishment before I fall off to sleep, hoping at the same time that said can of soup does not make me sick.  Tomorrow I will wake up, repeat this same process over again, all the while hoping that two checks which are missing in action magically appear in my mailbox when the Post Woman shows up at around 11:30 AM.

Life is not always fair and sometimes, like it or not you are the one that falls between the cracks in a system and world full of flaws and imperfections.  For now, I again find myself reluctantly being a victim, the man falling between the cracks, but somehow, someway I will find a way forward into a better tomorrow just as I always have, my motto simple, "The best revenge is living well."