(no subject)

[sciatrix]

The entire house is currently sitting at 5-10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than Austin is, because of the fans, and I'd had to sit home and look after them much of the week. Having just gotten a text from the drying folks asking us to turn up our AC (!!) because the fans can't work at that temperature (!!!!), I called and left a very snappish voice mail, because it's been 95 degrees in the house all day yesterday and there are four humans, four cats and a dog still living in it. They've asked us to turn off some of the equipment and see if that helps, anyway, and hopefully the tech will be out today to tell us it's all dry and can be put away. Here's hoping, anyway, because the whole experience has left me so drained I haven't really been capable of anything but dozing, playing endless rounds of Zoo Tycoon 2, and watching Bob's Burgers or mindless true crime. It's only now after several hours of work AC that I'm able to sit up and think enough to have something interesting to say.

I'd been listening to the Dirty John podcast today, more or less because there was a Real Crime Profile piece about it I happened to give a shot, and the titular John Meehan's first ex-wife had some very clear-headed things to say about her abusive ex. (Meehan, by all accounts, was what I usually call a piece of work: abusive, threatening, prone to lying, and so forth.) Meehan himself isn't particularly unusual, but the woman the podcast is really centered around is his second ex-wife, a woman called Debra Newell, and she had something of a history of abuse in her family herself: her sister Cindi had previously been shot by Cindi's own husband while she had been in the process of divorcing him.

This is where I get horrified enough to relay the story, because Debra and Cindi's mother Arlene is... well, she's earned something of the title piece of work herself. I just listened to this woman casually describe a pattern of viciously controlling behavior out of Cindi's ex-husband Billy, describe the things Cindi had told her, downplay the things Cindi told her were a problem, and sigh and say she'd been on a number of talk circuits because "well, everyone wants to hear a little more about forgiveness, right?" The husband had asked to meet with Cindi over the impending sale of their house, walked up behind her, and shot her in the back of the head. The police came to tell the mother what had happened, and Arlene paused and asked if they would pray with her, and declared that it would be all right because Jesus had told her so.

Then she explained that, well, she still loved Billy, and of course he'd shot himself too, after, but he hadn't died, and he wasn't in his right mind anyway what with all the stress of the divorce. And she was a Christian woman, and love could fix anything, and, well... she knew Billy before, and she knew him after, and she knew what was and wasn't him, and she knew she had to forgive him.

So she testified at his trial about all the things Billy was going through as a result of her daughter divorcing him, argued at length on his behalf, and successfully got his plea reduced to voluntary manslaughter. And she was proud of this!

My god, but Christianity has a lot to answer for, and so does this woman. The prosecutor in Cindi's case later said that her family had "thrown her away," and having listened to her mother lay out just how much she loved her ex-son-in-law and how he was really sorry and she believed in forgiveness above all, I can't find it in me to much disagree with him.

Comments

[siderea]

Reminds me of a client of mine. Despite showing up multiple times on her parents' doorstep with black eyes and covered with bruises and telling them her husband was beating the shit out of her, they continued to be real into him.

[sciatrix]

I will never understand some people.

[notasupervillain]

Everything about that story is a tragedy.

[sciatrix]

Seriously.

[viggorlijah]

My mother calls and writes to my ex. She would swap me for him in a heartbeat, and I would not be surprised if she turns up at his church wedding in a couple of months. They agree happily on how I am the cause of all their problems related to their relationships with me and get along very well. I used to wonder why my mother and my husband didn't have more close friends, and why the friends they had were kind of creepy, and then I left them and now I know.

[sciatrix]

Gross. I'm so sorry.

(For what it's worth, in my family, my mother and grandmother--her mother-in-law--hate each other and are both rather awful people. I feel like that's the way it usually goes with abusive people--either they love one another as kindred spirits or hate one another, no in between.)

[sebenikela]

this, right here, is why I get very, very suspicious about Christian narratives of forgiveness, even when they're dressed in fancy language about "restorative justice," because all too often it just means that assholes have no accountability and that community harmony is more important than survivors feeling safe.

(caveats of course Not All Christians, Not All Restorative Justice, there really are people doing amazing work in that space but I have some experience with the shitty kind so I default to skepticism)

[sciatrix]

Yep. It was very clear, also, that she had received a great deal of praise for being so forgiving--and everyone involved in that podcast bar the prosecutor seemed very unwilling to directly criticize her for her "forgiveness" towards her daughter's murderer. Asking her "wow, how did you get to that place," yes; implying that her forgiveness was in any way a value judgement on her daughter's worth, no. And I mean, her daughter was dead, and I can't recall, but one of her grandsons might have been as well; and the other grandson was clearly very traumatized about it, and so was her other daughter. She used to invite Billy to social functions, and her daughter used to duck out and hide from her, but no one was willing to break the social harmony that the grandmother was putting so much good Christian effort into laying down.

Brr.