Part three of three…..
My wife was on my back clawing at my neck trying to rip at my skin where my jugular vein is. She was by any measure a woman possessed. She was still on my back when I dialled 999 and shouted out that I was being attacked and our home address. I threw the phone down, heaved her off my back and shut myself in the kitchen. I heard her storm upstairs screaming in rage. She returned calm a few minutes later and spoke through the door. And then the moment of my real crime.
She quietly instructed me to call off the police and that if I refused she would ensure I lost everything, that I would be thrown out of our home and that I would never see any of my children again. That everything I had ever worked for would be taken from me. That I would be accused of the most horrific crimes and that she would ensure everyone would hear of it. No one would believe me and that her background in social services meant she knew exactly how to turn the system on me. She promised that I would live to regret this day for the rest of my life and that she would never stop until I was destroyed. I didn’t think about it. I responded quietly that it was too late, that she had gone too far this time. She would have to deal with the consequences of her actions.
When the police arrived, I told them what had happened. I did so quietly, still deep in shock. She told them a very different version between dramatic bouts of bloodcurdling wails to ensure our neighbourhood would be in no doubt who the true victim here was. They could not fail to see our marital embarrassment, advertised as it was with a sea of revolving blue lights in our sleepy cul de sac.
She was at least honest in one sense; she kept her last promise to me.
If I had my time again I would not have made that call to the police. It only made things infinitely worse. And if in my time again I made the mistake of calling them, I would reflect upon it and would undoubtedly call them off before they arrived. I was stupid to believe that I could defy what I later came to know as the God of Duluth. It is an all powerful god and I AM the disposable gender in her Book of Righteousness. The thing you my reader will disbelieve could happen as reported, is exactly the view I myself had held until I found otherwise. I was wrong and so are you if you do not understand how it works. Domestic Violence legislation works well. It protects the weak, but not always the victim. It punishes the male, but not always the perpetrator. It rewards the female for her being brave in coming forward with her claims, but not always the person telling the truth.
The fact is, our Domestic Violence legislation and protective mechanisms served to destroy not only my life but that of my 3 girls and a dying father. And therein lies a bitter irony; that in it’s efforts to right a wrong by applying a gendered response it ended up hurting more females than males.
I have learned that all it takes to remove a mans life (and of all those that depend upon him) is one single lie uttered from the lips of a crying woman. It matters not how ridiculous and obviously untrue that lie, only that it comes from the lips of a women demanding state protection. There is no come back, no reversal of the permanent damage that is wrought thereafter.
Once the train wreck is in motion it does not stop.
All I had to do that day was to accept my newly imposed life as a cuckold, to do exactly as I was told and to not aspire to believe that anyone would come to my aid. If I had done as is expected of me, Then I might be better off now. More importantly, my children might still have a father and an identity that they were born with.
My detractors are absolutely right; there really is no smoke without fire. I was in fact guilty of a heinous crime. I was guilty of gross naivety; believing that the police would help me, that blood under her nails and multiple lacerations to my neck and chest would be evidence ample of victim and perpetrator, that her initial admission she had attacked me would not later be ignored by police as ‘inconvenient’, that judges cared about the truth and that social services would actually investigate what they had been ordered to. I was wrong on all these counts and many more.
Duluth reigns supreme over us and all must kneel down before her and obey. Duluth is the all powerful matriarch.
All hail Duluth. All hail Duluth.
—THE END—