Why Me?
- Rosetta Mandisa
- Apr 27, 2020
- 4 min read
Photo by James Wheeler on Pexels.com
Not long after I graduated high school, many, many moons ago, I met this guy who turned out to be a real piece of work. The first few months were great, of course. We spent a lot of time together going to movies and on dates to nice restaurants. Back then, Sizzler, was considered a nice restaurant and it was our favorite place to hang out. The guy was real nice, said all of the right things, made my friends laugh and was the perfect gentleman. He opened car doors for me, held my hand when we walked and made me feel like I mattered, until the day I learned different.
It’s crazy to think about it now because even though it was such a long time ago, I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was at his apartment making dinner. I had decided on spaghetti. It was easy and who could mess up spaghetti, right? Little did I know at the time how much messed up spaghetti was going to cost me. When the spaghetti was done, I headed off to the bathroom to clean up and then went back to the kitchen to make our plates. Taking the lid off the spaghetti I noticed something was clearly different about the spaghetti I’d left on the stove no more than five minutes earlier.
Turns out that while I was in the bathroom, my boyfriend decided he was going to add his own ingredients to the pot. He had poured in a bag of shredded cheese. Now, in my mind he should have put it on his own portion once I had made his plate because I didn’t like cheese on my spaghetti and I told him as much. I didn’t yell. I simply told him that I wasn’t going to eat the spaghetti now. He insisted that I would. When I refused, I learned that night that the guy I had previously thought was so wonderful was, in fact, a monster. I was about nineteen at the time and I had dated a couple of guys prior to him but none had ever hit me. To say I was shocked is a complete understatement.
This guy lived in the same apartment complex as me so going back and forth between his apartment and the apartment I shared with my sister was nothing out of the ordinary, however I made a decision that night that carried a negative impact on my life for years to come…I didn’t go home. I was too embarrassed and I didn’t want my sister to see me battered and bruised. I didn’t want any one to know that the guy I had professed my love to had done something so heinous.
I ended up staying in that relationship for about four years. The only great thing it produced was the love of my life, my son. Not long after my son was born, my boyfriend decided that he wanted to be closer to his family that lived about seven hours away. I quit the best job I’d had up to that point and moved with him. The abuse slowed down but it didn’t stop. Instead of just taking it, I learned to fight back. That seemed to help. A few months after we moved, I clearly remember being at his parents’ home talking with his mom in her bedroom. She had asked me to stop by because my boyfriend told her that I was unhappy about the move. When she asked if there was anything she could do to make things better, I replied, “you can ask your son to stop hitting me.” I will never forget that she didn’t respond. She never asked if I was okay or what I meant by hitting. She just made some kind of humming sound and walked out of the room. She would acknowledge my presence when we went to visit but she never had much to say to me after that day. I like to think it was because she was embarrassed to know she’d raised a monster.
Now that I’m older, and I like to think I’m wiser, when I look back on that period of my life and the struggles I had after leaving that relationship, I learned to stop asking God why things like that happened to me. I realized long ago that my struggles helped me to be the woman I am today; loving, caring, forgiving, hopeful, eager, beyond blessed, beautiful and smart. I also realized that my struggles gave me a unique voice. A voice that is able to help others move past the same hopelessness, sadness, and anger I once felt.
I shared this very same story with a friend just this past weekend. I’ve shared it so much that I no longer cry when telling it. I’m not saddened by it. I’m not embarrassed by it. I don’t have to ask God, “why me” because I know why. My past is my story, it’s my strength, it’s my voice and anything attached to me is a beautiful thing no matter how ugly it started.
God gives his toughest battles to the strongest warriors – Unknown…:)
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