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My grandmother was born in 1911, and at fifteen she fell in love and married my grandfather.  It wasn’t that unusual an age to marry in the hills of Arkansas back in the day.  I’ve said before that I’m only one generation away from wearing shoes only in the winter, and I’m not entirely joking.  At fifteen my grandmother was so in love with the man who would become my grandfather she used a box to cover one of his footprints so the rain wouldn’t wash it away.  She was embarrassed that she ever thought that much of him, because soon after they married he started hitting her. By sixteen she’d had her first of five children by him, and the abuse continued through their entire marriage. He was abusive to the children, too, but he saved the worst of it for my grandmother.  She was 4’ 11” and he towered over her, but she was never his victim.  She fought back as hard as she could for all those years. Why didn’t she leave? Because back then there was no place to go, and he would have gotten the children. They were still seen as his property not hers. She wouldn’t leave her kids, because she was afraid of what he’d do to them without her there to protect them. She stayed until my mother, the youngest, was fourteen and old enough to choose where she lived.

My grandmother told me once, that she left when she was afraid that either he’d kill her, or she’d kill him, and then what would happen to the kids? She endured at least twenty years of abuse to protect her children.  She told me once that if she hadn’t had two sons that she would have hated all men, but she loved her boys and her grandsons, so all men weren’t evil just most of them.  But she allowed my grandfather to visit us, he taught me to catch butterflies and to hold them just so around the middle on the thorax so that I didn’t damage their wings.  I still remember the zebra swallowtail that we caught beating its wings against the screen in the window.  I never caught another one in Indiana.  I can still hear the ping of it hitting the metal, desperate to escape.  When I’d seen it long enough he helped me set it free, because you always set them free, he said. I remember even at five or six being confused that his big hands could be so gentle with butterflies and yet had almost killed my grandmother multiple times.  It took me years of therapy to understand why I write about monsters that turn out not to be, and about people that turn out to be monsters.  When I asked why she let him visit, my grandmother said, “He’s their father and your grandpa. There’s nothing I can do to change that.”

All five of their children took the grandkids back to visit Papa  in Arkansas in the summer.  I have pictures of me at his house with his favorite dog and one of the cats. He had a white pony that I had named Lulubelle. No, I don’t remember why I chose that name. Papa died when I was ten, and it was only when the family gathered for the funeral that the grandkids discovered that Lulubelle was also Snowball, and several other names.  Every set of grandkids had a pony at Papa’s house, but since we never visited at the same time it was the same pony. I don’t know what that says about my grandfather, but he could be charming. He was well liked by everyone except his wife and kids.

If my grandmother had had a women’s shelter to go to with her children all those years ago it would have made a great deal of difference to her and my uncles, my aunts, and my mother. That’s why my charity is Mary’s House of Hope at A Safe Place.  So that the women enduring abuse today, right now can take shelter with their children and their pets. Most shelters won’t take pets, and some women stay to protect their fur kids, just like their human kids. It’s one of the reasons I want to support this place, because you bring all that you love. I couldn’t change what happened to my grandmother, but you can help me make a change for other women, other children, other families. Together we can make sure there is someplace for them to go where they are safe.