Tales from the Shark Tank

My girlfriend just called me. She came back to Indiana because she needed the support system she has here. She got a restraining order, and at least superficially her husband has been abiding by it. Life’s been mostly quiet for her since he got served. And now she’s started questioning if it was really that bad, if she was really in fear of her life, or if, as her husband kept telling her before the judge put a stop to it, she’s just been crazy and hysterical and blowing it all out of proportion. This, after she’s told me she turned off the landline so that the jerk couldn’t leave vicious, threatening messages on the answering machine where the kids would hear them and be terrified again. This after she hid for 24 hours while he prowled the area trying to find her.

So I told her what she’d told me. I reminded her that she’d been crying and shaking, that she’d been scared by a 2 hour delay to be able to drop the dog off for boarding. I reminded her about the times she called me after he’d shoved her around, using accusations he’d cooked up in his own warped mind to justify it. I reminded her that he’d kept calling all night long while she hid. Essentially I told her that yes, it had been that bad, and pointed out that now if she backed down she’d not only be dealing with his irrational suspicions, but his rage at being “messed with”, escorted out of the house by the local gendarmes. In less than ten minutes she was crying again, but she was agreeing that indeed, she’d been minimizing how scared she and her kids had really been.

I knew this would come, and that I’d have to remind her why she was doing what she’s doing. I know there will come times in the future when it gets rough and she needs to be assured that she is strong enough to see it though. I know she’ll need to be told that what her husband is saying about her isn’t true – that he’s lying to her and to himself about her. She’ll need reassurance that she deserves better than his violence.

We’ll give it. When a person has been told they’re worthless often enough, they usually need an external spine. So as my husband put it, the evening after the sheriff finally got the jackass served, we’ll be her exoskeletons.

A couple of weeks ago someone finally opened a gym in the tiny town 4 miles away. We took a look at it and promptly joined. The difference between a 40-50 minute round trip and a 15 minute round trip is the difference between actually getting some good out of the membership or not. It’s small, but it has all the essentials – strength machines and aerobic equipment, weights, a way to stretch and so forth. The couple who own it also know what they’re doing, which is a great help to people to whom physical conditioning of this sort is a complete mystery.

The day the owner introduced me to the strength machines, he gave me some guidelines for how to tell when I’d done enough, also advising me that I should see what felt possible, and then back it off a step so that I didn’t overdo it. If a 30 pound weight felt right, use a 20 pound weight; if it felt like I could do 15 repetitions with only a little strain do 12, and so forth. He also told me that the first week or two I was likely to feel utterly flattened on occasion, and that it meant I should back off a little more, working at a lower level until it didn’t flatten me and then adding one iteration. As he said, if it takes me a month to get to the next level instead of 2 weeks, nothing is lost.

He was right. I spent a couple of days in Indy dealing with Mom-stuff, came back last night, and went to the gym again today. Tonight I do indeed feel like a truck ran over me. I’m glad he warned me this would happen, because with the warning came the assurance that it wouldn’t be like this forever. If he was right about the first part, chances are he’s right about the second. I’m counting on it.