(a bit about the book)

I do not generally choose to ascribe labels to my being like: Statistic, Victim, Formerly-Battered, and Survivor, but I am, among many things, a formerly battered woman, and a survivor. When I was 22, I wrote what was then called, A Promise Broken, it was a diary that chronicled my experience as a young woman who unwittingly fell in love with a violent man. I wrote it for an independent study program at the college I attended and when it was completed, I tucked it into a box.

But, I need to back up…just a bit. Before I tucked it into that box, I had a dream of helping other women. I told myself,   “If I can help even just one woman, then this story will have served its purpose.” As luck would have it, while volunteering for a women’s crisis center in New Hampshire, that one woman came into my life. Not through the hot-line, not in a police call, not in our support groups and not at the many clubs to whom I delivered community outreach speeches. She came into my life because I needed a typist.

To back up even further, before I needed Anne the typist. I spent countless hours hunched over my Smith Corona typewriter telling the story of my relationship in Diary form. If you have ever used a typewriter then you know that changes often lead to an exercise in frustration: hm, let’s see…actually that paragraph was altogether confusing and it needs to actually come before the bottom paragraph (which by the way I just whited out and re-typed part of) and…come to think of it…this makes no sense in paragraph 3 so…well darn it…and there’s the noise the paper would make while being dragged from the roller of the typewriter, followed by the crunching sound derived from crumbling the page altogether up into a ball and yes, resolutely throwing it behind the shoulder into the missed garbage can…floor. So Anne. She was my savior. She re-typed A Promise Broken with all my pen marks and changes and handed me my manuscript when she was done.

Fast forward. Just shy of a year later, we needed some typing done for the crisis center. Anne was hired. Upon completion she asked me to meet her for coffee. We met, and that is when I learned that A Promise Broken had given her the courage to rebuild her life. She had been in an abusive marriage for nearly 14 years and she maintained that my work was a gift to her. I was blown away…it had helped, one woman. Then came the box.

That brief story is among the countless steps that have led to this moment where writing a Memoir is the answer. Thankfully, I kept the box, along with all the many other pieces that I have written in the 24 years that have passed. With full lungs I blew the dust off the lid and used the original diary as the base of my recollections.  The book shares with the reader the painful loss of self that occurs in an abusive relationship, providing passages from my diary of long ago. It is a naked portrayal of the effects of teen dating violence, the diary is woven into the reflections of my life decades later, exploring a myriad of questions from surviving, to healing, and what that means for my own children, as well as the children of others.

The time is now to bring this story out from behind the original shame that rendered it silent, I have children, nieces, nephews, and they all have friends. It is my hope that by giving my story, now titled: Tornado Warning, a voice it will continue the path of awareness much in the way the pioneers before me have, and the brave people who will follow.  I can educate young people, women, and men alike to take a stand against violence and be heard. I can shine a ray of hope into the life of a person who has been taken from the very base of who they are, by someone who ‘loves them’, and with any luck help give the leg up they need to be the rider of their own white horse that takes them away from abuse and back to their core.