Making home a safe and lovely place

“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned,” wrote author Maya Angelou. And, oh, isn’t it so! To be understood and loved is a true gift from above; it casts out fears and uncertainty and makes us believe that we really can do anything.

Home could and should be the most lovely place for us all – a place to retreat to from the oft-chaotic world of buses and trains and unfamiliar faces and frenzied work places; where we go to kick off our shoes and take to the couch and be a slouch, let the belly out. Home is secure and comforting and carpeted. It is cups of tea and dinner in the oven and laughing at John Clarke and Bryan Dawe on ABC TV. It is the place when we are sad that we are most glad to be.

Charity, it is said, starts in the home. When our loved ones are loved the way we should love them, and we are loved back in kind, when our homes are permeated with the sweet fragrance of togetherness, it strengthens us to be effective in the world. When home is not that place, it can leave us crippled: forever restless, searching for some place to call our own, or feeling as if we are underserving of a peaceful home.

We are ALL deserving of a peaceful home.

Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs places safety and security just above our physiological needs for clothing, shelter, food, water and sleep. After personal, financial and health security is achieved, we look to fulfil our need for love and belonging. When we feel we are accepted, we can then move on to self-esteem and self-respect and, finally, self-actualisation (aka becoming everything we’re capable of becoming). If any of our foundational needs are not met, Maslow observes that we are less likely to reach our full human potential. Third-world needs notwithstanding, many of us will have to overcome obstacles if we are to achieve fullness.

There is a woman I know in her 70s, a fragile and delicate soul, who left her husband 10 years ago. His emotional abuse chipped away at her like a carpenter at a piece of wood, until there was but a splinter left. It took all her finite resources, a great deal of courage, to gain the strength to leave. Nervous breakdowns, psychiatrists, a whirl of appointments ensued and, finally, an existence she can contend with. Like a bird with a clipped wing, she is only now beginning to heal; to locate the pieces of herself that went missing; to reconnect with the girlish spirit that makes one’s eyes sparkle.

I have known other women to suffer at the hands of their husbands and boyfriends. Smart, beautiful women whose self-image has been tainted by the ugliness of their partners’ own insecurities. They are men who inspire Carly Simon songs. And Kelly Clarkson songs. And Alanis Morissette songs. Need I go on? Still more grown women are in perpetual recovery from the abuses they witnessed, or experienced, growing up.

In Kaz Cooke’s new book for women, there’s a chapter titled ‘How to escape control & abuse’. Within it is Cooke’s advice on what to watch out for, comforting words of consolation and advice on how to get help. “An abuser can create an atmosphere of fear, shame and low self-esteem by scoffing, being sarcastic or hurtful, putting down, criticising, demeaning, insulting or threatening,” she writes. Disconcertingly, there are also many, many personal anecdotes shared by the women who answered her survey who speak of stalking, belittling and beatings; of feeling like an idiot and suicidal. When I asked her about them, she wept, and said:

“What really shocked me about that is that I didn’t expect there to be hundreds of responses of women saying this happened to me. It was totally across cultures, classes, ages – and I thought I’d get some women saying, ‘We’re really come through it with counselling’, but there was not one of those hundereds of women; every single one of them, when asked, ‘What would you advise if you can see a woman in a relationship going this way?’, every single one, the only total consensus in the book, was ‘Leave, leave now, leave as soon as it happens once’. Even women who’d been stuck in these relationships for 30 years or who had kind of tortured themselves with the knowledge that they didn’t get their kids away, and that they’d been in it too long – every one of them had the beautiful heart, in a way, to say that they wanted to get other women to get out of it. I just thought that was a really brave gift to give other women.”

For those who do not find comfort at home, it is common to retreat into the self, or an imagined place or the comfort of work or routine, where the soul can be soothed, even if fleetingly. There is self-medication, meditation, any number of “escapist” methods of shutting reality out for as long as it takes to overcome circumstances, to pretend they do not exist. How sad to think these women might miss out on the sweetness of feeling truly alive in the world, of not being afraid to be themselves, because a tormentor thought a bit much (or far too little) of himself to have respect for her.

Even if we have not experienced abuse first-hand, we passively invite it into our homes and our family lives when we permit television shows or radio jockeys or video games or movies that rail against everything that is respectful of the integrity of women to permeate peaceful living – and that includes letting Uncle Creepoid’s comments go unchecked at the Christmas table. We can all personally take a stand – to correct wrong thinking, to encourage our blokes to support women, to raise our girls to believe in themselves and to refuse to diffuse loving home environments with the garbage the world permits. We can also try, as so many wonderful, selfless people do, to create safe havens for those who have none to come.

It’s not okay that any woman or girl should feel betrayed by the world.

Show your support for White Ribbon Day – our national day of stance against violence toward women – by taking an oath at MyOath.org.au. I also recommend getting a copy of Half the Sky: How to Change the World.

Image credit: Broken tea cups by Penelope Waits