Selma In The City

My neighbour, Lila, moved out last weekend. We had bonded over shared experiences, the greatest of which was a terrible split from our exes. I didn’t know she was moving until a few days before the truck came. She didn’t want to tell me, “I feel like I’m a failure,” she said. Her reason for moving however, was not an admission of failure but a display of strength.

Lila had been in deep, financial stress for the past 6 months, unable to pay her energy bills, her daughter’s school fees and her rent. Her ex hadn’t been keeping his side of the Parental Agreement decided upon in Court and she was struggling to make ends meet. Part of the agreement was regular payments for her half of the business they’d started together which he still ran to his financial benefit. He claimed he couldn’t pay that half upfront so the Court agreed to instalments.  In addition, he was breaking the agreement in other ways, constantly asking that their daughter spend extra days with him or turning up at Lila’s place without notice. He claimed to love their daughter ‘more than anything’ yet refused to pay for the very things he had agreed to in Court like new school shoes or swimming lessons.

Even though Lila worked full-time she was struggling to pay her bills. She’d lost many clients when she’d been forced to leave the business. When her daughter stayed with her father she took shifts with Uber Eats, delivering food.  “I never thought my life would end up like this,” she said, her eyes wounded, even though her tone of voice was light. “What do you do when someone tells you they love you more than anything on this earth, that they will love you forever, but they don’t? What do you do when you find out that your life with the man you loved wasn’t real, that your life is so full of lies and betrayal that when you lie alone in bed at night the pain is so great it feels like a knife in your heart?”

In spite of her wounds Lila mustered the strength to move on, finding a cheaper place to rent and getting a better paying job. She moved far away to do it. She wanted to. It served two purposes – really allowing her to start again and making it more difficult for her ex to turn up unannounced and uninvited. He now has a 90 minute drive instead of a 5 minute drive to her house.

I will miss Lila’s sweet, friendly nature and her calming presence. I liked hearing the sound of her daughter playing in the garden. It was next door family energy.

I won’t forget the wounded eyes. I can’t. Those eyes were caused by the thing we don’t always talk about when we talk about abuse in a marriage or relationship – financial abuse. That hold abusers like to have over their partners, the control of the money. That’s why so many women have trouble leaving toxic relationships. They have no money. Naysayers will say “Just go anyway” but it’s not that easy. Without money how do you pay for accommodation? Food for the kids? Petrol for the car? To make matters worse, any kind of assistance programs available are jam-packed full of women in similar situations and you may not meet the criteria for most dire of circumstances.

I remember when I split with my ex I was completely panicked. I thought it was because of a romantic sensibility where I was mourning the death of love but it was really because splitting from him meant leaving the business we ran together, effectively leaving me without an income. The last thing you want to do when you are in a overwrought state like that is to pull yourself together and go to job interviews. You just want to lie in bed and cry. But you can’t. And I didn’t.

The thing I have noticed over time, especially now that I have given myself some space to breathe, is that you remain affected by the financial abuse for a long time. It affects the way you view money. It affects the way you view work. It affects the way you view yourself. Over time the verbal abuse means less. The betrayal, infidelities and lying means less. The physical abuse doesn’t mean less but you can compartmentalise it, lock it in a box, so it can’t hurt you as much. The one I’ve struggled with the most is the financial abuse. For years I endured it. For years after we split I was still paying off old debts, his debts. I still have a fraught relationship with money. I still view myself as being in a position of lack, of deficit. But perhaps the wish to survive, the need, the implementation of that wish and need, is worth much more than money.