no. 68. i'm guessing

This week, two for the price of one: Thoughts on Cassie. Thoughts on parenting a 2-year-old

Hello - a long one this week on two very different themes. But as ever, thank you for being here. You can support my writing on ko-fi, hit the like button, share with a friend or even upgrade to a pledge. It all means the world. Thank you for giving me a space to write.

On with the show

*

I’m writing this far too late at night because I’ve spent far too long reading about Cassandra Ventura, or Cassie, testifying against Sean Combs, or P Diddy, in court. Over the last two days, she’s told stories of coercion, physical violence, bribary, threats, and rape. She was 22 when she took part in her first “freak off” - the name Combs gives to drug-fueled sex sessions, sometimes lasting up to four days, with male escorts, he orchestrates. Ventura said she took part “hundreds” of times, feeling unable to say no for fear of physical retaliation, coerced and trafficked. According to Ventura, Combs would watch and film these sessions while masturbating.

Throughout their 11 years together, Ventura said he would threaten her with these films, saying he’d put them online. Ventura also testified that life with Combs meant showing up to public events with sunglasses on to hide black eyes. She’d spend time recovering secretly in hospital after particularly vicious attacks. She became addicted to opioids, which she said she took to come off the party drugs and to numb herself from the abuse. She became suicidal. She admits she punched Combs in the face once. She says he responded by stomping on her head as she cowered on the floor of a car. She likened him to Ike Turner. One chilling detail from the New York Times live blog stated that Combs did not take his eyes off Ventura when she entered the courtroom.

Now, while heavily pregnant, Ventura will be cross-examined, and in the process, defence lawyers will undoubtedly attempt to dismantle and doubt not just Ventura’s testimony, but the notion of coercion and abuse itself. They can not deny the violence - we’ve all seen the leaked tape of Ventura fleeing a hotel room only for Combs to follow her in nothing but a towel, push her on the floor, stamp on her head and drag her back, before throwing a vase at her. But this, they will say, I’m guessing, was just one dark moment, one weak moment, a moment he was sorry for - after all, he oh-so bravely released a video on Instagram saying as much. I'm guessing what they will put into question, render invisible, or a money-grabbing conspiracy by an unhinged woman, is the years of calculated grinding down, control, and fear. Years of debilitating psychological warfare, brutal and deliberate excavation of someone’s self-hood, their self-esteem, which in this case was reinforced by reducing Ventura to not much more than a sex doll, pumped with ecstasy and ketamine. Years of living in the dark shadow of a powerful man, a very famous and very rich man, years of existing like a hostage, brain and body warped with fear and abuse and drugs and control, all which, I’m guessing, will be undermined, taken apart and reduced to a string of unfortunate separate incidents. A he said/she said, in which her actions will be her responsibility alone and have nothing to do with him. Because, still, when it comes to male abuse, we’ll always find a way to blame the victim.

Abusers follow a playbook, and there’s one big rule they all adhere to: they are the real victims. The woman is crazy/wants money/fame/is desperate/mean/jealous. In this case, I’m guessing, the line the defence will take is that this was all her choice: she was a consenting adult. She took the drugs. She sent him a text message saying she loved him. She had consenual sex with him after he raped her so how could he have possibly raped her. The patterns of coercive control will be dismissed. The contradictory and complicated actions of a victim will be used as proof that she was complicit. The abuse, the coercion and the fear will be downplayed and ignored, a form of gaslighting itself, a retraumatising - as the criminal justice system so often is. One of the darkest and most troubling things about this playbook is how effective it is on the outside world, from the police to the general public, who also start to believe the perpetrator is the victim and the victim is actually the one to blame. And this is because we still don’t like women daring to speak uncomfortable truths, especially about powerful men.

I don’t think this will play out as brutally as Amber Heard v Johnny Depp. The leaked videotape is very powerful. But I’m preemptively exasperated and exhausted by a world that, for the most part, still refuses to understand, or accept, how male abuse and coercive control work. Ventura’s bravery is utterly commendable, from her first lawsuit against Combs to taking the stand right now. But why should women have to endure a public flogging to prove what so many of us already know: male abuse is everywhere, and so often it is far worse than you could possibly imagine.

***

When my son was a baby, my patience was (almost) limitless. Yes, I was an anxious mess fighting off the impending doom in my chest every evening, but I had mystical levels of patience. Or at least that’s how it looks to me now.

We got lucky. On the whole, A was/is a good sleeper, and yet even so, there were (and still are) challenging periods. When he was teeny-tiny, he went through a stage of refusing to go down until 11.30pm, sometimes midnight. I would sit in the chair in our bedroom, feeding and waiting, feeding and waiting. And for the most part, it didn’t bother me. When he got a bit bigger and moved into his own room, I could stand for hours in the dark, rocking and hushing and pacing on the nights I needed to, never frustrated or angry. At some point, he went through a period of night waking. This meant he was wide awake at 2am and ready to go. 3am, 4am, 5am would pass, and I’d be waiting for him to seem tired, calm down, lie on the sofa, anything. Sometimes we watched TV. Sometimes I wrote. It was part of the job.

Now A is turning two and a half and my well of infinite patience seems to have dried up, evaporated under the heat of toddlerdom. As his daily protests beat down on me like arrows, launched from his little tower of stubbornness, I don’t let his attacks bounce off me, as I should. Instead, I pick up each arrow and turn it back on him, a pointed finger, a sword in a duel, trying to prove to him that I’m the one in charge. As my lack of patience makes way for a battle, the only real weapon I have is my voice. I attempt impressions of someone in charge. I speak in a low, slow tone, like I mean business. I yell (too often). I get down to his level and speak to him kindly and reassuringly. I have begged.

By contrast, E had a lot less patience for rocking baby A in the dark, but now practically morphs into a Buddhist monk, persuading A to do whatever it is we need him to do with a game or a giggle, or most impressively, a few calm words. And, to boot, A is considerably more compliant around his dad, meaning E endures a lot less shit. (Some people might say these things aren’t unrelated. I’ve also heard this woman say that fathers are better at setting boundaries. No idea if true, but would love to understand why if it is.) Sometimes, E looks at me quizzically when I respond impatiently to A, unsure why I’ve jumped to that voice or that threat. Already bloody and bruised, the look feels like another arrow, this one straight to my heart, making me feel mean or disconnected. Why don’t my calm words work? Why isn’t burning lava working its way up through E’s veins, too? And worst of all, my rage is ineffective. It has no impact on A whatsoever and just leaves me feeling awful; an out-of-control mother who can’t communicate with her son or set boundaries.

As we roll around on the bathroom floor each night, wrestling to put on a nappy and pyjamas, panic slithers itself around my neck, and I lose perspective; if we don’t set those boundaries now, my mind whispers, will we have a 14-year-old who doesn’t respect women? I grab A’s ankle as he tries to escape, pretending I’ve caught a fish. The game lasts for 4 seconds before he tries to bolt again. I try once more, but instead of laughing, he’s now protesting, whining, scrambling for freedom. I grab his little arms and yank him towards me. “Ow, mummy! Ow, mummy!’ He starts to sob. I abandon all efforts, scoop him up and put him on my lap, wrapping him in a towel. I start singing. He begins to calm. I take a deep breath.

It’s 6.40pm. I am sweaty and shattered and hungry and I know that this has sucked any energy that I might have used to write later. As we sing, I’m able to lie him down and start getting him dressed. And suddenly there he is: the delightful little boy I adore, the one who can endure long car journeys without complaining, just singing to himself, the one who is a joy to have in restaurants, the extremely helpful one, the funny one, the kind one who offers to kiss my psoriasis better, the one who is determined and loving and dazzling.

Or sometimes, he starts to roll around again, and I start to yell, and he starts to cry, and E comes up the stairs, the sound of his footsteps prompting A to stop wriggling. “Daddy’s cross”, he whispers. I too, feel like I’m in trouble, unable to perform basic motherly tasks. “Cuddle, mummy, cuddle!”, he’ll say as he throws his little naked body at me, knowing he’s overstepped a line. The same thing will happen the next night, or maybe it won’t, maybe he’ll lie down and we’ll sing. Either way, my nervous system is shot to shit, waiting for the next refusal. And this is before we’ve even got to bedtime - (for me, although rarely for E) a drawn-out disaster of its own, a feeling of utter parental failure.

By the time I’m back downstairs, I’m done. I spend the evening feeling incompetent and guilty, vowing I will be calmer tomorrow and that he’s just a baby trying to find his way in the world. Now out of sight, I can’t imagine how I could ever be so cross with the most perfect thing in the world. Experts on Instagram tell me I need to “regulate” my emotions, language typically reserved for children. And often, I'm left feeling like a child. I want to be held and have a hot bath and an early night with a nice book. Instead, I have coffee with A’s first childminder, Karen. Karen is small but mighty; a short, no-nonsense woman full of love and boundaries in her 60s who once described my son as the most stubborn child she’d met in nearly 40 years of working with kids. She had wizardry powers over children, including A. What can I do, I ask? "Be consistent", she says. And then with one of her looks, “Toughen up”.

Today I raised my voice from the kitchen as A stands in his high chair threatening to fall head first on wooden floorboards: “You’ve got to learn to be patient!”. I catch myself and imagine A thinking, that’s bloody rich coming from you. I’m not sure when I’ll get my patience back. I see it momentarily like a child running off through the crowd, instantly making me panic and yell more as I fear it’s gone forever. I secretly took great pride in my parenting for the first year or so of A’s life. Of course I had my moments, but I was also able to recognise I was doing something really fucking hard. That quiet confidence is seeping under doors and out of windows, escaping through every crevice. Every time I yell, every time I feel rage rise, I feel like I’m falling down a leaderboard, tumbling towards failure, a stamp of approval slowly being revoked. I feel like I'm letting my son down.

I’m well aware of meditation and journaling and sleep and diet and exercise and filling up my cup and trying to inject those things in my life. But I’m also trying to remember that this is still the job. Lean back into the reality of it. Perhaps as he's got bigger, and I've flirted with freedom and a sense of normality, I've started to forget how the land really lies. I've started to assume he can fit into my life and forgotten I'm meant to be building a new one for both of us. And maybe I tricked myself into thinking the hard days were behind us. But they're not. The tough years don’t go away; they just look different. I used to think having a newborn was the challenge of a lifetime. But that was before I lived with a 2-year-old.

Some great things

I Almost Quit My Career for My Kids and Then I Met Joan Darling by Shaina Feinberg. I adored this short film about a filmmaker finding an older mentor who helped her rediscover her creativity after having children.

Homocide: Life on the Street (Sky Atlantic). This is The Wire before The Wire (!) It’s based on David Simon’s book of the same name, and while he wasn’t involved in this TV series, it has all the hallmarks of Simon’s singular genius storytelling about crime and life in Baltimore. Plus, it’s the 90s; there are no smartphones, it’s wildly sexist, and everyone smokes. I’m hooked.

Catherine Lacey, one of my favourite American fiction writers, reposted this essay called Making a Living: On valuing time over money. This is the eternal dilemma for any wrtier, or creative, and she really gets to the heart of it: “It’s not that you need to make a living so much as you need to be a part of something worth living for”.

As always, thanks for reading,

Marisa