A True Tale of a Snake Oil Salesman

I returned to St. Kitts from the Peace Corps Close of Service workshop that was held on Antigua last week and found everything in order but the restlessness of my spirit.  While the workshop was both an opportunity to learn the logistics of winding down after two years of service and a chance to reunite with the 24 other Eastern Caribbean volunteers who began this journey back in August 2010 - and where both objectives were met – for me it also brought an unexpected feeling of being left without a tether.     

There are a lot of changes and choices I need to make, which is not a bad thing, just unsettling as the changes are imminent and I'm no longer insulated by the many have to do's of Peace Corps service.  The first order of business is to find a job; where I live will depend on where I work.  And when I open that compartment in my brain where job search has been tucked away for the past two years, anxiety and frayed nerves settle in. 

In thinking back on most of my adulthood, I remember being a remarkably decisive person, making decisions straight away and following through without hesitation.  These days I more often find that I put any kind of personal decision making aside, too many what ifs to consider.  I’ll think about it tomorrow has become my calming mantra.

The mother of one of the students I mentor stopped by my office yesterday. Standing in the hallway when I arrived for work, she greeted me warmly. She asked if she could come in for a few minutes and offered me one of the two cups of tea she held in her hands.  I settled in the chair behind my desk while she pulled a chair closer, and then I listened as she began to tell me her tale of a broken heart and a shattered life. 

It was really a story of survival - emotional survival - of going through hell for too many years until finally finding herself on the bridge to healing.

She said she had met Kishona’s father 14 years ago. A fraud, a bully and a charismatic manipulator is how she described the man who had nearly destroyed her.  He told her it was the titillation that made him take risks, he liked commanding the lives of others, a serial abandoner he enjoyed the secondary gain he got by inflicting pain on those who loved him; for him creating emotional devastation was his way of demonstrating power. Of his four wives, two sets of biological children, and one set of stepchildren, he said, “I walk away when I get bored, find someone else.  There's no shortage of needy, gullible women."

He reinvents himself with each new ‘family’, changing the back story to fit the new identity, but always appearing needy and vulnerable; blaming childhood abuse by a teacher for his personal failures, feigning unconditional love as though his very life depended on that love, threatening to kill himself if love was lost; I'm nothing without you, desperate and sorry, forgive me baby girl, always forgive me baby girl.  That was his hook.

A serial cheater, he had never spent a moment without ‘a someone’ in his life; each wife replaced by the mistress who eventually became the wife, and then soon became the ex, abandoned and betrayed, another human sacrifice heaped into a life-long pile of discarded lives; collateral damage of an emotional predator.  No one could ever love him enough.

He recently remarried, this time to a woman he said he was bored with already; wife number five.  “A mercy marriage,” he tells others and laughs. “She doesn’t even know her number, thinks she’s the fourth, as if that really makes a difference. What’s one wife more or less?” 

Co-dependent to an alcoholic, she’d always made excuses for him because she'd been told alcoholism is a disease.  She even tried to help him get sober.  It worked for a while, but his sponsor said he was too narcissistic, too arrogant to stick with it; and he had a big problem telling the truth, honesty is a must when you’re in recovery; too much ugliness looking back at him in the mirror she guessed, and he was after all, most notably a coward.

She told me she was finally able to forgive herself for wasting all those years thinking he was more important than her.  She was mindful of the road she had traveled to get to this place, and grateful for the strength to have made it.  She was ready to move on.

She said she was telling me her story because she wanted me to talk to the young girls I work with about the debilitating effects of emotional and verbal abuse.  It is a story that has a lot to teach and a story that needs to be told. Damage from emotional abuse may be harder to see than the broken bones and bruises of physical abuse, but it is just as painful - and just as wrong.

If I were giving recognition awards to adults instead of teenagers, she would receive the award in the Courage to Overcome category; it’s not easy resuscitating a life tossed into the heap. 

I gave her a sticker with a yellow happy face like the one I give to the kids.  It made her smile. And I gave her a hug for her courage and for sharing her story with me. And of course, I promised to pass her message along.  

Some things cross the cultural divide with clarity of purpose first, and lead to clarity of understanding.

And so it goes on the island of St. Kitts, August 1, 2012.