Safe - Or Not

 

Never-ending imbalance: the feeling of the day for too many of us. When will we get back to normal? As if normal was ever a balanced state. Today, for example, it is 31 years since the tragic murder of six women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique. How normal are the lives of those families, and still for many women, since that dreadful time? 

Is normal being free to walk up to someone and greet them with a handshake or a hug? Is normal being able to just drop in on someone without wearing a mask? Is normal leaving your home, with or without your children, just to escape daily abuse? 

So many questions with one simple answer - stay where your feet are, given the situation that surrounds the world, has the world in its grip. But if your world involves abuse, take your feet to a shelter, a safe home……oh, I forgot - restrictions have compromised the availability and accessibility of these places of safety. 

I paraphrase an Edmonton physician, who related this morning, on CBC's Rosemary Barton Live: It is not the legislators that are curtailing our rights. It is the virus. This pandemic, and the resultant restrictions to protect us all, sent us all into the safety of our homes, our bubbles - except for those in abusive relationships.

It is the Covid19 virus that has us in our homes: either creatively managing our homes with jigsaw puzzles, baking bread or cookies, painting or writing, doing a lot of walking on our own or with one another, juggling kids and work at home, taking a nap whenever and wherever, or, more dangerously, being trapped, scared and lonely.  

Normalize your day if you possibly can, don’t wait for ‘it’ to become normal again. An old normal may not be a good thing. 

“She’d worn anxiety like a thick robe for 

so long that it was hard for her to take it off.”

~ Pernell Plath Meier, In Our Bones

**Authors note: Go to The Sunday Magazine for the December 06, 2020 episode on CBC Radio, to hear Piya Chattopadhyaya’s excellent interview with Pamela Cross, a feminist lawyer and legal director of Oshawa, Ontario family law support centre Luke’s Place regarding this issue.