Agency gives resources, confidence to battered women
Next Door Solutions to Domestic Violence empowers survivors of abuse, steers them toward recovery
Every once in awhile, Rose Martinez opens the nightstand drawer and pulls out her diary to remind herself of who she used to be.
She only wrote in it during the worst of times, when she says her husband hit her, mocked her or forbade her from seeing family and friends. Even so, she wrote, “I still love him.”
That was a decade ago. She had been married for 25 years.
“I look at it and think, who was this?” Martinez, 52, said. “It’s not me. But it was me back then.”
She is sitting in a small room on a comfortable club chair reserved for counseling at Next Door Solutions to Domestic Violence, a San Jose nonprofit that empowers survivors of abuse and helps them recover.
Martinez was nervous to tell her story at first. What would people
think of her staying with that man for so long before finally leaving him for good? Her four grown children know some, but not all of what she endured.
In many ways, she’s been preparing for this ever since she came to Next Door Solutions four years ago. She hopes this story will reach other women like her and encourage them to seek help much sooner than she did. She also wants to help the organization that gave her the resources and confidence to move beyond her traumatic past. A donation to Wish Book from readers like you will help Next Door reach others in need.
Martinez was just 18 when she married her husband, who was five years older. She thought she was doing everything right. He had asked her parents for her hand in marriage and promised to support her plans to enroll at San Jose State University. They married in a church ceremony and she wore a white dress.
But things went wrong quickly. She says he called her stupid, pushed her, grabbed her hand and twisted it. He wouldn’t let her wear makeup, she says; it would only attract men. He didn’t let her go out for lunch with friends, she says; it was a ruse to have an affair. He rarely gave her money, she says, even for a haircut. He didn’t send her to college.
One time, she moved in with her parents, but not knowing how bad things were, they encouraged her to return. She packed her bags more than once over the years, but she says he threatened to kill her — or her parents — if she left.
She quit jobs she loved, she says, fearful that her jealous husband would come to her work and cause trouble. By then, she had four children.
“Finally, I said there is no way I’m going to get through this. My mother is ill, I couldn’t put the burden of four children on my parents. What do I do? I don’t have a job. I have four kids to feed.”
That’s when, the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2006, she swallowed a bottle of pills. With her kids upstairs — ranging in age from 9 to 18 — she regretted it immediately and rushed to the hospital.
Her suicide attempt was a wake-up call. She vowed to work her way out of this marriage and began secretly studying and taking exams to get a job in payroll with the local school district.
It took another series of violent episodes a few months later — and new threats — for her to contact police, explain the history of abuse, obtain a restraining order, and finally get out of the house. A police report from June 2007 recounted her most recent allegations, that her husband’s abusiveness had worsened over the past months, that he frightened her with a gun, and “that he was going to carry through with his previous threats and have someone kill her.”
When police contacted the husband, he denied he had ever hit or pointed a gun at his wife. He also told police he had no guns, but police found one in his vehicle, according to the police report. He was arrested for domestic violence, court documents show, but he ended up pleading no contest to a single misdemeanor count of carrying a concealed weapon in his vehicle.
Two years later, Martinez married her new husband, Hector, who treats her well and has none of the abusive traits of her first husband. She thought her old life was behind her.
But simple things would trigger anxiety, like when her new husband asked for a beer, she flashed back to the times she says her first husband got drunk and hurt her.
“I am not him,” her husband told her.
She found an old card someone had given her from Next Door Solutions
and went to a group meeting — and that’s when the healing began.
“I remember crying the whole time, listening to women telling their stories. At that moment, I realized I’m not alone. I’m not the only person who would have stayed,” she said. “I’m not the stupidest person in the world.”
She had never really talked about what had happened to her until she opened up to these women. Here, she felt no judgment.
Jordan Dancer, the grants manager for Next Door, said the nonprofit provides a safe haven for women like Martinez. They hold classes and workshops and provide a shelter with 19 beds. It’s always full.
“It’s keeping it quiet that keeps it happening,” Dancer said. “If you need somebody more than yourself, you’ve got somewhere to go. It’s recognizing and
dealing with it and using it for power as opposed to suppression.”
Martinez, she said, is a prime example of a victim becoming an empowered survivor. Martinez has marched at City Hall to bring awareness to domestic violence. She helped with a nutrition group for mothers. And she has formed a group with other survivors who call themselves “Committee of Strong Women.” They’re taking training classes now to become “mini-advocates” and plan to hand out fliers in laundromats — the one place they know controlling husbands allow their wives to go alone.
When Martinez was asked to tell her story to a group of civic leaders and donors at a Next Door fundraiser, she trembled as she took the stage. After she stepped down, two women approached her separately. Both looked glamorous to her — wealthy white women, the owner of a company and a lawyer.
“You told my story,” one told her.
“You told my story,” said the other.
Martinez was dumbfounded.
“How could they go through what I went through?” she asked herself.
Maybe everything happens for a reason, she thought, that she is here now, putting her story out to an even bigger group of strangers, hoping to make a difference.
“Maybe you came,” she told the women, “because next year you’ll tell your story.”
It’s important to tell, she knows, and important to remember.
In the same drawer with her diary, Martinez keeps the discharge papers from the hospital when she tried to kill herself. Her husband has urged her to throw them away. But she won’t.
“I don’t want to forget what happened,” she said. “That’s why I tell my story. If I forget what happened, I’m not going to be the person I am now. I have to remember what I was brought here for.”