Personal Narrative: The Cry Of Tamar

Of all my classes I’ve attended, I believe I have never cried as much as I have with this class. The last 6 weeks have magnified the fact that as African-American, divorced woman, single mother who has underwent abuse multiple times by the ones closest to me, the odds are quite unjustly stacked against me. Not only has The Cry of Tamar helped me look at all the obstacles behind me that I conquered, it has given me the encouragement to press forward. I am not the only one. I am a part of the more than half who have encountered sexual assault, but didn’t report it. Having grown up in the church, I’ve seen first-hand and totally agree that the violence women experience in today’s world “is an area of continued need for education and prevention within the church1.” I can relate to Tamar’s story in more ways than one.
As military brats, my little brother, little sister and I spent many summers with my grandmother. The majority of the time we spent outside with cousins and friends

I had a marriage much like “Eleanor’s2” When we first met, my ex was the most loving, supportive and doting man, I thought I had ever known. We dated less than a year, before marrying; big mistake. The change after our marriage in 2008, was almost immediate. He became verbally abusive, behind closed doors and was constantly accusing me of having interests in other men, either at work or at church. I was never permitted to go anywhere else. One attempt to visit my sister resulted in him standing atop me with a butcher knife, with a silent threat of cutting me if I left. One other vivid memory, which reminds me of a scene out of the movie Misery, is when he stood at the end of the bed with a hammer, slamming it into the mattress, over and over, narrowly missing my feet, because he was upset at the thought of me conversing with another male. I was never allowed to ask him for sex, but was supposed to be readily available at his immediate