The women who show up at Gayan Peart's domestic abuse shelter come with trembling hands and tears streaming down their faces. They come with suitcases or just the clothes they were wearing when they walked out the door. They come with crying, confused children who want to go home, even though home is where their mommy gets hurt. They come with no money for a hotel room, no family to turn to, no support system to trust.
They come with one eye fixed on the door, sure that they're not yet safe, that he's going to burst in at any second, angrier than ever because she tried to leave.
Gayan understands the fear and the pain. She lived it — though it has taken her a long time to admit that, even to herself.
Gayan's parents separated before she was born. When she was growing up in Jamaica, she and her mom were a cozy duo, sometimes even commuting together to the elementary school where Gayan was a pupil and her mom was a teacher. "She was a great, loving parent," says Gayan, "and she tried really hard to give me a great life."
Gayan was happy when her mom started dating a well-liked man from their church. The pair got engaged and Gayan, then 14, thought, "Oh, I have two parents — yay! I have this little family."
Soon there was a wedding and a new house in a different community, 30 minutes from family and friends. For a while things were great. But it slowly became apparent that Gayan's mom was no longer in charge. Her new stepdad made all the decisions about who could visit, how money was spent and what Gayan should do after school. "He quickly was the one in control — of everything, really," she says.
Gayan chafed at the new rules and detected her mom's growing disillusionment. "She was just so sad. She would go in the shower and she'd be crying. She'd have the water running and she'd be in there for a really long time and I'd go to the bathroom with my ear to the door and I could just hear her in there sobbing and sobbing," Gayan recalls. "But then she would come out, dry her face, act like it was fine."
One day a fight erupted as her mother sat sewing. Her stepfather tried to throw her mom's sewing machine out on the lawn, then stormed out of the house. Gayan and her mother locked the door, but soon he was back, demanding to be let in. The women blocked the door as he pounded on it; Gayan was in front when her stepdad's fist crashed through the door and hit her in the chest.
She screamed and ran to a nearby police station. By the time she returned with the officers, her stepfather was nowhere to be found. But he returned eventually and didn't even pretend to be the nice guy Gayan's mom thought she'd married.
"I felt like one moment I was living in a home that was a little strange, to living in this nightmare," Gayan recalls. "It became ugly very, very quickly."
Gayan started sleeping in her mom's bed, with a knife under the pillow. They would stay with friends for a few weeks at a time, but Gayan's mom had no financial resources to make a clean break. So they always ended up back under the same roof with Gayan's stepdad.
"I remember looking at her and I said, 'You know, I never want to get married. Because if this is what marriage is, I don't want it,' " Gayan recalls. "She said, 'Don't say that. This is not what marriage is supposed to be.' "
After Gayan graduated from high school, her mother left for England to visit an elderly aunt — and decided not to return to Jamaica. Soon Gayan joined her. Living far from home, she locked away the painful previous chapter of their lives.
"My body suppressed a lot of these things. My mom would try to talk about it and I'd be like, 'La la la la. I don't want to hear his name. I don't want to talk about him,' " Gayan says. "Sometimes she'd be like, 'Do you remember?' And I really couldn't. It's almost like it was wiped away from my memory."
Gayan made her way to the United States to finish college and ended up getting a job as a social worker in Boston. After a few years she became a program manager with Bethany House, a domestic violence shelter in Alexandria, Va. Bethany House owns two homes in Northern Virginia that can house 10 families at a time for four to six months. It was Gayan's mission to help abused women get on their feet — find jobs, cars, permanent housing and emotional independence.
Gayan loved her job but didn't feel a personal connection to the work. "It was just, I'm a social worker and I'm helping these women," she says.
Then after a couple of years with Bethany House, her pastor interviewed her for a church newsletter and asked if anything in her past had led her to pursue this line of work. "I was like, 'Me? Domestic violence? Oh no, pastor,' " she recalls. But as he pressed further, something broke open. "And then there it was, playing out in front of me. Yes, this span of your life did happen. It did exist. It was ugly. It was messy. And you suppressed it all these years, pretended it didn't happen."
Suddenly, she related differently to the woman who was stranded at a gas station with a newborn and no diapers or formula — because she didn't want her abuser to suspect that she was leaving for good. She understood the preteen gripped by embarrassment to be living in a shelter.
"Your mind processes so differently when you can see yourself in that child or that mother," says Gayan, now 35 and the executive director of Bethany House. Today, when she tells women it's not their fault, "I can say it, not because I went through some training or because I have a degree, but because I've walked a mile in their shoes. Now I have a mental and a heart connection to these women."
She can also understand the emotional and financial ties that lead some women to return to their abusers.
"As much as some of our women don't want to go back, they doubt themselves. They're like, 'Am I doing the right thing? Can I provide for my family? This is so hard,' " she says. That's why Bethany House offers such long stays, to give women time to build up the financial and psychological resources to go it alone.
On a sunny Friday morning in June, Gayan greeted a 30-something woman carrying a suitcase at the door of the shelter. The woman accepted Gayan's hug and began to cry. "She was just so happy we had a room available," Gayan says later.
These moments, in all their intensity, are some of Gayan's favorites. "Because it's like, 'You made it out!' " she says, waving away tears. "Because we didn't have a Bethany House in Jamaica. I wish. I go through the house sometimes and look at the empty rooms and say, 'I wish we'd had this.' "
