Passive Aggressive

For thousands of years, women have had to become resourceful in their resistance. They’ve had to learn how to fight without the appearance of fighting—how to win without the appearance of winning.

Passive Aggressive

By Elizabeth Hood

He calls me “Passive Aggressive.”
And maybe he’s right
Cause how else do you fight 
When speaking your truth gets you pushed up against a wall?
Screamed at so loud the spit hits your face?
And all you want is for him to just lower his voice so he doesn’t wake the baby.

I guess it’s “Passive Aggressive” to
Shut down
Curl up
Pass out
Rather than prolong the argument by actually arguing. 

Apparently It’s “Passive Aggressive” to seek 
Validation
Help
Sanity 
From anyone other than him.
Don’t you know? That’s pathological 
“Attention Seeking”
“Ally Gathering” 
“Triangulation”

I HURT HIM he says
Because I Passive Aggressively
Didn’t love him enough 
Didn’t try hard enough
Didn’t have compassion enough
For his ISSUES.
Well let me tell you,
Compassion dies when you’re the punching bag.
Trying dies when all your trying is never enough. 
Loving dies when your soul knows deep down 
You’re being used. 
Abused. 

Well maybe 
“Passive Aggressive” is all the Fight I’ve got left.
So I Passive Aggressively scan my prison cell for cracks.
And I Passive Aggressively look for a spoon, a rock, 
Anything I can use to chip away the concrete.
And I Passive Aggressively dig
And cover
And hide my holes
Looking for some Shawshank-style Redemption.

But he’s onto me. Because I’m sloppy.
I’m terrible at lying and covering up my tracks.
It’s my nature to nurture
And I’m still Passive Aggressively trying to 
Feed the baby, 
Make some money, 
Live a life that looks 
“Normal.”

And I’m caught.
And now he has to watch me
And track me 
And chain me
And hack me
And convince me that it’s ALL MY FAULT.
YOU CREATED THIS MONSTER he screams.

But my soul
It’s Passive Aggressive too.
It’s been plotting and planning behind the scenes.
Passive Aggressively
Hinting,
Beckoning,
Pointing.
And at last I look 
and see that the prison door was always open. 
And the only thing that ever kept me in
Was fear. 

So finally. FINALLY. 
I.
GET.
AGGRESSIVE.
And I walk out. 

---

The Story

Passive Aggressive is the first poem I wrote as an adult, shortly before I turned forty years old. The date was November 28, 2018. It was about 8:30 in the morning and I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror drying my hair.

I was anxious and disturbed by a recent spate of angry, threatening communications from my ex-husband, this time accusing me of being passive-aggressive both in our marriage and now. I had tried non-engagement as a tactic, but he argued that my silence constituted an attack. A wall of text from him alleging that I had systematically hurt him in covert and subtle ways that inevitably resulted in his overt and aggressive verbal attacks on me. An eye for an eye. He was defending himself. He was the victim of my attention-seeking, ally-gathering, and triangulation. He diagnosed me. Calling me a master manipulator. A narcissist. A psychopath.

As I stood looking at my reflection in the mirror I tried to see it--to make sense of it all. Was I all those things he accused me of? Was I intentionally hurting him? Was he right? 

But suddenly, looking in the mirror, asking myself honestly for the thousandth time what I needed to change, I understood something essential about my story. The realization arrived in the form of a poem. A poem that hurt. Searing, aching words that pushed their way up from way down in my gut like they had been simmering and festering, waiting until I was open enough, healthy enough, to push them out. For the first time, I admitted to myself why I had felt so dark and half-dead. I was finally able and willing to give it a name. The word was abuse. I had been abused. I remembered the day years ago when we were still married when he growled at me, “Don’t you dare call me an abuser.” And I realized he said that because he knew what he was doing.

And my “passive aggressiveness?” Well. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was passive-aggressive. But how else do you fight when speaking your truth gets you pushed up against a wall? Screamed at so loud the spit hits your face? And you are a mother. And as he screams you stand stock still, incredulous that he isn’t just as keenly aware as you are of the fact that the baby is sleeping in the next room. And you desperately need that baby to stay asleep.

I remembered the times when I tried to push back. Tried to yell. Tried to argue. This only resulted in escalation. I had learned that attempting to fight back was dangerous and that someone like him would never allow me to “win.” 

But I am a woman. And for thousands of years, women have had to become creative and resourceful in their resistance. They’ve had to learn how to fight without the appearance of fighting—how to win without the appearance of winning. When physical force and domination aren’t tools in your kit, you find another way.

And there it was. Suddenly I was able to own my “passive aggressivity” not as pathology, but as a strong, subversive, indomitable part of me that had found a way over, under, and around the walls of power. I had found a way to cope. I had found a way to survive. 

It felt like a purge. Vomiting words. I grabbed my phone and began to type the words into my notes as fast as I could, like trying to catch a tiger by its tail and pull it in before it’s gone. Word after word, phrase after phrase, understanding flowed in like floodlights in a dark room. It was like waking up after years of sleepwalking. In the space of fifteen minutes, the poem came out whole, intact. It barely needed editing.

I couldn’t believe what had just come out of me. It was like looking at a solid tumor that had just been excised, hard as a rock. Bloody. Disgusting. Fascinating. Terrifying. Gruesomely beautiful. Was that thing in me? 

What does one do with an artifact of pain like this? Over the next few days, I turned it over and over in my mind in a state of near obsession. I became intimately familiar with my new creation, reciting it over and over in my mind the way a mother examines every finger, toe, freckle, and hair of her newborn baby. I memorized it. I recited it aloud in the shower, each repetition bringing forth new waves of pain washing through me, bringing me to my knees in naked, wet, heaving sobs, as if there was no bottom to this well. 

But reciting it to myself wasn’t enough.

I shared the poem with a few friends who told me it was good. But that wasn’t enough for that hungry little monster. A day or two later, while scrolling through Facebook, I saw an advertisement for an open mic night event at a local coffee shop. A “Poetry Slam.” It was the first of its kind that I had seen in my town, and I felt quite sure this might be my only chance to appease the beast I had created.

I walked into the coffee shop that night alone. I had told no one except my best friend that I was going. This was something I needed to do for me. It didn’t matter to me who would be there listening, or whether there were two or fifty people there. It only mattered that the poem was witnessed and heard.

I waited patiently, grateful that there were only a couple of familiar faces in the room. I sat alone at a small table, listening to the other amateur poets and musicians, looking over the words a few times more, but knowing that I would not forget them.

I was almost last on the program. When my turn finally came, I made my way to the small stage. There was a high stool for me to sit on but I chose to stand. The room was dark except for a single spotlight trained on the stool. As I stepped into the light, my body felt full and awake. Not nervously or anxiously, but full of conviction and awake to purpose.

And goddamit if she wasn’t there again, stepping forward into my body like a possession by spirit.

She. The same part of myself who stepped forward every time I had to perform for my ex-husband, for the men ogling me hungrily in the sex clubs, and the nude beaches. She—who stood straight and tall, and walked in seductively dominating strides.

I speak of her often in the third person because she is not a piece of my every day. She is not in me when I clean the kitchen or bake bread. She isn’t the one who holds a sick child until he falls asleep. She only comes when she is needed. She is my protector. She allowed me to fade away while she did what had to be done. And now here she was again. My Queen of Fire. So tall, so lithe and strong, so large and commanding in her very presence I feared she would leave me with stretch marks when she left again. 

I began quietly. “He calls me passive-aggressive. And maybe he’s right.” It was not a recitation. It was a remembering. My hands gestured and my voice rose and fell and this time I did not cry.

When it was over, when I said the final words, “And I walk out,” I didn’t wait for applause to step down. The stepping down, and the walking out was the final stage direction. I felt my body release into my chair as the applause sounded in my ears. Yes. It was good. They felt something. The poem was satisfied, and now it could leave me alone. But now I was not satisfied. I would have to write more. Much more. For the rest of my life.