Martha McGuire remembers the day 10 years ago when she walked out on her boyfriend of four years, who she says abused her. She remembers it as if it were yesterday.
He was angry about – of all things – batteries, she says, and he took his anger out on her. But it would be the last time.
“I did my routine. What I called ‘Turn up the heat and feed him fat.’ He was already buzzed [on alcohol]. The heat made him tired and the food will put him to sleep. I got the dog, went to the police station, and had him arrested.”
Her breath getting shallow for a moment as she recalled that final night, she added, “This happened 10 years ago. And it can still evoke emotion, even after all that time. But it was as if God had pulled down a shade. I could feel the peace and calm. I knew it was done.”
“I have pushed through all the negative hype I’ve been telling myself.” – Martha McGuire
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Now, after turning to her Catholic faith for guidance and conducting years of personal introspection, she feels transformed and healed enough to help others.
“I have pushed through all the negative hype I’ve been telling myself,” she said in an interview last week at Immaculate Conception Church, where she works as an administrative assistant.
In recent years McGuire has turned to music and creative writing as an outlet for healing. Now, she would like to share some of her work with others who are living through what she herself experienced.
She has written a two-minute song titled “Woman Rising” that describes her own journey. In one verse, she sings, “You told me that you loved me/I thought you were my friend/Still I stand here bruised and bloody/Lord when will this nightmare end/I’m a woman rising/I’m a woman rising.”
“I want to be able to go into women’s shelters and make the connection,” McGuire said. “And I was trying to figure out how I could reach out to other women, how could I share my own story with them and let them see they don’t have to live like that. I really wanted to find a way to do that, and this song just came to me.”
McGuire’s demo recording of the song is sung a cappella, but she said she’d like to find a trained musician who can help her set it to music so it can be performed and perhaps even used as a public service announcement for a women’s shelter.
Second act
If self-doubt and abuse marked McGuire’s early life, she’s determined for her latter years to be defined by healing and transformation, in herself and in others.
Her life plan now consists of raising enough money to rent out studio space so she can make inspirational music and spiritually-based guided relaxation recordings for people going through painful transitions in their own lives.
Already a volunteer at the Palisades Emergency Residence Corporation in Union City, McGuire also has an interest in working with the homeless and people transitioning from shelters to permanent housing.
Despite the difficulties she had growing up with her father, compassion for people living in the margins of society is a lesson she said she learned from him.
“My dad, who raised me after my parents split up, was always bringing home people who didn’t have anywhere else to go,” she said. “He’d tell me, ‘Don’t mind the way he smells. Don’t mind the way he looks. Let’s just give him a hot meal.’ I remember, I once asked my dad, ‘Daddy, what is a utopia?’ He told me, ‘It’s a place where everything is the way it should be, a place where everybody is cared for and loved. It’s a place that doesn’t exist,’ ” McGuire recalled, momentarily choking up. “I remember being so hurt by that. I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t create a utopia in our own lives…Of course I understand why we don’t have a utopia. But even now I believe we should be trying to get there.”
McGuire invites interested musicians to reach her at mcguire95@aol.com.
E-mail E. Assata Wright at awright@hudsonreporter.com.