October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. As grateful as I am to see DeKalb County, Georgia, signed a 2025 proclamation to dignify this difficult reality, my sad report is that I must add — more than twenty years “late” — to the pile of unreported instances.
What I am saying is REGINA COUNTRY stands for all things same-sex women UGH in Scorched Peaches. My 2003 girlfriend and 20-month cohabitator at Dorothy (my beloved lost home in Midway Woods, Decatur), Regina Country was a dominant woman who wooed me, screwed me, then boo-hooed OH ME meaning we brought each other to tears and near fisticuffs.
Those fists were mine. Same with the screaming. Tis a miracle no cops were ever called to my home.
Regina Country
pronounced rih-JY-nə rhyming with vagina
memoirIZATION for all things UGH in same-sex women relationships including domestic violence
How did this happen
When my DeKalb County Board of Health job got cut due to CDC grant cuts, Regina Country had been living with me for three months. Devastated, I said yes when she asked me to dinner in Virginia Highlands. I said nothing when she called this loss cause for celebration because “now we can go into business together.” I didn’t know how to say no. An extreme love codependent self-starver, I went with “opening” a Candler Park office of which I have no idea what the operating business was outside of emotional violence.
Highlight? My sole “managerial” position persuading a transgendered woman not quite out to work for us under her preferred name. Lowlight? Magots in the rugby cooler post-opening weekend, post-swing-and-a-miss fisticuffing.
I lost friends, I lost tons of money, I lost it. I lost it on her twice, once on pro row of Brick Store Pub. Regretfully, my emo*smelly butt was NOT thrown out. It would have been the wakeup call. A sideways wink from Archangel Mikey was sole community comment ever given to my Regina Country relationship.
Scorched Peaches is my nonlinear story pushing up regarding my old MJ #emosick personality that endured many things, including sexual assault with a Georgia man I knew twenty years. I’m 86’ing old MJ in waitress style, yet this ugly humiliation of “DV” aka domestic violence isn’t something to toss aside. It matters not physical instances of UGH in my home did not involve weapons, brutal fists or hands, or other dramatic types of battery or fury.
What matters is it happened; ACCEPTED. I render its SAD (aka danger) to siddhic innocence aka NUDY. U R Warned — ask for help, don’t suffer alone.
Might you pause with me? 159 Georgia residents lost their lives in 2025 to domestic violence. {{{ }}}
the Dotted Line
Allow me to share I did tons of reading on love, tons of spiritual work on myself back in the day. 20 months in Codependents Anonymous support rooms participating, reading. I never pursued a sponsor. Never called a hotline. Never pushed into the nitty gritty of PATTERN until a decade after my fall.
and…
This past April, I came out to the world on my UGH status re: sexual assault. Weighty and vulnerable, it gave me strength to contact several Georgia groups regarding resources for an 18-yr-old unreported instance. For a lady like me, the news isn’t great. Since I had zero plans to push for legal anything, what I learned was available? Support groups. What isn’t there and I don’t understand it? Advocacy for restorative justice for old assaults.
Because I am no longer dealing with emotional violence in my home nor legal measures with my peace friend, there is no need for certain advocacy. This I do understand. I’ll wait on a weighty post on restorative justice and my request to Brick Store Pub and instead share this goddessend of a woman who stayed on the phone with me once I found her.
…I found her through my determination. Some glitch in the machine kept my call from going through, but I did not give up on this one Georgia SA leader. We spoke in September. She spoke words that pierced the veil regarding my main problem above all problems — speaking up. Wondering out loud if I had been talking too much, this professional lady of empathy redirected me.
don’t you ever stop talking
the Dotted Line
A very late wakeup call, I consider her deep listening to be a dotted line. On one side of the line, women who rise for others BUT aren’t listening to their own self (counting old MJ on this UGH side). On the other side? Women who listen to their own discord regularly, thus NOT so caught off guard when a gal they know opens up.
Words that count? What professionals in SA/DV say ~ I’m sorry that happened to you.
My notes from the field? pushback of my Scorched Peaches as peace path has come from Regina Country, other Decatur lesbians, other Decatur feminists, and Atlanta women activists with whom I rose in a field to call for an end to sexual violence and injustice. This is not shade — this is consequence.
Of? GUILT — THE PATTERN OF TIME WHICH IS WAR
not sure about this sexual peace
All I have to do for the feminist mob to show up on Decatur Square is to call for a protest. For me to SCREAM for my justice, for our collective justice with regards to patriarchal sexism et. al <<<academic shorthand for all y’all. To throw the Commanda R psyche word that begins with an R and ends with a T into a crowded movie theater of our collective mind which I shall never call glibly a RE-RUN. What do I mean?
I mean that the PATTERN of patriarchy is the same as codependence. The former drives us women to demand gender equality, the latter has us U-turning with wheels screeching over the curb fleeing from what we don’t yet address as women. If all IS fair in love and war, then all is unfair too! So…
…who am I to say what women need to do or be to become emotionally freed? Isn’t war about consequences? Isn’t this avoidance of seeing my fall from fellow feminists just consequence? Isn’t it not helpful for me to harp on organizations who couldn’t hear, who watched me fall? Isn’t it time for a re-spray upon the wall? I’m not for men who abuse. I AM FOR delivering men to my call ~ sexual peace amends through meaningful peace friendship.
I think I’m just UGH advanced seeing down the ladies lane. ACCEPTED.
paz flag
When I bought/mortgaged Dorothy in 2002, a peace flag found its way to me. I hung it under my front bay window both for peace and my lesbian love for women. I learned only today that the peace movement flag and the LGBT+ flag are not quite the same.
To have given a significant portion of my life, free time and paid, to the peace movement and yet no time when I needed it most to sincere movement of emo*violence OUT of my system…it moves me. It is foundational to what I call my scorched peaches.
If we are connected and you feel UGH about saying hello, don’t. Say hello right now! The pattern needs to be starved of fire and be addressed re: sick water. Need to UN-Linked with me? Please do. For I understand, I do.
Abuse is not a ‘normal’ part of any relationship, and it is not a ‘private’ matter. It is a crime, and it happens in the lesbian community just as it does in the heterosexual community.
— National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR)
(((A)))
