How did I become the face to your fist?
A survivor of domestic abuse tells her story and how she escaped.
May 29th, 2025
Anna Maskerine. Photo by Christine Vanlerberg.
“Even in the worst situations, there is always hope. Just like the wildflowers that bloom in unexpected places, between cracks on sidewalks and stone-covered paths, on rocky hillsides and burned forest floors, you can regain enough of yourself to start again.”—Anna Maskerine
Review by Sonja Pinto
Warning: The following story deals with domestic violence and violence against women.
Their future location known only to a trusted few, Anna Maskerine and her young child left everything behind fleeing a dangerous relationship as she chronicles in her hard-hitting collection of short vignettes and poems Beneath My Scars: Surviving Domestic Violence by Anna Maskerine (Caitlin $26). Now, with her son fully grown, Maskerine shares her unwitting entrapment by an abusive partner, her escape to a new life in Nelson and the healing that followed the harm.
Details of the time with her abuser are harrowing. Maskerine diligently double-checked locked doors only to have her windows smashed in by his forced entry. There was the night her abuser came home drunk in the night and smothered her with a pillow only to brew her coffee in the morning and kiss her on the cheek as if nothing happened. Like clockwork, he apologized profusely after the violence only to perpetrate more violence a week later. Yet on the surface, her abuser was charming, even sweet, to those around them.
“Statistically, a woman is assaulted thirty-five times before reaching out for help, and she leaves seven times on average before leaving for good,” writes Maskerine. Since escaping her abuser, Maskerine has forged a career working in transition houses helping women leave situations that resemble her past. Once in Nelson, Maskerine eventually began working at the Aimee Beaulieu Transition House when it opened in 1995, where she was a program manager for thirty years. Her personal experience with domestic violence shaped her work: “The ideas and decisions that were forming the program in Nelson were being grounded in real experiences: mine, the voice of a survivor. My own history gave an insight into what at least some, if not all, of the women could feel when reaching out to us for support. I wanted to make sure we reached back in the most supportive way.”
Maskerine offers valuable insights into the vital programming of the transition house. “Our work would be client driven, woman focused, and trauma informed,” she promised. Moving beyond her own experiences, she also helped develop culturally-specific services to support Indigenous women who have even higher rates of domestic violence.
Maskerine’s story demonstrates how easy it can be to slip into a dangerous partnership. “Our time together didn’t start out as abusive. Quite the contrary,” she recalls. Her earliest memories with her abuser are filled with sweet dates, flowers and flattery: “It was like he was two different people.” Maskerine’s disbelief is palpable. “How did I become / the face to your fist”? is a question she poses in one of her poems.
“I’ve looked back to the beginning as if on an expedition to unearth the signs, some red flags or warning signals that could have averted everything that happened next. I know that sometimes the sound of your heart is so loud, you can’t hear the freight train that’s headed straight for you,” writes Maskerine. Indeed, the abuse began with relatively innocuous incidents like her abuser taking her wallet from her bag without asking. Eventually, the abuse escalated to him taking away her birth control pills and verbally threatening her physical safety.
Extreme manipulation became normalized without Maskerine even realizing it: “I had no control over anything: who I saw, where I went, what I ate, what I wore, the money I made.” This control extended beyond their household, with “rules for being out in public.” At restaurants, she “was to make no eye contact, keeping my eyes only on him and my head down. He would order for us both, and he would always add a beer for himself.”
Over time, Maskerine became isolated from friends and family, and her abuser limited her phone use. “When I was with him, I hardly ever let thoughts of leaving enter my mind for fear that he’d somehow know what I’d been thinking and planning. I was totally consumed by fear then—paralyzed by it, more truthfully.”
Maskerine describes the psychological trauma that she developed such as hypervigilance, hearing every sound in the house from a window cracking open to smelling alcohol on her abuser’s breath before he entered a room. Hypervigilance is a form of protection for those experiencing domestic violence. “Knowing where he was, what his mood was like, helped me to predict what might come next, prepare for it, and know where we were in the steadily turning cycle.”
But freedom seemed to whisper to Maskerine. “The sound of safety / Travels on the wind,” she writes in a poem. Her life after escape became a quest for autonomy. “Healing for me didn’t mean the damage never existed. It meant that it no longer controlled every part of my life,” she says.
Maskerine leaves her abuser unnamed for the entirety of Beneath My Scars, but she emphasizes her son’s birth as what ultimately saved her, giving her the strength to leave and start a new life. With this strength found in motherhood, Maskerine began to rebuild: “Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.”
Why tell her story at all? “Shame dies when stories are told in safe places,” says Maskerine. “Part of healing is telling the truth about what happened to you.”
Her memoir is a stunning story of resilience, strength and healing. “Even in the worst situations, there is always hope,” she says. “Just like the wildflowers that bloom in unexpected places, between cracks on sidewalks and stone-covered paths, on rocky hillsides and burned forest floors, you can regain enough of yourself to start again.” 9781773861593
Sonja Pinto is a writer, photographer, printmaker and book reviewer. They reside on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples (Victoria, BC).
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