1998, A STORY OF ABUSE & REGRET

Photo: me, five months pregnant with my first child & reacting to something hurtful the husband did...

THEN:

1998, A Story of Abuse and Regret


In 1998, I experienced a breaking away. Actually, I suppose it was more like a rending away. I tore myself away from many of the values that I had based my life on. I tore myself away from so many of the things that I cherished, from my home, my idea of family, from my life, from myself, even from my god.

I left my husband of thirteen years, the father of my two young and innocent sons, aged ten and seven. I moved from South Carolina where we had enjoyed a lovely home with a deep garden tub, a nice yard, and many of the pleasures that I'd longed for all of my life. I moved in with my mommy and daddy and I slept, with my two kids, on my parents' pull out sofa bed. I missed my husband. I missed my home. It felt like self mutilation. The pain was deep. I hurt to the very core of my soul. It was the hardest thing I'd ever had to do or that I have done since. I hated myself for what I was doing to my family, but at the same time, I knew that it had to be done, and that I had to be the one to do it.

My husband had an addiction to alcohol. Over the years, that addiction had waxed and waned but overall it was worsening and I knew it. Things would sometimes get violent between us, but I made excuses for the violence, and I minimized what I could not excuse away. I blamed myself for "starting it" and I did start it because, deep down, I'd rather suffer the physical abuse than the mental and verbal abuse. I started the fights, and I made excuses for him afterward. I did this for several reasons, foremost because I was just as sick as he was, co-dependency is a very real, very sad thing. But religion also played a very big factor in my acceptance of the unacceptable. I had been taught many things by my fundamentalist Christian parents. Some of it I rejected, but the things I felt common sense and the bible backed up I supported with a tenaciousness that almost killed me. I believed in "soul mates" and thought that God Himself had put me in the marriage I had. I believed that divorce was wrong, a tool of the devil used to destroy families and to tear down values. I believed that faith could move mountains, that God could work miracles and change lives. I believed that God could save me, save my family, from alcoholism, from the vileness of a divorce. I believed that I should "put it all in God's hands" and that if I only "had the faith" He would repair my broken world and heal my sick husband. If He wasn't doing so, then surely it was my fault. I wouldn't "let go and let God". I did not have enough faith!

By 1998, I'd lived for years on memories. I fortified my heart by concentrating on how sweet my husband had once been, and I watched for signs that might prove that his sweetness was still there, lying dormant under all the anger and the pain. I'd learned to ration myself. I could feed on a tidbit of kindness for months. I liked being a wife and I loved my husband very much, but more than anything, I wanted to be a "good mother" and being a good mother meant fixing the family my children needed. I wanted to keep their family together. I didn't want my sons to have a "broken home". I didn't want to be a "single mother". It all sounded so nasty and so frightening that I did not want that for my sons. And I feared it, and because of that fear I made mistake after mistake. I forgave, and I prayed, and I berated myself for not having "enough faith." It was all my fault and I knew it!


By 1998, I knew about several infidelities and other various lies my husband had fed me for years. I knew about the woman of low standards (that would sleep with not only A married man but many married men.) I knew that she, whom we'd met when she'd married my husband's cousin, now fancied herself in love with my husband and moved into and out of his life as often as she could sweet talk or seduce her way under his skin. She left my husband's cousin in order to be on standby for my husband. I was extremely annoyed at her; she was a betrayer of the sisterhood. I would never have interfered in her marriage, hurt her heart, let alone damaged the family that her little boys belonged to and depended on. I was hurt by her unfaithfulness to the common good and the common female good. I was more than annoyed with my husband; he was a betrayer of our family, of my sons. He was helping this woman of low standards destroy the wife and sons he claimed to love; he was helping her destroy the family he had vowed before God and man to protect. He and she even started their own little sub family when she finally managed to get herself pregnant. I had told him that was exactly what she was after, in order to pull him into her life more, but he had not believed me. He said, "Right. She makes me wear TWO rubbers!" Then she told him she was having his baby. He said, "Maybe you were right. Maybe she was cutting holes in those rubbers, but now it's too late." Neither he nor I believed in abortion. She bragged to me that she would be able to give my husband the daughter I had never given him. She did not, but when her child was born a male she named it after my own sons. She gave the child both of my son's middle names. I had held out hope that the baby might belong to one of her other lovers, my husband's cousin even?! But, once arrived, the child looked more like my husband than my own sons did. My heart was shattered. I told my husband it was "spaghetti", so shredded was my very soul.

Looking back I know I should have left many years earlier than I did. I just kept believing in and waiting on that miracle that would save... everything. My faith, contrary to what I thought at the time, was just too strong. If I had my life to live over I would still meet and marry this man. I can't imagine a world without those two boys that knowing him gave me. But the entire time I was married to him I would be preparing to live on my own, raise my boys without him. Education would have been paramount. I would protect the hearts and lives of my original family, isolate them from him as much as possible, and I would leave the day I knew I was pregnant with my second son. That is what I would do differently if I could live my life over knowing what I now know... Educate more, leave with my boys asap, and be kinder to the people I meet along the way.

By 1998, I'd been through a lot physically as well. I'd been slapped until my jaw ached so much that I could eat nothing but mashed potatoes and pudding for two days. I'd been hit with beer bottles, car doors, house doors, and knocked flat by the front fender of my own car. I'd been pummeled in my kidneys until they were bruised for literally months. I'd spent hours cleaning up vile messes, piles of broken dishes, sentimental mementos, and my own art from pottery class, while holding my bruises and rubbing my sore muscles. I'd been through a frightening wreck when my drunken husband grabbed the steering wheel and yanked the car out of the lane I was driving in. I'd sat in shock as he, when the car stopped skidding all over the road, got out and busted the windshield with a lug wrench. I'd been dragged through a gravel parking lot when my hand got stuck in the door handle of the car. My drunken husband had ignored my cries for help and laughed when I pulled gravel out of my skin. I'd been choked until I blacked out. I'd had a gun held to my head and the trigger pulled. He thought it was very funny that I didn't know the gun wasn't loaded. He thought it was even funnier that I had urinated on myself. Amazingly, I'd never had to go to a doctor or the hospital and I'd rarely had any bruises or lacerations that anyone could see. I'd been through what I learned to think of as co-hell. My husband was in his own hell and I was in mine. We'd been through a lot but I realized too late that my boys, my beautiful and innocent little sons, had been through so much more! They were in the car when it skidded and slid and wound up totaled. The glass from the windshield had scattered over their heads. They listened as their mommy and daddy screamed, made foul accusations, and hit one another. My sons were the true sufferers, but I was in so much pain I didn't understand that. I had a big dose of the "beaten wife" mindset. I could fix this. Everything would go back to the way it had been before he started drinking. If I left I was giving up on my family, worse - giving up on God. If I left maybe he would kill me and my boys as one of my best friends and her baby had been killed by the man she left.

In 1998 it became apparent that staying was just as dangerous, maybe moreso. My husband tried to burn his home down, with his wife and children peacefully sleeping inside it. He came inside not long after dawn and woke me. He was still very intoxicated. He actually laughed when he told me that he'd tried to burn the home down. Because it was unthinkable, because he had laughed, I didn't believe him, so he proved it. He took me outside and showed me the ashes against our cedar deck. He showed me the black steaks left where the tongues of flames had licked up the side of the wood. If the wood had not been treated the entire home would have went up. My heart stopped beating and I couldn't breathe. All I could think of was that my children had been sleeping in that home when fire had tried to eat it down. When I regained my faculties, I told him that I was leaving, and I finally meant it. It was over. He chuckled and went inside and passed out. Yes, I considered putting the boys in the car and torching the place, but the spirit of my sons would not hear of it. Since they'd been born and made a mommy out of someone like me I'd wanted them to be proud of me, just half as proud of me as I was of them. I couldn't expect them to ever be proud of me if I killed their dad. From that moment on, the only time I slept was while he was at work and my sons were in school. It took me three weeks to arrange the move. Looking back, maybe I should have put the boys in the car and quietly left that very moment, but at least I went, and it afforded a measure of peace to my children to have their familiar beds and playthings after we moved out of my parents home. At last, we were safer than we had been in years.

I felt so much guilt for allowing my children to suffer through what they'd seen and heard, for failing to save them years earlier, for choosing such a man to be their father. All my life I'd given my mother great credit for the man she had picked out, so it naturally followed that I blamed myself for the un-fatherlyness of the man they called "Dad". That guilt almost crippled me emotionally. It took me years to understand that my husband was a very sick man. It took me years more to accept that I had been as sick as he was. I finally forgave him for losing control of his life, and when I did it opened the door for me to forgive myself for not taking action before my sons had been exposed to violence. It took years, but I was finally able to forgive us both for the injustice and pain we had spoon fed our kids, but forgiveness does not erase the past, and I will never stop wishing that I'd protected them as I now know God would have wanted me to do. I was an adult. I knew what I was in for when I stayed in that relationship, but they were helpless children. They were stuck. They were counting on their mother and father to see them safely through this sometimes frightening world, and we both let them down. How wonderful it would have been if the very first time he'd crossed the line I'd walked out and not returned unless and until he'd went through months of professional help! He might have actually found a way to heal himself, if I had known to demand it of him, if I had been strong enough to say, "Fix your problem or we're not coming back," and if I'd found the strength to follow through! It took me years to realize that there is a world of truth in the old adage, "God helps those who help themselves." I now understand that our loving Creator would no more want me to stay in such an unsafe environment than I would want either of my sons to endure it when they marry! If I had things to do over again I'd walk out the door the day I found out I was pregnant with my second son. I'd walk out with a smile on my face, and I'd never look back. It's one of only four changes I'm certain I'd make if I had my life to live over. I'd make sure I stayed better connected with my parents, sisters, and nieces and nephew. I'd refrain from being mean to that girl I insulted so greatly in high school. I'd work as hard on getting a formal education as I did on being an autodidact, and I'd rescue my sons from the violence as soon as I had my sons. I don't want to try to go through life without their smiles.

Twelve years later, I had to face the fact that a much beloved family member was trapped in the same sort of nightmare that I once lived inside. She is still in that marriage today. She also has two sons. I'm sure she's praying every night for the salvation of her family. She is probably berating herself for not having enough faith, for not putting her problems firmly in God's hands, for not praying hard enough, or often enough, or long enough. Maybe she's spending days fasting and praying. I'm sure she's remembering how wonderful he is when he's sober. She is probably feeding on every tidbit of kindness for months, and concentrating on how much God supports family, and how nature shows us that sons need fathers. Maybe she is thinking she starts those fights. She's counting on God to help her fix things. How, oh how, do I break the news to her that God is counting on HER to protect his daughter (herself) and his sons (her sons)? How do I tell her that if she doesn't find, doesn't somehow create, the strength to get out of danger and take her boys with her NOW that she will regret it the rest of her life? How do I make her understand that it will leave a black stain in her past and a heaviness in her heart that will never go away, not even after she finally manages to forgive herself? How do I tell her that she must rend her own heart out? How do I make her see that she must tear herself away from many of the things that she cherishes, from her home, her family, her life, herself, even from her god, or her idea of Him anyway? How do I tell her that God helps those who help themselves? How do I tell her that I understand how she feels, and that I love her to the ends of the earth and back? And when I tell her, will she listen? Will she understand? Will she let me help her? Will she take the action that I should have taken so many years earlier than 1989?