I have a story to tell.

I have a story to tell.  It is not a pretty story and I do not know if it ends well, but it has to be told and it is pooling up and spilling over the edges onto this page.

I’ve been fighting this.  The reason it’s been hard to talk about it is rooted in my hard-wired WASP conflict avoidance.  There are certain things you just don’t talk about.  Money.  Sickness.  Divorce.  Failure of any kind.  Abuse.

Abuse does not exist, because it is proof of something acrid and terrible about you.  You failed.  You are prey.  To be prey, one must be stupid or weak or from a very bad family, or all of the above, but what is CERTAIN is that something is very bad and very wrong and it is because of YOU.  If you were more self-sufficient, stronger, smarter, or would have tried harder, none of this would have happened.

And yet there I was.  Nursing my 4-month old twins on a couch in a department store bathroom, whispering desperately into my secret cell phone that I kept hidden in a shoe in the closet.  This particular call was with an abuse hotline counselor who was referring me to a local shelter intake location.  It was ultimately a hotel, but I will save that part for another day.  You husband must not know that you are planning to leave. 

He hardly ever let me out of his sight these days so if he left the house this was a common scene: grabbing the phone and packing the diapers and rushing the girls to the car.  Calling the attorney.  Calling my family who lived out of state.  Calling a listing for a rental that was inevitably unavailable to me because I couldn’t explain my situation.  At first I would hide in the bedroom or the bathroom but now I would go to public places because he always seemed to know the conversations I had in the house.   I used to drive around while the babies napped but now my car wasn’t safe anymore because he inexplicably now knew what I’d been talking about in my car.  I would go somewhere new every time, usually a park so the babies could spread out on a blanket. Today it was too hot for the park so we went to the mall where there was air conditioning and I could feed my babies.

I was sure he had followed me and would see the phone or overhear my conversation.  So there I sat, hiding in a public bathroom, breastfeeding my two babies in tandem (which was in itself a challenge), trying to organize myself to make a plan to escape.   The attorney said we would need to have the divorce papers ready to file the same day I left, because if not my husband would make good on his threat to call the police to report that I had kidnapped the babies if I tried to leave him (he eventually did do this…there is so much more on the police, DCFS and any means he could find to harass us, but that is for another day).

We met three years prior, and after an odd first date, I decided to give him a second chance and he swept me off my feet.  He was handsome, witty, charming and, by appearances, successful. He was tall and muscular with dark hair and a dazzling smile and piercing blue eyes.  He was a successful sales executive, and had survived cancer, he told me, and did this all while caring for his three children who he had primary custody of and had, he told me, saved from their drug-addled mother who abused and abandoned them. He pursued me with dogged determination and brought flowers and took me on trips to the Bacara and California wine country.  He was smart.  He readily quoted poetry I’d loved in college.  He caught literary references and remembered everything I’d long since purged from my memory about Greek and Roman mythology. When we were first dating, people would tell us we looked like Barbie and Ken.  He seemed sweetly disorganized but well-intentioned.

And then, sometimes things seemed off.  A detail in a story didn’t make sense.  His children didn’t seem to remember some of the horrific abuse their mother had inflicted until prompted by him.  He was not where he said he would be.  The mail was missing.  He had an answer for everything.  He always had an explanation, and wasn’t I probably overreacting?  Yes, I was probably overthinking it.  It was hard to trust after being in failed relationships in the past.  I was the runaway bride.  As he told me, “neither one of us is a relationship expert.”  I did not have any hard evidence anything was wrong.  Just a gut feeling that occasionally went screaming, frantic and naked down the hallway of my mind at night.

It slowly built.  If he would have punched me in the face that would have been obvious.  Instead it was like the old saying–throw a frog in boiling water and it will jump out, but if you slowly turn up the heat it will cook.

Find a place and move when he’s travelling for work.  Whatever you do, he must not know you’re planning to leave him. 

When I went home from the mall that day, I would make dinner for the children (there were 6 now in the house) and again be afraid to fall sleep that night.  I would keep my three girls in the bedroom so I knew they were safe.

The falcon cannot see the falconeer.

I had a law degree and when I met him had been self-sufficient with savings and a college account for my older daughter who at the time this was taking place was 4.  Now, at home from work with my babies, I had no access to funds or even information about how much money he made.  The tax returns were mysteriously not able to be filed.  He would take care of it.  Something was happening with the taxes but I did not know what it was.  I found a document from the IRS referencing a tax lien from several years prior, shoved into his T-shirt drawer.   It was a mistake, he explained.  Something from his prior divorce that had been resolved.  It did not make sense.  We had been married for a little more than one year and I had newborn twins.  I realized that in a few months, the credit cards that I had always paid off in full every month would be maxed out completely and I would finally have no way to pay for diapers –or get a hotel room if I had to flee–without asking him for money.

I have a story to tell.  I still do not know how it ends.

I am slowly crawling to shore after the shipwreck of this marriage and the abuse that he still works to inflict upon us from afar daily. The reason I’ve been able to survive is a combination of a genetic pioneer heartiness and my stubborn grit.  It is the power of love for your children and the grace of good luck.  Without the fortune of winning the biological lottery and being born into my family of origin, I would be penniless and homeless.  Without my family and friends I would be dead.

It hurts every day but I feel ready to start to stretch toward the light.  My wings are starting to dry after this storm.

I have a story to tell and I do not know how it ends but I am not going to be afraid anymore.