Facts-
- 1 in 4 women will be a victim of domestic violence
- 85% of domestic violence victims are women
- Women who are 20-24 years old are at the greatest risk of nonfatal intimate partner violence
- Most cases of domestic violence are never reported
If you have never been a victim of domestic violence, you're thinking "That's crazy, why doesn't she just leave?" That's actually a great question, although a bit insensitive to the women who are living with it every day. But unless you've been there, unless you have felt that flood of emotion and fear and anger and guilt and regret and shame, you couldn't possibly understand what it's like or how hard it is to just walk away. And that's why I'm writing this. I've been thinking a lot lately about my marriage (I'm still married but if you've read my introduction you will have seen that I have not been with my husband in nearly 2 years). I'd love to forget most of that shit ever happened, but it always comes back. And it's so random. Just these little flashbacks of the name-calling, the downgrading, demeaning slams, and worse, the violence. And it sucks, it really really really sucks. Thanks, PTSD, 'cause I totally want frequent reminders of how I barely escaped with my life.
The question I always come back to is, why? I mean, T and I were best friends since we were 13 years old. He was my right hand man, the first guy my dad ever let me be friends with. I mean, for years, every weekend was us and the other rednecks out on the backroads, hittin' up mud holes and drinking beer on top of "The Towers". And when I had a boyfriend and he had a girlfriend and they kept getting all pissed off because we spent more time with one another than with them. And yes, we fooled around once when I was nearly 17. T wanted to date me then, but I wasn't allowed to date and since my dad approved of our friendship, I desperately wanted to keep from screwing that up and turned him down. Part of it was because I felt like T felt weird, and didn't want to seem like a dick and not ask me out after our drunken... Intimacy. I found out a few years later then up until that night, he was a *whisper* V-I-R-G-I-N. I guess I probably would have known that if I hadn't been so intoxicated. Disclaimer: I do not, in any way, encourage or endorse under-age drinking. This is a story about my poor choices and I am not trying to romance the idea of an underage alcoholic. Lesson learned.
So anyway, he got his girlfriend pregnant in high school, and they got married. Their son was born 13 weeks early, spent 75 days in the hospital. When the baby was about 3 months old, T's wife left him. And he tried to kill himself. I found out and called him from Austin (where I was living at the time), and demanded that he come straight to where I was. I was in a relationship at the time, but I'd actually tried to break it off before and he refused to leave so I just kinda looked at him as more of a roommate that annoyed me and I had sex with. Yeah, I was young and just loved those unhealthy relationships. Again, lesson learned.
So he comes to Austin and within a couple of weeks we were madly in love (I'd been in love with this boy since I was 15, it had been a long time coming) and moved back to our hometown together. We partied, hard. I mean, he worked long hours doing seismic work but when he wasn't working (and sometimes when he was) we were in space together. It was a whirlwind of love and sex and drugs and romance and crazy stupid youth. And it was amazing, for the most part. I knew he had anger issues in the past, and I knew the reasons that his wife had left him, he was honest with me. But I also knew that those two were no good for each other from the start, they were high school sweethearts but even then it was rocky and temultuous and his friends begged him just like her friends begged her to just leave each other. And of course I thought, it won't be that way with me. We are more than just two people who care about each other. We are best friends, he has seen me at my worst and knows everything that I'm too ashamed to tell anyone else. I convinced myself (and it wasn't hard to do) that things would be different because we already had such a strong foundation, so much to build on that was already there. It was perfect.
He was dealing with custody issues with his son, and the entire time we were together, he was permitted to see his son less than a dozen times. I'm not sure if it was more because of me, or because of him, but either way, I held him through it all and did whatever I could to help ease and numb the pain of that loss. I was so nieve, thinking that the partying and the distractions would actually help. They didn't help, at all.
We had our "lovers spats" - I'd freak out and scream and yell because he would freak out and scream and yell and I had no fear - I was ten feet tall and bulletproof and I was hard headed and fiery tempered and I didn't give in. Neither did he. Then months passed and I realized "Oh God, I'm late." It was when I was pregnant that his true colors began to show. I don't know if it's because we stopped partying or if it's because he just didn't want another kid, but it all changed so quickly. I was less than thrilled- I wanted a kid but I didn't want one then. I had just turned 20 less than a month before we found out. It shouldn't have been a surprise, but it was.
When I was pregnant we moved closer to Houston. He quit his job while I was pregnant and working over an hour away, and was living off of unemployment. Yet somehow, this didn't bother me. After Ladybug was born, I was in heaven. This little girl was amazing, she was such a sweet mild tempered baby. But T, on the other hand, he was angry. All the time it seemed like. I could never do anything right, he would call me from work and yell and scream and tell me what a worthless whore I was. How I was useless, how I didn't deserve him or Ladybug. It just escalated, within a few months he would shove me down and get in my face, screaming, spitting as he yelled about how if I even thought about leaving him he would kill me and himself. That neither one of us deserved Ladybug so it didn't matter if we died. I remember we had let some friends stay with us after they ran into some financial issues. T got mad at me one day about who-knows-what, and my friends took their kid, and picked up Ladybug and took her outside (it was sweet, they knew how much I didn't want her to see that). He pulled me by my hair out of the apartment door, got our daughter to bring her back inside, and continued to shove me back into the corner, screaming, yelling, threatening.
He would slap me, shove me, get in my face and threaten me. And it happened often, far too often. I found myself screaming at Ladybug when she would start crying because I knew it was my fault. I knew that she just wanted us to stop and I couldn't make us stop, so I wanted to make her stop. I hated myself more and more, every day. For what I was letting myself go through, and worse, for what I was letting my daughter witness. And I was convinced that if I left, he would kill me. That if I kept his daughter from him, or if he thought that's what I wanted to do, that I would die. I left him 3 times over a 2 month period (it took me nearly 4 years of being with him to get up the nerve to leave). The first 2 times I came back, he found out I had (God, forgive me) fooled around with an old friend. T had been keeping Ladybug from me and it was too much to handle, I went off the deep end and did a lot of things I shouldn't have. Silly me, I was honest when I got back with T and told him everything that I had done. Of course, that only made the violence worse. He actually grabbed a pair of pliers, threatening to pull every tooth out of my "filthy mouth" unless I told him every detail of what this other guy and I had done together. He did this in front of his mother and his sister, holding us all hostage in my mother-in-laws house and taking everyone's phones. His poor mom had never seen this side of him, and she was so much more afraid than I was. I was quiet, and so calm, knowing that if his threats turned to reality, he would not live with the guilt and he would be dead soon after me. Silly girl.
After I finally left him for good, I decided that he and I could still be friends. I wanted to have a good relationship with him, afterall, we have a child together. And that will never change. And despite his faults, he is an amazing father and I could never keep Ladybug from him unless he deserved it. And as of now, he doesn't. One night, I was upset that I had been stood up, once again, by a guy that I was wanting to date. I drove back to our hometown from Houston (where I was supposed to have dinner with this other guy) and called T to ask if he would like to go have a few drinks and play some pool with me. So we went to this little bar in town and had a few drinks (I had a beer and 2 or 3 shots over 4 or so hours). As we walked out of the bar, I realized just how messed up I was. Now, at this point, I was a pretty heavy drinker. There was no possible way, without having been slipped something at the bar, that I could have been that drunk. No way in hell. I let him drive, and crawled into the front passenger seat and passed out.
When I woke up, it was late, after midnight (we had left the bar around 10 p.m.). We were not at his mom's house, where we were headed when I passed out. We were at our old high school hangout, "The Towers", back in the woods, miles away from the nearest house. I was in the backseat of my mom's Tahoe with him, laying down, my pants unbuttoned, and his hands down my pants. I freaked out!!! I jumped into the front seat, terrified that I couldn't remember anything, only to find that the keys were not in the ignition. Not once had we ever taken the keys out of the ignition at The Towers. There was no reason to. This pissed him off, bad. The next 3 and a half hours were spent with me being tossed around like a rag doll. At one point I had a knife to my throat. The entire time, him telling me that tonight, I would die. And he would take Ladybug and he would leave because I did not deserve her or him. That I was a whore, a dumb stripper bitch that never should have had this child, that he wishes he would have killed me when I was pregnant. Somehow, he calmed down enough to take me to his mother's house to pick up our daughter, to drop off my mom's vehicle at her house, and get our suburban and take me to Houston. His plan was to get a motel room (with the only money I had in my wallet) for a week so that my bruises would heal and nobody would have to know what he had done. He wanted to work things out. He said he would leave me and Ladybug at the hotel for a couple days so I could have some time to think and that he would come back so we could fix our marriage. Finally, somewhere in North Houston he stopped to go in and get a room. He sat down my cell phone and the keys in the seat, walked around to give me a hug and a kiss, and went towards the hotel. I slammed my door, rolled up the windows, locked the doors, and took off. He ran back up to the vehicle, jumped onto the hood and began attempting to punch out the driver's side window to stop me. I swung to the left then to the right, throwing him off of the vehicle. Of course, out of this whole night the only thing my daughter witnessed was Mommy "running over" Daddy with the suburban. This breaks my heart more than what he did to me. I hate that my daughter suffered for nearly 2 years with watching Mommy get beat and Daddy get mad and Mommy get mad. It makes me sick when I think about that. Really, really sick.
I filed a police report when I got back to town. This was after having to stop at a truck stop and ask a truck driver, beg, crying, for $10. "I know, I look like a crackhead, I look like a bum, but please, I was just abducted and beaten and I got away, but I live about 20 minutes away, my daughter is freaking out, I need to go to the hospital, I need to get to my mom so she can help me. I need to get to the police." I still have that truck driver's name and phone number put away, and one day I will get a thank you card, and I will send him $20 and a heartfelt thank you that he helped me. I know how it looked. I know that my hair was a mess and my clothes were ratty (T had ripped my shirt off me and broken the zipper on my pants, so all I had was some old clothes that happened to be in my vehicle that were dirty and torn and to be taken to the dump.) I know how that looked, and I thank God that he gave me the benefit of the doubt that the money was for gas to get to help, not for drugs. I may not have done that back then, the way it looked. I don't judge people like that anymore. Never, ever again.
I dropped the charges against T. I dropped them because he was already on Felony probation, and I didn't want him in prison. I didn't want to be financially responsible for raising this little girl. I didn't want him to sit in a cell with a bed and 3 hot meals and not have to do his part. Looking back, that was probably just an excuse. But, that's how it goes. I did get a protective order, and exactly one month later I met this amazing man, Mark. And that night, I cried and I told him everything. What a small world - he knew T, he was best friends with T's ex-wife, and knew more about that than I did. He hugged me and told me that I could take my time, he understood why I was so cautious, and he waited over a month for me to agree to be with him. He would drive 30 minutes one way to pick me and Ladybug up, to bring us to his house, just to hang out and watch t.v. so I didn't have to sit at home alone and scared. And we've been together ever since.
This is just my story. There are so many other aspects of domestic violence. Up until I got with Mark, I did not know that a relationship didn't have to be screaming and yelling when you were mad. I did not know that there were men who, when they were mad, would still talk to me, not scream at me. I did not know that he wouldn't call me names and put me down and say everything he could just to rip my poor heart out. And I thank God every single day that I found a man that wasn't hurtful or hateful. I thank god that I found someone who would love me, and not hate me and not hurt me. But I know that not everyone is lucky enough to be able to get away from those types of relationships. And I realize that even though it sounds crazy to someone who has never been there, it is hard to leave. It is hard to admit that what's happening is not okay, and that it's not likely to change. And that's why I'm writing this series. I will over the next week (or two?) give you every aspect of this hurt and pain that I can give you. And I hope that someone, somewhere, will be helped or given hope by what I have to say.
