Seven years ago today I woke up confused. And scared.

The night before was the turning point in my marriage, the moment at which I knew I could never go back to not knowing how immensely screwed up our relationship was. I was pretty sure X wanted me dead. And I was terrified what would happen if I tried to leave.

The escalation had started about a month earlier. We had a planned trip to California to see my mom and step-dad, with a stop at Legoland in San Diego first. I had done what I always did before trips: planned every detail, created lists for everyone, and spent the entire day packing all of us up for the trip. Because I was becoming more aware of X’s disordered behavior, I did try to get him to pack for himself. But it seemed futile. The trip was a chance to put all of the chaos and drama on hold, to be with our kids, and to perhaps have one final cohesive memory for everyone. It’s amazing the lies we tell ourselves to survive.

Our day had been like a roller coaster, like most of the days around that time. He seemed to hear me in counseling, and then he would get mad at me for checking my March Madness bracket and ignoring him. We would seem united at the parent teacher conference, and then he would come home and harass me and tell me he needed me to “hold him like a baby.” That night, I was loading the kids into the car to go to soccer practice, when X said that he wasn’t coming – not to soccer practice, not to California.

I should have let him walk away. Instead, I stood in front of his car door and begged him to come with us.

“Then have sex with me tonight,” he said. It always, always came back to sex.

I was taken aback. The conversations, the sexual requests, always confused me, seemingly disconnected from whatever we were talking about. I once again pleaded with him to come with us, to reconsider his desire to leave.

“Get out of my way or I’ll push you out of the way.” It was a rare direct threat, and he immediately caught himself saying it. This should have cued me in to recognizing that he knew exactly what he was doing. But it seemed so impossible that this was all deliberate, that he was in far more control than he pretended to be. Catching his mistake, he followed with, “You’re so afraid I’m going to chop you up, so here’s a real threat.”

I hadn’t ever been concerned about being chopped up by my husband – which is a sentence I never expected to have to write. But I certainly became concerned about it after the comment. And yet I still didn’t leave. X came with us to soccer and then came with us to California, one of the worst vacations of my life, in no small part due to the fact that my younger son got the Flu on Day 2, and we were all stuck together in a hotel room for 5 days and couldn’t go to my mom’s because my step-dad had a heart attack. #storyOfMyLife

The night we returned from vacation, I was helping out with a fundraiser for my college, something I was paid to help with. X got angry that I wasn’t paying attention to him. I kept explaining I had to do my job as though I needed to explain why I didn’t deserve the treatment he was giving me. At 4 am the next morning, he woke me up to tell me that he was leaving me.

“Ok,” I said.

He woke me back up. “I want you to understand what I mean. I’m leaving you.”

What X wanted me to do, I believe, is panic. He wanted me to beg him to stay, just as I had a hundred other times. And he woke me up in the middle of the night to create the most extreme conditions possible. This was a torture technique. But I wasn’t interested in his games anymore. I let him leave, believing we were all safer if he abandoned us. By the time I woke up, I was getting texts from him to hire a babysitter to come meet him at a hotel. Instead, I called our marriage counselor, who by now was pretty annoyed with this whole situation. She didn’t understand why I didn’t just leave. That day would involve a car chase around the city, ending with me and the kids at a women’s shelter, being given a burner phone, and staying at a hotel to protect us.

And yet, IT STILL WAS NOT ENOUGH FOR ME TO LEAVE.

By this point, my support system was nearly non-existent. My parents were investors in our startup company, and I felt a responsibility to everyone to try to make this work. But it felt like it was becoming harder and harder to do so while keeping everyone safe.

X ended up coming home.

But then something did happen, something I could no longer deny. I knew I was afraid of X, but I was having a hard time articulating it. I was going to therapy twice a week, seeing a psychiatrist every other week, attending marriage counseling. My own counselor told me that the police wouldn’t help me. My psychiatrist wanted me to file a police report. The marriage counselor, unbeknownst to me, had told my counselor that I needed a safety plan. But no one really told me what to do to protect myself. I knew very little about protection orders. And I wouldn’t have even known what to put in one. (It’s why I try to help women who are trying to figure out how to leave – I had no one to talk me through it.)

That night, April 30, 2016, I was getting the kids ready for bed, as I always did. They were putting on pajamas, and I was reading them a bed time story. X called me into one of the back bedrooms, where he was sitting in a rocking chair in the dark.

“We need to talk about our marriage,” he said.

I agreed. “Just let me finish putting the kids to bed.” My heart started to race. I knew we needed to talk, but the way he was sitting, the tone of his voice, sounded menacing. I was afraid. Just breathe, I told myself. Just breathe.

When the kids were in bed, I let him know that I was free. He said he needed a minute. I walked into our bedroom and used every anxiety calming tool I had. I knew that I needed to stay detached, unemotional, even if he would criticize me for it.

I heard him walking down the hallway. Deep breaths. He stopped at the door to our bedroom. In his hand was a two foot long rope that I had used to make my kids’ Santa bags a few years prior. He stared at me and slowly started to thread the rope through his fingers. He would pull it through and then start again.

I tried to stay calm. “Why do you have a rope in your hands?” I asked, trying to feign ignorance.

“Oh, no reason,” he said. He tossed the rope behind his head and walked toward the bed. “I’m going to sleep now.”

And that was it.

It’s been seven years, and I still feel like I need to explain to people why that was so terrifying. He didn’t make an actual threat. But I knew exactly what it meant. And yet, how would I get police protection for “he threaded a rope through his fingers and didn’t say anything.” He knew what he was doing. He knew it then. He knows it now.

Six days later, in the safety of our marriage counselor’s office, I told him I wanted a divorce.

He stood up and walked out.

I didn’t know that while it was the end of our marriage it was the start of five years trapped in a family court nightmare.