If you want to read my story from the beginning, click here.
Disclaimer: This post involves descriptions of domestic violence. I believe it is important to tell this part of my story to help readers understand why I was so concerned about my children’s safety once we separated and why I was so flabbergasted by the family court response to my allegations of abuse.
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.
But what about the men?!
Every. Single. Time. I post about women who have experienced compounding trauma by the legal system, whether it’s here or on a news piece, someone will ask BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MEN?!?
First, what about the men?! When I post about women’s experiences in court, nothing about that statement invalidates the male experience. It merely presents the perspective of a protective mother who has experienced gender bias in the court – a bias that has been confirmed by legal research carried out at the GW Family Violence Law Center.
Second, do you know who the biggest perpetrator of male violence is? OTHER MEN. 76% of violence committed against men is a result of men. So even when we talk about male victims, we need to also be talking about male perpetrators.
It’s not that we don’t believe that men experience abuse. It’s not that we don’t believe that women can be perpetrators. I personally have known many personality disordered women in my own life. It’s that this is a gendered problem with gendered consequences. That matters when we are having this conversation.
Here are the statistics:
Males perpetrate 95% of all serious domestic violence. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 95% of reported assaults on spouses or ex-spouses are committed by men against women. Eight in ten murderers who killed a family member were male. Males were 83% of spouse murderers and 75% of murderers who killed a boyfriend or girlfriend
Over 85% of the people who commit murder are men, and the majority of women who commit murder usually do so as a defense against men who have been battering them for years. Ninety percent of the women in jail for murder are incarcerated for killing male batterers.
In 88% of the sexual abuse claims that CPS substantiates or finds supporting evidence of, the perpetrator is male.
Of cases where men reported being victims of physical aggression by a female partner, “most of the affected men had been violent toward their partners themselves.”
And yet, even with these known statistics, women have a far harder time convincing the justice system – the family courts in particular- that they (and their children) are the victims. Men do not have the same problem with credibility – as substantiated by Meier’s research.
Inevitability, someone in the comments is going to say that the reason the statistics are so skewed is because men don’t report abuse. Ok. That is absolutely a conversation worth having. But it’s a conversation we should be having on its own, not as a counterpoint to the problem that protective mothers face in court.
I am the mother of two sons – two males who are abuse survivors. I absolutely want to have a conversation about our boys and our men. But I also want to lay responsibility for violence against women squarely at the feet of who is responsible – and that is men.
Additionally, I want our court system to acknowledge its bias against women’s claims of abuse. It is absolutely unhelpful when we want to talk about how women aren’t believed and someone butts in to ask about male victims. That isn’t the topic. That isn’t the problem being discussed. It’s women who are fighting this uphill battle against a system that purports to want to protect children – and that does everything except protect them. THAT is the problem.
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