I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.
Bob Seger, Against the Wind
On August 26th, two years ago, my daughter started first grade – her first onsite school year – and I had to report for virtual court to see if x had done any of the things the judge had required so he could start supervised visits with V.
Visits had been suspended in early June and we went all summer with no visitation. All x had to do was show proof of enrollment in a 52 week anger management and then he would get professionally supervised visits on both weekend days, three weekends a month.
We didn’t hear a peep from him all summer.
It was a very tentative kind of peace. I still only made real plans on my one weekend a month just in case. Visits could resume anytime.
But they didn’t.
It was the calmest summer I had had in a decade. V started to settle into a more level demeanor. I started to see a healthy baseline for her for the first time ever. She only asked about x two times all summer.
I went to court that morning reminding myself that this reprieve was a gift that I never expected to receive and that whatever was next, I needed to remember what we were given.
But x no showed court. (He did show up five days later to child support court to argue about how much he shouldn’t pay, though, further exemplifying what matters most to him).
Two years ago today, our custody case was closed with zero visitation to x. The judge ruled that he could not even file for visitation until he started the anger management process and finished at least four sessions.
As far as I know, he’s never even enrolled.
Two years ago I was set free from family court and from the madness of sending a child into covert abuse several times a week.
I thought I would be floating – and I guess technically I was – but it was an odd kind of floating. I remember describing it as feeling like I was in one of those big plastic bubbles that kids climb into to roll around in a pool at local fairs. I could see the world, I was in it, but I also wasn’t. I did not know how to move in this new world.
There was this layer between me and everything else.
That layer was grief.
I had been grieving, actively and over so many things, since years before I even left the relationship, but I was so busy trying to keep my daughter safe and help her through the effects of covert abuse that true grief had been buried so deep inside me that I didn’t even recognize it anymore.
I also had not yet even come close to grieving the gross unfairness of the court process that had subjected both V and I to those years of post-separation abuse.
I could not afford to grieve in those first years out, showing up for fourteen hearings, fielding so many cruel and full-of-lies messages, fixing all the messes he intentionally made.
I was paddling. I was barely staying afloat. Grief was a luxury I could not afford or we may have never ever made it to shore.
Two years today without a court date.
730 days free of that madness.
814 days with no visitation.
I think I stopped being utterly exhausted all the time about six months ago. Less than 200 days ago.
I fully realized it one day a week ago while messaging a group of friends about some random movies. I realized I don’t crash five minutes into a movie with V anymore. It’s normal now for me to outlast her again on Friday nights.
When I was set free, I crashed. So hard.
And I wasn’t ready for that.
I wanted at least a brief period of elation but instead, there was palpable relief and then, almost immediately, the (much needed by my whole being) knockdown of not fighting anymore and my body starting to truly try to recover.
Two years ago today, I became an actual bona fide single mom with 100% custody. Which is hard. And exhausting. I don’t have free time unless I work to make it happen.
Easier, by far, than parenting with an abuser, but still a lot.
So much harder when I was bone tired from grief and the sadness of this life I didn’t want for us.
The structure that had become my life – that had constituted every waking moment – disappeared like a sand castle at high tide and I suddenly had nothing to hold me in, nothing for me to push against, nothing but a free life I was too afraid to ever count on getting.
My muscles were so used to pushing at that point that sometimes it seemed I was floating in outer space and the number of directions I could go felt endless.
I’ve only had one message from x in these two years.
He sent a message, on V’s birthday, four months after he lost all custody, telling me to wish her a happy birthday for him and tell her how much he misses her and that he thinks of her every day.
I didn’t even open it and read it for six months. The subject line of Happy Birthday was enough for me to understand.
I couldn’t tell her those things. He could see her. He is making a choice not to, day in and day out. What a mindfuck it would be for me to tell her how much he loves and misses her after he hadn’t seen her for six months. The whole point was to not fuck her mind up.
I stopped being a surrogate gaslighter for him four years ago. I wasn’t ever going to be tricked into doing his dirty work again.
I am grateful every day to the judge that heard that last filing. So grateful.
There’s not a day that passes that I am not aware of how different our lives would be had it gone differently.
But I am also still sad.
V had the hardest time this summer around Father’s Day. She misses her dad. She does what all of us who have deeply loved abusers do – she remembers the fun times and romanticizes what it would mean to have him back in her life.
When I asked her what she missed, she said the toys he never gave back to her and going to the movies.
She wants a daddy but can only conjure x when she thinks of daddy.
Oh honey, mama knows how that feels to look at x and overlay all the things you want him to be. To try to convince yourself that he can be those things if all the stars align just right. I truly know.
About six months ago, V asked what would happen if we ran into x. I let her know that she could say hi to him and talk to him if she wanted but asked her if she knew that she couldn’t go with him no matter what he said and she said yes. I asked her if she knew why and she nodded her head and then pulled her arm back and fake punched the air.
When that conversation happened with her therapist, I got called into the session because, it turns out, she wasn’t just worried about if she did want to talk to him but was worried about what would happen if she didn’t want to talk to him.
I felt so dumb.
I had simply imagined a scenario where she was worried about if I would let her talk to him.
But she’s worried that she’ll be scared but will be expected to talk to him, anyway.
Of course.
So we have a safe word now for if we run into him and she doesn’t want to see or talk to him and I will usher her away and be the bad guy and all will be well in our world. She will not have to figure out how to get away all on her own.
We are scared. Not just me.
I still avoid certain places. I still look all around the grocery store as I stand in line so I’m not caught off guard.
I still have nightmares.
I had one a couple of weekends ago where I woke up – in my dream – and x was spooning me, holding me tight and not letting me slide out of the bed and I was doing mental gymnastics to figure out how I could get loose and get far far away. I woke up for real and was short of breath.
That same night, I had a dream where he filed something with the court giving a very specific example of me hurting V and said because of that he should only pay half of what he’s paying for child support.
I am still scared.
I am still waiting for the other shoe – or, I guess, the tenth or so shoe – to drop.
I’m also not just waiting for shoes to drop – I am living and learning how to settle into this life fully and heal more – but something few people understand is how we are forever changed when we’ve been through this kind of abuse.
We don’t talk about this with anyone but our most trusted people.
Most people don’t want to hear this. We are supposed to be over it already by the time we are out as long as I have been, especially if we are free.
We can easily have guilt and shame about not being over it. There is an expectation that we get through this healing stuff and then we don’t have these fears anymore.
Lots of us start this healing process believing we will somehow magically revert back to the person who wasn’t scared of the abuser’s next move and who isn’t disillusioned and cautious.
But how can you be when you have had someone target you so narrowly? When they will hurt your (their!) child to hurt you. When they will say anything about you to anyone just to ruin your supports. When they contact your family and convince them you are lying. When you are still paying off the debt you accrued to protect you and your child.
When someone does so much to try to destroy you, you can never fully escape the fear that if you aren’t careful, they will be right back in your face and this time it will hurt more.
The stakes are too high but, also, the damage done is very deep.
After two years of peace, I can’t imagine being suddenly thrown back into the life I had before freedom.
I don’t know if I can even get my muscles to push that much anymore. They’re tired. And they’ve remembered what it feels like to relax. They like this feeling.
My child misses a father she doesn’t have. She loves him. But she also fears him.
Being free still comes with the cellular level memories of what it was to be not free.
This morning, I had my coffee in the Toni Morrison mug I first used on freedom day 2021. To remind myself of that feeling when you are so scared and so hopeful and then the world shifts in a way you were too scared to hope for… to remind myself that sometimes things go as right as they can when the situation is already just so wrong. To remind myself that even when you are scared (maybe especially when you are scared), dreaming is still possible. Still necessary.
Tonight I will do what I did on 8/26/21 and then again last year: I will pop open one of those adorably small champagne bottles, after V has gone to sleep, and I will toast to the judge who read what I wrote and knew it was true, who heard x speak and could hear the lies, who made consequences for behavior and showed that, for x, it was never about love or parenting.
I will toast to my child who was spared at least these two years of continued trauma. Who has a chance for a life anchored to the ground of truth. Who has the freedom to decide if she wants to say hi to him or not.
I will toast to the women I know (and the ones I don’t) who don’t yet have the luxury of this kind of grief. To the children who don’t yet have the choice my child has.
I will also toast to the woman I was for more than forty years – the one who believed in the inherent goodness of people so much that she couldn’t even see what x was until she was standing far enough away from him – until the black eyes of hate were no longer disguised. Who couldn’t even fathom the truth of him and tried so hard to avoid that truth.
Even freedom can be laced with grief if it’s a freedom you shouldn’t ever need.
The person I was before x – the woman I was in those first years with him – did not know what it was like to have a personal terrorist.
I can’t be that woman anymore. I wish I could.
Grief over the life you thought you had is a slow drip with erratic bursts of pain. Especially as you see it play out in your own child as she grows and runs up against the loss she will feel over and over in her life.
Even as you cultivate joy and fun and laughter. Even as you make all new stories.
This free life is one I can’t afford to lose.
Laced with grief or not, it is a better life, by far.
Life After Emotional Abuse 