Second. Diary. Ever.
Nearly three years after the police removed my husband from our home and I filed for divorce, day before yesterday I received the final ruling in the mail. If it weren't on official paper with a county seal, I'd think it a cruel and tasteless joke. Because the judge believed the lies my husband and his large family told about me, I must move from the town where I "went home to mother," though she's been dead since '98, and return to a provincial coastal village where my husband's family's lobster fishing version of the Sopranos hold considerable personal, economic and political sway, and, since I am practically a pariah there, all my friends will be virtual.
[Update: this is me begging for recs.] Will you help me keep this up long enough the snoozier among us weigh in? Thank you.
Giving a thumbnail sketch of a three year battle ought to be left to summarizers, not extrapolators like myself, but I think I'm going to have to write a book about my experience and will need a shortened version so I've deemed you gentle readers at DailyKos and
MLW a proving ground.
I live in Maine where our intimate partner homicide rate is higher than the New England and Northeast average, and nearly all female murder victims die at the hands--or more usually the gun muzzle--of a husband or boyfriend. The state has recognized these embarrassing facts and convened committees to study them. Like the rest of the country, the statistics continue to prove that the committees have effected too little change.
My own tale begins with my congenital desire to talk things out combined with my choice of a taciturn, introverted husband who had none of the interpersonal tools he might have needed to resist or deflect my inexorable chat. Opposites attract and then drive each other totally crazy, right? This seemed an almost amusing--at least for me--state of affairs until I became pregnant with our first and only child. The statistics are hazy, but a surprisingly high number of women receive their first threats and violence while pregnant. Around 29 weeks, my doctor advised me to leave my work as a high school dance and English teacher and go home for couch rest because I had started having contractions and she couldn't tell whether we should worry about them or not. Since I was 40, we decided to err on the safe side.
Ironically, as soon as I started to hang around at home, my husband became belligerent and I felt less safe every day. He is a successful lobsterman who has access to some of the best ocean bottom in the world, but it was February, his slowest season. He came to hate seeing me reading on the couch every day and made it clear that despite the doctor's advice, I should be cleaning the house or working or simply out of his sight.
By the time our son was born, we had reached a silent stalemate. With silence not being my strong point, I felt an enormous amount of stress above and beyond that of labor, delivery and early new motherhood. When the baby was six weeks and one day old, I overheard my husband make a homophobic remark about my father's partner, a lovely man who's part grandmother, part uncle to me, and I objected, saying it was the meanest thing I'd ever heard him say, then took the baby into our bedroom to cool off. My husband got off the phone immediately and barged into our room. By his velocity and fury I assumed he was going to attack me, so I started lay our infant on a pillow next to me in an attempt to keep him safe. My husband pushed him out of my arms, but fortunately he was already mostly on the pillow so landed safely where he lay like a fawn in the grass.
My husband, six feet two inches and 250 pounds, a fitter Tony Soprano, took me by the throat with both hands and through clenched teeth said, "If you ever talk to me like that again, you'll be on the outside looking in." I grabbed his hands and, because he was apparently not actually killing me, only threatening to, I was able to get my fingers between his thumbs and my neck where they stayed for several moments while I repeated, as calmly as I could, "We have a problem. If you think this is the way to communicate your anger to me, we have a huge problem." I did not resist, did not react, only repeated this mantra until he let go and lunged for the baby. He refused to give him to me for some time afterwards and when I asked him to give him to me, he repeated what would become his mantra, that I could go and that he and the baby would be fine. I did not go, but from that moment on whenever I raised any objection to anything, from the guns leaning in the corner of the mudroom that he had promised to store in a safe, to his refusal to take the baby for as little as an hour, so I had to hire a baby sitter in order to attend a single yoga class per week, he would repeat, "If you don't like it, go, Eli and I will be fine."
Fast forward a year or so. I had just attempted another silent truce, only speaking when spoken to, unless discussing a meal, while the baby endured a four month bout of postnasal drip and a nighttime cough which my husband could not hear because of a serious hearing deficit thanks to decades of hunting ducks and running huge loud fishing vessels. Doctors had come up clueless and I was more exhausted than I have ever been in my life. Coupled with my husband's restless leg syndrome and the need to stay up long enough to pump my breasts so my husband could give the baby a bottle before bed, I'd had 13 hours of sleep in nine days. I had begun to hallucinate from sleep deprivation and even though it was my husband's quietest season, I could get no respite from him. When I asked him for help he would say, "You're the one who wanted a kid, you take care of it."
Unaware at the time that this behavior was lifted chapter and verse from the Abusers' Handbook, I assumed I had no option but to tolerate it. I wish I'd thought of it at the time for some much needed perspective, but lately I've realized that the majority of female homo sapiens have been tolerating much worse for the last 70,000 years of human history and even today the number of women worldwide with any real autonomy pales next to those with essentially none.
Early one morning I broke my silence and asked for my husband's help dealing with some of the damaging factors in our marriage, he quickly tired of the conversation and picked me up in my bare feet and jammies and put my outside in the February air. As soon as he put me down I ran back inside and picked up the phone to call his parents, who live less than two miles from our house. My husband, assuming I was calling the police, got between me and the jack and unplugged the phone. I turned and ran out the door to my car where my husband followed and reached in to grab the keys, then tried to hold the door open and pull me out. I backed up slowly and finally got out of the drive.
His mother's response, when I arrived on her doorstep was, "We don't know what to do with him when he's like that either."
I filed a protection order and went to a friend's house that day, but never had the order served. My husband exhibited what I now understand was a manipulative display of pseudo remorse, and I came home. Unsurprisingly, nothing had changed and shortly thereafter I finally had to check myself into the local hospital to get three nights' sleep. Thanks to the wonder of anti-depressants and homeopathic sleep aids, I was able to endure another year at home, until once again my husband began his wintertime tirades.
There were other incidents and other protection orders, and a psych eval that showed my husband to be without empathy and "show schizoid tendencies," but I'm going to take my sister's advice and stop making my case before everyone's nodded off in their comfy computer chairs. Two years ago I moved to a little house 45 minutes away from my husband's and have maintained our child's primary residence. My husband has always had generous time with the boy, now four and a half, far more than the weekend visits that separated and divorced friends and acquaintances describe.
Today's news is that the judge, concurring with the Guardian ad Litem, who did not believe me because she was smitten with my husband and his giant Waltons-by-the-Sea-family, really more like the Coasta Nostra, has divided our child in half and given my husband the right to choose where our son attends school. This means that I must leave the town where I took refuge, nearer my friends and grad school, and move back to the Stepford-esque fishing community where my husband and his 50 immediate relatives hold sway in every corner.
Finally, here's my point. According to the judge's ruling, I never should have left. He writes that I "convinced [my]self that I was being abused" by reading the internet and that the choking incident never happened. My husband's family, who slandered me to the point where I quit my job to avoid embarrassing my school and students, convinced him that they are a "close knit, loving" group fully capable of helping a divorced father with 50% custody who works 90 hours a week for three quarters of the year raise a child. Why in the world would I have ever objected to such a scenario? It was everything I ever wanted in a family. Truly, the way the judge paints it, all my dreams had been realized. If my life bore even the slightest resemblance to their version, why the hell would I have wanted it to change? It defies logic.
Is this how we reduce family violence? Despite the risks to my life and limb, had I crystal ball and seen how the public safety and judicial system would fail me, I never, ever would have filed a protection order, nor would I have bothered with a divorce. I should have learned to enjoy a little recreational choking or perhaps stayed until I received an injury worthy of an ER visit and Polaroid. For our son, this cure will be as bad, possibly worse than the illness.