I fell in love with and married a man eight years my senior. I looked
up to him tremendously. He was extremely intelligent and he valued my
intelligence. In the beginning, I stayed with him because he was romantic
and funny, and we could talk about Plato for hours. We were married
for 18 years.
But he wasn’t always romantic and funny. He’d get upset
over things like my liking peas. I wasn’t allowed to read fiction
or to write poetry. No issue was too small for him to carp on for hours
or days. It only ended if I cried or agreed I was wrong to like peas
when carrots were so superior.
Sometimes he would throw a blanket over me very tightly and hit me,
creating thigh-sized bruises. He would tell me he was joking and to
imagine what would happen if he really wanted to hurt me. He’d
been in the service and talked about murdering people, including those
who had crossed him. He threatened to burn down the house with my daughter
and me inside. I stayed because I thought he’d kill us if we left.
I worked in a psychiatric setting as a nurse and would tell abused
women, “You don’t deserve this.” But I didn’t
realize what was happening to me was domestic violence until my closest
friend pointed out that her husband didn’t spend hours dwelling
on her faults. Sometimes I’d be a space cadet at work, asleep
on my feet, because my husband would yell at me all night for several
nights in a row. Sometimes when he was raging, I’d stay off work
altogether, get my daughter to a safe place and get myself calm enough
to return to a stressful job.
Two events triggered my leaving my husband. I’d become very close
to a woman who hanged herself when she was discharged back home to her
abusive husband. Secondly, another woman’s husband set her on
fire. Through them, I could see my future. I decided to leave.
My ex-husband used to tell me, “If you leave me, wait and when
you least suspect it I will show up at your doorstep and kill you.”
It’s taken me years not to feel terrorized when the doorbell rings.
Sometimes I still feel afraid. But my story has a happy ending. A year
and a half after I left him, I met someone else. We’re married
and are living happily ever after, with lots of tolerance for each other.
61 year old
German, Welsh,
Native American female
Kaiser Permanente
Registered Nurse
