At the beginning of May of this year, I left my husband of 16 years. It was a catastrophic meltdown that finally did it. I put up with a lot of abuse from him over the years, and had left him before. So, why did I go back to him, if he had hurt me in the past? A lot of reasons. The first time, he told me that he was ill and basically preyed on my sympathy. The second, the reasons were more complex. I had been in a shelter and ran out of time to find a home - I am disabled and that makes finding affordable housing very difficult. I was sent to another shelter about 100 miles away, but my oldest child stayed in the county where I had been. He had gotten tangled up in the judicial system and I couldn't get back for one of his hearings. My husband was basically given custody. Between not being able to find an affordable home and him having my son (and me not having seen him in several months), it was a recipe for disaster.

I went back, and things seemed alright. I know it is difficult to understand if you've never been in this sort of situation, but I really wanted things to work out and to be okay. He had promised me that all the lies and deceit were behind us, that he'd never do that again. I wanted it to work so badly that even though I hesitated, I believed him.

It didn't take too long for him to fall back into old patterns. I did too. He started hiding the cordless phone (the only phone we had) and disconnecting the battery so that it wouldn't ring and I couldn't page it to find it. I wasn't allowed to leave the house, even to go to a small shop across the street, without him. He hid important documents and mail. He stole a check from my purse and wrote it out to the landlady. Of course, it bounced, but I didn't know the check had been written. He took one of my check refills and hid it. This would come back to haunt me.

When he went out one day, I went searching for the phone, and when I found it, the battery was disconnected. I reconnected it and called the bank. I was shocked when there was a check I didn't write that showed up on the automated account info. I was crying when he came home. I asked him if he wrote the check, and he denied it. Still crying, I asked if he was sure, please tell me the truth if you did. Still denied it, then accused me of being 'aggressive' and 'attacking' him (while I was kneeling at the side of the bed, crying). I went and looked in my box of extra checks, and found that one refill was missing. He told me it must have happened when I was moving back, that they'd probably fallen out of the box. It made sense, sort of. Again, I fooled myself.

He said he'd reported the missing checks to the police, and that they'd be coming by to handle the situation. Of course, this, too, was a lie. Every time the police had supposedly come, I was in the shower, in the bathroom, etc. I started to wonder why they never came when I was able to talk to them. I said I'd like to call them and talk to the officers. Naturally, he said he'd handle it. And the phone remained hidden.

Finally, I got my hands on the phone again and had my internet banking access fixed. (I could have gone to the library and use that, but I had forgotten some of the account access info and was never able to get it fixed because of not being able to use the phone.) I logged on... and my stomach turned over when I saw the check he'd written. It was obvious that he had written it, but he still insisted that he didn't. Finally, I told him that while looking for the phone, I had come across the lease and while I didn't remember everything it said, I definitely remembered the landlady's name. At that point, his story changed.

Now, the check was written because he needed a bounced check or an eviction notice to get help with the rent from a local charity. Supposedly, the landlady knew about it. I asked why, if she knew, did she resubmit the check for payment. He claimed that it needed to have 2 insufficient funds stamps on it. I told him that they only stamp them once.

From that point, things went downhill fast. Within a week, things had reached a critical point. I couldn't take any more and told him he had been lying to me and stealing from me, and I now knew it. His response was awful. I don't even remember all of what was said. I just remember the 'big things'. The things that were so bad that they pretty much blot out everything surrounding them.

So, life has been pretty overwhelming for me lately. I never dreamed I'd be in this situation again, and I think, even now that a little time has passed, I'm still just a bit shellshocked. I'm trying to dig through all the things I'm feeling - they (counselors) have told me that what I feel is completely normal. It doesn't feel normal though.

Labels: abuse, domestic violence, survivor