Leaving an abusive relationship is like being reborn. I don't have a degree in anything. This is my own story of living in abusive relationships for years and finally having the guts to walk away. I am now happily married to a wonderful man. I invite other women who are right now living the life that I once lived to read my story and someday be writing a happy ending to their own lives.
I got married for the first time when I had just turned 23 years old. He was handsome, a hard worker and nice to everyone. A lot of people thought that I was really lucky to find someone like him. They never saw what happened at home. I was being abused all the time, physically and emotionally. But, when my 7 year marriage to my abusive first husband ended, I was devastated.
I was about 3 months pregnant with our second child, had just quit my job because he wanted me to stay home, I was sick with kidney problems and my last paycheck was in the checking account that he closed the day after he left. I had no money, the welfare system in our state was too slow and I was at my wit's end. Yet, I wanted that scumbag back in my life and pleaded to him to come back to us (me & our then 6 year old son).
I would've done anything at that time to get him back. No matter that he beat me up and gave me a black eye as my Christmas present one year, almost married someone else just before we got married, ran me over in the front yard of my mother's house while our first child watched or the fact that he drank a lot. I wanted him back and I tried up until after our second child was born. He just had had a child with his girlfriend but that wasn't stopping me. I was literally obsessed with getting him back in our lives.
Then, I met someone else. He seemed nice in the beginning but that changed really fast. Everyone that knew him warned me about him. I didn't listen. I got beat up for cooking the wrong thing, saying hello to his friends or other stupid things. Heck, I got beat up for shrimp once. I got the wrong ones and he didn't want them. Soon, I was pregnant from him. He changed a little bit but then it went back to the same old beating again.
I had an abnormal test result for one of the prenatal tests so I was sent in for a special ultrasound at an obstetrician that dealt with problem pregnancies because we were told that maybe the baby would be born with a defect like Down's syndrome. I got beat up for having a “retarded baby”. Then, one morning as I was taking him to work, he started hitting me as I drove. I dropped him off and called the police. They arrested him there and he was also fired from the job.
I got a temporary restraining order against him and since he lived a couple blocks away from me, somehow I got him banned from the little town that we lived in. He wasn't allowed into the town for about 3 weeks.
Just before I gave birth, he started being nice again and told me to call him when I had the baby. So, as stupid as I was, when I went into labor I called him up. He got there just before our daughter was born, perfectly normal. We somehow got back together again after she was born but he had to leave the state when she was about a month old. I ended up packing my things a few months later and moved too. I was moving back to my hometown so that wasn't a big deal. Just as before, everything was fine at first then it just turned downright nasty again.
The last time he beat me up was the night of my sister's graduation from high school. He beat me up for about 4 hours that night while I was driving. I ended up driving to the police department when he passed out in the car. When I walked in and asked for help, I knew that they could see I wasn't playing around. The officers took me into a room, told me to wait there until they came back and went outside to arrest him.
One of the officers that came back to do the report was a guy that I knew from high school so he was really upset. He told me that if he wasn't in uniform, my other half would be getting beaten up by him. I again went for a temporary restraining order against my then boyfriend. I got it for the entire household since we lived with my mother at the time. I was terrified that he was going to come back to kill me or try to do something to the kids or my family. I couldn't sleep at night. Every time I'd hear something outside, I'd jump up from bed. When I went somewhere, I didn't want to go alone.
