The Messy Details
So those few of you who are interested in all the messy details of what’s been happening in my home life and why I’m legally separating from Andrew, my husband of nineteen years: It’s a long, LONG story. Nearly as long as our marriage was, really…
The first five or six years of our marriage were good overall. Sure, we had our problems, but I’d say overall we were happy. Looking back, when we first got married I wasn’t emotionally ready for all the commitments that come with marriage-no, not in matters of fidelity, that was never an issue. There was no man in my bed before Andrew, and honestly I don’t think there’ll ever be one after him either. But I wasn’t really ready to give Andrew’s emotional needs as much consideration as my own, as well as make grown-up decisions about money and financial assets-I’d been living on my own for years, but I hadn’t done any planning for the future, just living from year to year and duty station to duty station.
It took a few years after our wedding for me to really grasp and incorporate the ideas of truly planning for the future, instead of having wishful and undefined goals that might never be realized, and having a Life-Partner, not just roommate, for the rest of my life. I know I hurt and disappointed him more than once back then, with crazy budget-wrecking impulse buys and with procrastinating on things that needed to be done until it was just too blasted late. But back then, Andrew was generally patient with me, accepting my flaws and forgiving my honest mistakes, and would even do silly things to make me laugh when I was stressing out. I still remember how he squeezed himself into my floral-print housedress once and paraded around in it, to jolt me out of the depressed stupor I’d been in after a really nasty argument with my parents.
Andrew would later claim he “treated me like a queen” in those early years; I don’t remember getting any royal treatment, but I do remember being treated as a wife and equal partner in most things-unless it was some home improvement project; he was firmly in charge of those, and I fell somewhere between junior partner and minion. But beyond the home improvement projects, there were times when it seemed like I just couldn’t do anything right; when Andrew just seemed on edge and angry no matter what I did to placate him, and all I could do was hunker down, say as little as possible and wait it out until he was in a good mood again.
In 1999 we bought what Andrew declared would be an excellent retirement home, over an hour’s drive away from the base; I wasn’t thrilled with the commute, which I’d be driving for seven years longer than Andrew would, but it was and still is a nice house with plenty of room out back for kids to run around in. When Andrew retired from the Navy in late 2000, we started trying to have a baby. We were both dead set against putting a baby in daycare, so we’d agreed even before getting married that we would wait to have children until one of us got out of the Navy to become a stay-at-home parent. And since Andrew would be retiring seven years before me and I’d seen what happened to my own mother, a stay-at-home mom who’d had to struggle financially and go on welfare when my dad left us-and I was adamant that would never, ever happen to me-we agreed that Andrew would become the stay-at-home parent until our child was old enough to go to school. When Andrew retired, it was time to start trying for parenthood. Again, I’ll admit that I didn’t try very hard at first, because I knew already that parenthood would change my life forever, and I didn’t feel ready for all the added responsibility of raising a child. But Andrew was eager for parenthood, so we tried, and less than two years later we had our daughter, Fiona.
It was while we were trying for a baby and while I was pregnant with Fiona that Andrew and I started really having marital problems. The capper came when we had an argument when I was 3-4 months pregnant that resulted in my sleeping on the couch in the basement-and the argument was over a TV show; one we weren’t even real fans of and just happened to be watching. No matter what fandom you’re in, no show-based argument should result in a spouse sleeping on the couch. When Andrew somewhat shamefacedly agreed the next day that he’d overreacted, we started going in for family counseling.
If I remember right, we went to six monthly sessions before Andrew declared that the counselor was prejudiced against him because she was female, and refused to go back for more. He said I could keep going on my own, and I believe I did go once, but without him along it seemed pointless. I’d privately decided that the underlying problem causing our woes was that now that Andrew was about to become a father, his subconscious was giving him expectations of how families should be and how parents should interact, and I wasn’t fitting his unconscious expectations of a wife and mother. But there was one thing the marriage counselor said that surprised us both: she said Andrew should see a counselor on his own, for depression.
Depression? That didn’t make sense to me at first; Andrew was angry and yelling at me a lot, but he wasn’t down in the dumps. But Andrew went to our family doctor with the counselor’s recommendation, and instead of seeing a psychiatrist for regular sessions, he was put on a medication that often helps people with mild bipolar disorder. (We found out later through conversations with his parents that his mother was actually diagnosed as moderately bipolar, had been diagnosed decades ago, but had never told Andrew about it. Possibly because he hadn’t spoken with them for several years before we got married and I encouraged him to mend fences with them.) Between the medication and the few lessons we did take home from the marriage counselor, we did get along better for a few years, particularly after Fiona was born and we just became too darn busy with all the changes and responsibilities of parenthood to think about anything else.
Birthing Fiona changed my emotional landscape as well as my body, but I still went back to work after six weeks, the Navy’s standard maternity leave period, while Andrew minded Fiona all day. Given my job’s frequent overtime requirements (overtime is -always- authorized when you’re in the Navy, it’s just not paid for because you’re on a monthly salary) and the insane length of the commute between Oak Harbor and the far side of Bellingham, I was gone up to 12 hours a weekday, so for the most part Andrew raised Fiona alone, with me seeing her just for an hour or so each evening. On the weekends I spent a lot more time with her, but if differences of opinion in how to raise her came up, I generally deferred to Andrew-I had to, really, since while I was at work he was the sole authority.
One thing I very definitely remember having a big difference of opinion on was Fiona’s potty training; his way seemed too harsh, making Fiona stay in the bathroom for up to an hour at a time, no matter how much she cried and begged to come out, until she, ah, performed to his expectations. I really wish now I’d worked harder to convince him to read all those online and magazine articles recommending the best way to potty-train and try that way instead; it might have saved all of us, particularly Fiona, a lot of grief over the years with her chronic encopresis.
But other than the harsh potty-training, overall Andrew was a wonderfully gentle and loving father to Fiona for those first four or five years. But he eventually stopped taking the medication for depression, because he decided that the medication’s side effects outweighed the benefits of taking it. But he didn’t say anything to me about taking himself off the medication-and to tell the truth, I was so preoccupied with worries about what he’d been diagnosed with the year after Fiona was born, Type II diabetes, that I actually forgot he’d ever been on any medication for depression. He was taking lots of pills every day anyway, for the diabetes.
When I retired from the Navy in January 2007, I went through a few temp jobs and a few months of unemployment before landing the Claims Analyst job at Sterling Health Plans. It was a very good civilian job for me, where people really appreciated my skills and aptitude for claims processing. But in retrospect, it was about that time that my home life started going downhill; not just a temporary slump like we’d had before but a gradual, permanent decline. Andrew started becoming outright abusive with his words; he called me “asshole” a lot, while claiming I was deliberately pushing his buttons to make him angry, even though most of the time I was trying hard to -not- get him angry at me.
At first I attributed his frequent harsh attitude to the chronic pain Andrew was in. He spent the latter half of 2006 and the first half of 2007 dealing with a fistula that finally required multiple surgeries to resolve so he could even sit down comfortably again. And beyond that, he had chronic joint and muscle pain that the Navy had basically ignored and he had learned to cover up and compensate for while on active duty. He’d gone to doctors about that constant pain, and the doctors had recommended specialists, but all he got out of trips to 4 or 5 different specialists was shoe inserts to support his arches-which did help, but not nearly enough. He was in enough pain every day that he couldn’t sleep through the night anymore, and he took his pain out on me… and I just took it, because I felt sorry for him and because he was still Fiona’s primary caregiver.
Then in mid-to-late 2008, Andrew’s overall mood changed again. He noticeably calmed down and became more mellow, but he also stopped being as involved with our daily lives as before. The most immediately obvious change was his involvement in Fiona’s schooling. For her kindergarten year, he not only walked her to and from the school down the street, but volunteered as a chaperone for field trips, baked treats for the entire class (the kids still remember the time he made enough pumpkin pies to feed everybody) and went to all the school assemblies and parent-teacher nights. But from first grade on, he stopped doing all that. It was understandable that he stopped walking her to and from school, because they closed down the elementary school down the street from us (the building was condemned due to poor maintenance) and Fiona was bused with all the other kids in the area to a new school on the other side of town. But he also stopped being involved with just about anything school-related; he didn’t even go to half the parent-teacher nights that were scheduled, leaving me to go on my own to find out how Fiona was doing in class and on the playground.
There were also plenty of nights that I came home from work to find out that Andrew had absolutely no interest in cooking dinner, and/or that none of the other household chores had been done. That if we were going to eat that night, have clean dishes to eat off of or have clean clothes to wear the next day, I’d have to take care of those chores after already putting in a full day at work. If I complained, Andrew either snarled at me about all the pain and physical misery he was in, or shamefacedly agreed he’d let things slide and promise to do better-and do better for just a couple of days before slacking off and spending most of his time on computer games again.
Then one day in January of 2009 I walked into the garage, looking for Andrew, to talk with him about some trivial thing… and found him hurriedly hiding a pipe in his pocket. But he couldn’t hide the foul odor in the air. When I asked him, he admitted it: Andrew had been smoking pot. He’d told me in the early days of our marriage that he’d smoke it back in high school, but given it up when he’d joined the Navy (their Zero Tolerance policy is strictly enforced.) I’d had no idea until that moment that he’d taken up the habit again.
Once I’d found out, later that same day when I thought I could talk calmly to him again, we had a painful confrontation over his marijuana use. I had already learned over the decades that marijuana isn’t entirely the ‘devil weed’ that my parents and teachers had said it was; there are plenty of doctors who will swear on their medical licenses that marijuana not only has medical uses, it’s more effective for treating glaucoma and the pain from some types of cancer, than any synthetic drug they’ve come up with so far. And there are certainly a lot worse drugs on the market; compared to some of them and their effects on human behavior, MJ is nearly tame in comparison. But that knowledge didn’t mean I wanted it in our household!
Andrew said he was using marijuana to relieve the pain from his back, hips and knees, bringing it down to a more tolerable level. I had already noticed he had been sleeping better at night for the last few months, sometimes even sleeping the whole night through… and I’d noticed how much more mellow his attitude towards me had been lately. Noticed and quite appreciated the difference, but not known the reason why… So I finally, reluctantly agreed he could keep using the drug, so long as he kept it in the garage and far, far away from Fiona.
It wasn’t until much later, after talking with the friend who’d inadvertently gotten him hooked on pot again, that I found out he’d been smoking it and hiding it from me since the fall of 2008… since the same time he’d started drifting away emotionally and slacking off on so many of his responsibilities.
It took me a long while to screw up my courage, but in January 2010 I finally confronted Andrew about the damage his weed-smoking habit was doing to our marriage and family. He protested A LOT, but finally had to admit to the differences in his behavior, and agreed to see our family doctor about a prescription, non-addictive painkiller he could take instead of smoking weed. And he did, but ultimately nothing came of it; Andrew is allergic to codeine and everything in the codeine drug family, and none of the other painkillers the doctor tried with him were effective enough to make a real difference in his chronic pain. He cut back on the weed for a short while, but never gave it up, and after a few months he was using it on a regular basis again… and when he ran out of his monthly supply, the days between running out and getting more from his supplier were unbearable for the rest of us.
I had a few years of good steady work at Sterling Health Plans, but after Obama started making huge changes to health insurance I lost my job there (though I lasted through nearly a year and a half of quarterly layoffs before my number came up; like I said, they really did appreciate my work.) 2011 was not a good year at all for me; I scrabbled with some horrid temp jobs and thoroughly depressing periods of unemployment in between the temp jobs, for almost an entire year before getting a more-or-less permanent job at Altair Advanced Industries (working as a Kelly temporary employee, but with the understanding that the job assignment would last up to a full year with an option for hiring permanently) as an inspector on the evening shift. I started working for Altair just before Christmas 2011, and started thinking things were finally looking up again. Thinking that now that I had a good steady job again, even though it was on the swing shift and I’d hardly get to see Fiona at all except on weekends, our family life would start to improve.
Three days after Christmas 2011, we got a visit from Child Protective Services. They’d been called in because we once put an antibiotic pill in Fiona’s lunch for her to take at lunchtime, to keep her on the dosage schedule when the school refused to administer the antibiotic without written consent form Fiona’s doctor (and we tried to get that written consent, but the doctor refused to give it for some bizarre reason.)
Andrew had a complete meltdown at the CPS visit and the accusation that we weren’t taking good care of Fiona. We’d already been on thin ice, because right after Thanksgiving I discovered that one of our credit cards had had the account frozen by the company for nonpayment of the bill. We had the money to pay it; he’d just not sent the money in, though I never found out whether he’d lost the bill in the household clutter or just forgotten to pay it. After the CPS visit and a LOT of yelling and screaming on his part, he declared that he’d had enough pain in his life and it was time to end it. Yes, he threatened to commit suicide. He was sitting on the toilet with the gun in his hand (thankfully not loaded yet; he always kept it unloaded and the ammo in a separate room) when I talked him into giving me the gun and not giving up on life yet, because Fiona and I needed him.
Shortly after that, because I’d complained (once, before shutting up about it) about the credit card being cut off for nonpayment, he handed over the responsibilities for our budget and bill paying to me, saying “You can deal with all this from now on, and may you choke on it.” Then he called his parents to blame them for his misery (he had been claiming for years that they’d mistreated him horribly as a child; he hadn’t talked to them for nearly a decade before we started dating, and had reconciled with them largely because I’d urged him to.) He declared our family utterly cut off from them, forbid them from ever trying to contact Fiona and “poison her the way you did me,” and forbid me from trying to contact them either. I was still scared enough by what had happened the day before that I obeyed, after sending the grandparents a goodbye email asking them to delete my email address from their account.
Things didn’t really improve after that. Andrew’s temper became more and more capricious. I tried to make him happy, but no matter what I personally did it wasn’t ever enough, not for more than a day or two at most. And all the while I was trying to make him happy, he was constantly wearing me down with his frequent insults and accusations that I was deliberately hurting him. It got to the point where I realized I felt a lot more tense and unhappy at home than I did at work-and this was with a civilian job, where people could and did get laid off without notice! That was the biggest change I’d had to deal with, after 20 years in the Navy; coming to terms with the uncertainty of employment, and knowing that basically every day had to be a high-producing day if I wanted to stay employed. But even feeling that job pressure, I still felt better about myself at work where people actually appreciated my efforts, than at home with Andrew’s near-constant verbal abuse.
Over 2012 I interacted with Andrew less and less, because so often I just didn’t know what I could say that wouldn’t result in more verbal abuse being heaped on me. In August he had a huge meltdown, declaring he felt suicidal again, and had me drive him to the hospital so he could get himself committed for psychiatric care. I was frantic, flailing to arrange child care for Fiona starting that very afternoon; thankfully my next-door neighbors like her and were willing to take her in while I went to work. We made quick arrangements for the care to continue, but while I was away at work Andrew came home from the hospital and grabbed Fiona back from the neighbors’ house. The hospital had refused to admit him for inpatient psychiatric care, instead giving him a list of psychiatrists in the area and other numbers that military veterans like him could call to seek help.
So I started pushing him to seek help, both mental and physical; a psychiatrist for his mental issues, and a massage therapist for the chronic pain he was in. I’d paid for him to see a massage therapist back in 2009, and he’d continued going for a few months, but eventually dropped it because our health insurance, Tricare, doesn’t cover either chiropractic or massage therapy. (Tricare is military health insurance, and speaking from many years of experience, the military’s general solution to people in pain is to give them Motrin and tell them to get back to work.) This time I told him I’d sign up for health insurance through work, starting at the first of next year; the group health insurance plan would be really expensive (over $550 each month), but well worth it if we could stop or at least greatly reduce the amount of pain he’s in all the time.
So in August 2012 Andrew started seeing a massage therapist on a regular basis, even though we’d be paying entirely out of pocket for it until could sign up for health insurance starting January 2013. He also had two sessions with a psychiatrist, the only one in the city who accepted Tricare insurance-though we found out later from the VA that he’s their very LAST recommendation for good psychiatrists in town. We also went to the VA to see about signing him up for VA healthcare and making a VA claim. But we were told that we made too much money to qualify for VA healthcare, and that getting a claim filed was an exceedingly lengthy process; that it usually takes YEARS to get a claim approved and start getting VA benefits, and that Andrew really should have filed his claim when he’d still retired from the Navy (yeah, he took that ‘should have’ about as well as you’d expect.)
I still tried to help him wherever he allowed me to help, but by Christmas break of 2012, it was becoming so obvious that I was withdrawing from Andrew emotionally that he even commented on it, saying lightly at one point while Fiona was next door, “You know, at some point you’re going to have to say something to me.” But I just stared at him, feeling helpless, unable to think of anything to say.
Two days later during that Christmas break Andrew had another meltdown, this time shouting that our marriage was over, he was done being hurt by me-yes, he still insisted I was deliberately hurting and antagonizing him-he was divorcing me emotionally, and from that point on we were just roommates and co-parents of Fiona. I was dismayed by the news, but not really surprised by it; mostly what I felt was just resignation.
For the next six weeks, we talked to each other only as much as needed to run the household and take care of Fiona. In January, now that we had Regence health insurance through my workplace, I brought home a long list of psychiatrists and psychologists in the area who take Regence BCBS insurance, and even helpfully marked the list with the local VA center’s top recommendations. Andrew tore the list up right in front of me and handed it back.
Then, a week before Valentine’s Day 2013, Andrew brought home a potted plant, a lovely batch of pink carnations. He claimed it had been Fiona’s idea to buy them, but I noticed the slightly hopeful look on his face. It was fairly obvious that he was hoping I’d just forgive and forget about his declaration that our marriage was over, and go back to being his loving wife.
In the past I’d always made a point of celebrating Valentine’s Day, even though Andrew generally scorned it as a “Hallmark holiday,” promoted solely for commercial reasons. I never made a huge deal out of it, usually just giving him chocolates and a suitably masculine-looking floral arrangement, but I still got him something, and he’d respond with some chocolates for me too. But that Valentine’s Day, because he had NOT SAID ANYTHING about actually reconciling with me and I’d just been hurt too many times before, I did nothing to mark the holiday at all. Two days later, another screaming meltdown ensued; this time he all but ordered me out of the house for good, threatening to divorce me and then sue me for alimony and child support.
Since I just couldn’t talk to him without him shouting at me, this time I wrote him a long letter. In the letter I told him how much I missed “us”; missed having a husband I could rely on for emotional support. And told him that our disintegrated relationship was harming our daughter’s emotional well-being, too. We’d already had to pull her out of Cascadia Elementary because of the incessant bullying and ostracism she’d been going through for years, and had signed her up with a child therapist while we enrolled her in another school for a fresh start. Fiona had enough troubles at school; she didn’t need to come home to a house full of tension, instead of affectionate parents who would provide her with a positive role model for her future relationships.
Then I told him in the letter that I couldn’t just turn our relationship back on like flipping a switch; there was just too much pain accumulated on both sides, his from all the time’s I’d hurt him without meaning to, and mine from all the times he’d retaliated with deliberate verbal abuse. That in order to rekindle our relationship, we’d need to see a marriage counselor and he’d need to start seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist for his own issues. I said that I’d printed another list of psychiatrists and psychologists out for him; all he had to do to signal his willingness to give “us” another try was ask for the list. I signed the letter “Daring to hope, Kimberly” and left it on his computer keyboard.
He never asked me for the list of psychiatrists. In fact, it took him nearly six weeks to acknowledge that he’d received the letter at all. But finally, nearly two months later, he agreed to start seeing a marriage counselor, available to us through my workplace’s Employee Assistance Program.
We had two sessions with EAP’s marriage counselor before Andrew declared he wasn’t going back to her, because she was “obviously prejudiced against men,” and said he’d see only a male marriage counselor or no one at all. So I started calling around, found a few male marriage counselors in the area (there aren’t many, but they do exist) and got us signed up for weekly sessions with him.
We lasted about a month with the male marriage counselor, whom Andrew really appreciated at first, but not for long; not when the sessions started making it clear to him how miserable I was, and started hinting about how much of our problems were being caused by him and his issues. In the middle of May, he finally blurted out that we were ganging up on him and hurting him, then got up and stormed out in the middle of the fourth session, driving off without me. Luckily the counselor’s secretary gave me a ride home that day, at no extra charge.
Two days later I came home from work at midnight to be confronted by Andrew claiming that he couldn’t breathe, he was dying of a heart attack, and I needed to rush him to the hospital ASAP. I did just that, and spent a miserable next few hours in the ER with him, first waiting with him to actually be seen by a doctor and then watching as the ER staff poked and prodded but found nothing really wrong with him. I finally went home without him at 3 a.m., because somebody had to be there for Fiona in the morning. I woke up in the morning to find out that instead of being admitted to the hospital proper, they’d given him a shot of something (an anti-anxiety medicine, as it turned out) and sent him on his way, to take a cab ride home.
The very next night it happened again; the same insistence that he couldn’t breathe and needed to be hospitalized. This time I didn’t break all the speed limits getting him to the hospital, and I left him there while still being admitted, to go back home to Fiona. Again, the next day I woke up to find out he’d taken a cab home from the hospital, after being diagnosed for the second time with no heart or lung problems, just another panic attack. (Yes, I’ve had a panic attack myself, decades ago in college, and I know that saying “just” a panic attack is dismissing their actual impact on people. But once you know what they are, an occurrence doesn’t merit going to an emergency room again.)
Memorial Day weekend was AWFUL. I was coming down with a cold from all the stress and lack of sleep, but still soldiering on, while Andrew claimed that I and the counselor had not just ganged up on him, but conspired in an actual attempt to kill him. He actually pointed right at me while bellowing “You tried to kill me!” He still insisted that all our problems were at least half my fault because I was abusing him-at least, that was the way he saw things. He finally admitted that part of it was just his perceptions, but still somehow made that my responsibility instead of his. Then he claimed that part of him actually still loved me and always would, but he’d never go back to that marriage counselor again and I’d have to find another one that he’d tolerate. Other than one dismal confrontation with him I just stayed away from him as much as I could, working on the garden outside all day even though I generally hate gardening.
Then the day after Memorial Day weekend, Andrew announced while I was getting ready for work that he’d had enough, and he’d be dead by the time I got home that night! So I took a sick day from work and took him to the hospital instead, to see once more about getting him committed for psychiatric care. Last August I’d just dropped him off there, at his insistence, because he didn’t want me hearing what he had to say to the ER staff. But this time I went in with him, and filled out an affidavit of all his declarations of intent to kill himself and his other erratic behavior, including how he’d broken the vacuum cleaner two months earlier-when it had clogged on him, he’d just picked it up and beat it against the floor until it shattered into pieces, right in front of me and Fiona. Based on that affidavit, the hospital agreed that he needed inpatient treatment for his mental health, so I went home to take care of Fiona again.
Later that night I got a phone call from the hospital. They’d told Andrew that there weren’t any available beds in the voluntarily-committed psych ward, so they’d have to send him to another hospital that had room, possibly as far south as Seattle. Andrew balked at that, stating that he’d do no such thing-and then, based on that affidavit and on his difficult behavior at the moment, they made it an INvoluntary commitment to a psych ward. Ironically, they then had room for him in the local Involuntarily Committed ward.
Andrew stayed in that psych ward for a week, with me visiting him every day but telling Fiona that her Papa was in the hospital because he was having trouble breathing again. And of course, he blamed me for his involuntary commitment, claiming that the affidavit was full of lies and I’d deliberately manipulated him to get him committed.
After a full week he was released from the psychiatric ward, now with a court order to get psychiatric help at a local counseling center. At least when he came home he praised me for how much of the housework and chores of his that I’d done while he’d been gone; he said he’d feared he’d come home to piles of laundry and every room in the house being filthy, but I’d even mopped the kitchen and living room floor before he came home. He went to the mandated weekly counseling sessions, though he told me nothing about what was being said in them or how they were progressing. But he did start restraining himself from heaping quite so much verbal abuse on me, though it didn’t stop entirely. And about a week before Labor Day, he surprised me by actually -hugging- me, which practically made me melt on the spot; it had been -years- since he’d given me a hug or shown any physical signs of affection. (I stopped counting sex as a sign of affection years ago, or even wanting sex anymore, because it was all about taking care of his needs. Sex should make you feel loved or at least valued, not uncomfortable and just wanting to get him off and get it over with.)
I really do hate holidays now; they’ve brought me nothing but pain and grief for so long. I’d started to have hopes of genuinely mending our relationship after that hug, but this last Labor Day weekend the home situation finally hit the boiling point; Andrew got physically violent not just with me, but with our daughter Fiona. No punches were thrown, just grabbing, violent shaking while screaming right in our faces, but he gripped hard enough to leave bruises on me afterwards. Then he ordered me to sleep down in the basement for that night, and for the rest of our lives.
That incident wasn’t the last straw, that was the last 2x4. I’d told Andrew before we’d gotten married, nineteen years ago, that I would tolerate absolutely no physical abuse and the first punch he threw would be the last. I didn’t remind him of my vow that night, but the very next day while at work, I started the process of petitioning for a protective order against him that would cover both myself and Fiona.
The day after that was the first day of middle school for Fiona. I took half the day off from work, and after filing the petition at the courthouse, I went to Fiona’s school and had her pulled out of her afternoon class to come see me in the school counselor’s office. I told her that I couldn’t live at home anymore, and asked her if she’d rather go with me, or stay home with her Papa-the man who’d been her primary parent since the day she was born, who’d been so gentle and loving in her early years… And Fiona burst into tears and said she’d rather leave home with me than stay there with him, because she was scared of him now.
The school counselor had been listening in while we had our talk, and while giving Fiona some tissues to dry her tears, he told me that his position made him a ‘mandatory alerter’, and he was now obliged to tell CPS about what Andrew had done to Fiona on Monday. Many phone calls were made over the next hour in that office, as we prepared to get both myself and Fiona to a shelter for domestic violence victims, and arrange for how Fiona would get to and from school while I worked.
I left the school with Fiona, planning to swing by work to pick up the burner cell phone I’d purchased a few months back for emergencies (I’d left it in my lunch pack), and then start calling shelters for vacancies and directions. And if we timed it just right, to grab some clothes from the house while Andrew wasn’t there; I was counting on him to leave the house for at least thirty minutes, the time it would take to drive to the school and back, since Fiona’s going to an out-of-district school and we are required to drive her there and back every day.
But as we were leaving the school parking lot to go get the burner cell phone, Andrew pulled into the parking lot in the family van, over half an hour before school was due to let out. Fiona told me much later that he routinely does that; shows up long before school gets out, so he can find a good parking spot, and then just sits in the parking lot and reads until the last bell rings. But when I saw him I panicked, thinking that he’d been served the protection order papers already and was coming to yank Fiona out of school in retaliation, and run with her to somewhere that I’d never see her again. I hit the gas and tore out of the parking lot, and Andrew naturally recognized our car, spun the van around and started following me.
That was the start of an honest-to-god high speed car chase through the highland suburbs of Ferndale, until I got far enough ahead of him that I was sure he’d he lost sight of our car going over the crest of a hill; then I took a tire-screaming turn down a side street that had lots of and connections to other side streets, and lost him completely in the maze. When we ran into a road construction crew that was blocking the street, I pulled over and started hollering for help, explaining that we were on the run and why; the construction crew (a full set of wonderful guys, and I’ll swear that to my dying day) pulled out a cell phone to call the police for me, set out traffic cones and their own burly selves to block the street behind my car so Andrew couldn’t come right up to us if he did find us again, and stayed with us until the police arrived to escort us to the local police station. Soon afterwards a deputy from the county sheriff’s office arrived at the station to take my statement, took pictures of the bruises on my arm as evidence of the Monday night assault, and then left to arrest Andrew for domestic violence. Several hours later, after our nerves finally calmed enough, Fiona and I returned home.
So now Andrew is out of the house, and there’s a protection order in place forbidding him from having contact with either me or Fiona, except for written contact. He’s allowed to write letters to Fiona, but they’re addressed to Fiona’s therapist, who will carefully screen them for harmful language before passing them on to her. He’s also allowed to write letters or emails to me about division of property or child care, but so far nothing’s been sent to me. I know where he’s staying and the people whose land he's living on, and they’re acting as go-betweens for strictly necessary information or sending of supplies. Andrew now has the van for transportation, and a small ‘fifth-wheel’ trailer to live in that I did my best to fully stock with bed & bath linens, kitchenette supplies and etc. before turning over to him.
So, that’s pretty much all the messy details of what’s been going on with me and my family. Congratulations if you actually read through all the above, eleven pages’ worth of venting; I found writing it all out over the last few weeks to be rather cathartic, but I think most people would find it long-winded as all hellandgone!
The first five or six years of our marriage were good overall. Sure, we had our problems, but I’d say overall we were happy. Looking back, when we first got married I wasn’t emotionally ready for all the commitments that come with marriage-no, not in matters of fidelity, that was never an issue. There was no man in my bed before Andrew, and honestly I don’t think there’ll ever be one after him either. But I wasn’t really ready to give Andrew’s emotional needs as much consideration as my own, as well as make grown-up decisions about money and financial assets-I’d been living on my own for years, but I hadn’t done any planning for the future, just living from year to year and duty station to duty station.
It took a few years after our wedding for me to really grasp and incorporate the ideas of truly planning for the future, instead of having wishful and undefined goals that might never be realized, and having a Life-Partner, not just roommate, for the rest of my life. I know I hurt and disappointed him more than once back then, with crazy budget-wrecking impulse buys and with procrastinating on things that needed to be done until it was just too blasted late. But back then, Andrew was generally patient with me, accepting my flaws and forgiving my honest mistakes, and would even do silly things to make me laugh when I was stressing out. I still remember how he squeezed himself into my floral-print housedress once and paraded around in it, to jolt me out of the depressed stupor I’d been in after a really nasty argument with my parents.
Andrew would later claim he “treated me like a queen” in those early years; I don’t remember getting any royal treatment, but I do remember being treated as a wife and equal partner in most things-unless it was some home improvement project; he was firmly in charge of those, and I fell somewhere between junior partner and minion. But beyond the home improvement projects, there were times when it seemed like I just couldn’t do anything right; when Andrew just seemed on edge and angry no matter what I did to placate him, and all I could do was hunker down, say as little as possible and wait it out until he was in a good mood again.
In 1999 we bought what Andrew declared would be an excellent retirement home, over an hour’s drive away from the base; I wasn’t thrilled with the commute, which I’d be driving for seven years longer than Andrew would, but it was and still is a nice house with plenty of room out back for kids to run around in. When Andrew retired from the Navy in late 2000, we started trying to have a baby. We were both dead set against putting a baby in daycare, so we’d agreed even before getting married that we would wait to have children until one of us got out of the Navy to become a stay-at-home parent. And since Andrew would be retiring seven years before me and I’d seen what happened to my own mother, a stay-at-home mom who’d had to struggle financially and go on welfare when my dad left us-and I was adamant that would never, ever happen to me-we agreed that Andrew would become the stay-at-home parent until our child was old enough to go to school. When Andrew retired, it was time to start trying for parenthood. Again, I’ll admit that I didn’t try very hard at first, because I knew already that parenthood would change my life forever, and I didn’t feel ready for all the added responsibility of raising a child. But Andrew was eager for parenthood, so we tried, and less than two years later we had our daughter, Fiona.
It was while we were trying for a baby and while I was pregnant with Fiona that Andrew and I started really having marital problems. The capper came when we had an argument when I was 3-4 months pregnant that resulted in my sleeping on the couch in the basement-and the argument was over a TV show; one we weren’t even real fans of and just happened to be watching. No matter what fandom you’re in, no show-based argument should result in a spouse sleeping on the couch. When Andrew somewhat shamefacedly agreed the next day that he’d overreacted, we started going in for family counseling.
If I remember right, we went to six monthly sessions before Andrew declared that the counselor was prejudiced against him because she was female, and refused to go back for more. He said I could keep going on my own, and I believe I did go once, but without him along it seemed pointless. I’d privately decided that the underlying problem causing our woes was that now that Andrew was about to become a father, his subconscious was giving him expectations of how families should be and how parents should interact, and I wasn’t fitting his unconscious expectations of a wife and mother. But there was one thing the marriage counselor said that surprised us both: she said Andrew should see a counselor on his own, for depression.
Depression? That didn’t make sense to me at first; Andrew was angry and yelling at me a lot, but he wasn’t down in the dumps. But Andrew went to our family doctor with the counselor’s recommendation, and instead of seeing a psychiatrist for regular sessions, he was put on a medication that often helps people with mild bipolar disorder. (We found out later through conversations with his parents that his mother was actually diagnosed as moderately bipolar, had been diagnosed decades ago, but had never told Andrew about it. Possibly because he hadn’t spoken with them for several years before we got married and I encouraged him to mend fences with them.) Between the medication and the few lessons we did take home from the marriage counselor, we did get along better for a few years, particularly after Fiona was born and we just became too darn busy with all the changes and responsibilities of parenthood to think about anything else.
Birthing Fiona changed my emotional landscape as well as my body, but I still went back to work after six weeks, the Navy’s standard maternity leave period, while Andrew minded Fiona all day. Given my job’s frequent overtime requirements (overtime is -always- authorized when you’re in the Navy, it’s just not paid for because you’re on a monthly salary) and the insane length of the commute between Oak Harbor and the far side of Bellingham, I was gone up to 12 hours a weekday, so for the most part Andrew raised Fiona alone, with me seeing her just for an hour or so each evening. On the weekends I spent a lot more time with her, but if differences of opinion in how to raise her came up, I generally deferred to Andrew-I had to, really, since while I was at work he was the sole authority.
One thing I very definitely remember having a big difference of opinion on was Fiona’s potty training; his way seemed too harsh, making Fiona stay in the bathroom for up to an hour at a time, no matter how much she cried and begged to come out, until she, ah, performed to his expectations. I really wish now I’d worked harder to convince him to read all those online and magazine articles recommending the best way to potty-train and try that way instead; it might have saved all of us, particularly Fiona, a lot of grief over the years with her chronic encopresis.
But other than the harsh potty-training, overall Andrew was a wonderfully gentle and loving father to Fiona for those first four or five years. But he eventually stopped taking the medication for depression, because he decided that the medication’s side effects outweighed the benefits of taking it. But he didn’t say anything to me about taking himself off the medication-and to tell the truth, I was so preoccupied with worries about what he’d been diagnosed with the year after Fiona was born, Type II diabetes, that I actually forgot he’d ever been on any medication for depression. He was taking lots of pills every day anyway, for the diabetes.
When I retired from the Navy in January 2007, I went through a few temp jobs and a few months of unemployment before landing the Claims Analyst job at Sterling Health Plans. It was a very good civilian job for me, where people really appreciated my skills and aptitude for claims processing. But in retrospect, it was about that time that my home life started going downhill; not just a temporary slump like we’d had before but a gradual, permanent decline. Andrew started becoming outright abusive with his words; he called me “asshole” a lot, while claiming I was deliberately pushing his buttons to make him angry, even though most of the time I was trying hard to -not- get him angry at me.
At first I attributed his frequent harsh attitude to the chronic pain Andrew was in. He spent the latter half of 2006 and the first half of 2007 dealing with a fistula that finally required multiple surgeries to resolve so he could even sit down comfortably again. And beyond that, he had chronic joint and muscle pain that the Navy had basically ignored and he had learned to cover up and compensate for while on active duty. He’d gone to doctors about that constant pain, and the doctors had recommended specialists, but all he got out of trips to 4 or 5 different specialists was shoe inserts to support his arches-which did help, but not nearly enough. He was in enough pain every day that he couldn’t sleep through the night anymore, and he took his pain out on me… and I just took it, because I felt sorry for him and because he was still Fiona’s primary caregiver.
Then in mid-to-late 2008, Andrew’s overall mood changed again. He noticeably calmed down and became more mellow, but he also stopped being as involved with our daily lives as before. The most immediately obvious change was his involvement in Fiona’s schooling. For her kindergarten year, he not only walked her to and from the school down the street, but volunteered as a chaperone for field trips, baked treats for the entire class (the kids still remember the time he made enough pumpkin pies to feed everybody) and went to all the school assemblies and parent-teacher nights. But from first grade on, he stopped doing all that. It was understandable that he stopped walking her to and from school, because they closed down the elementary school down the street from us (the building was condemned due to poor maintenance) and Fiona was bused with all the other kids in the area to a new school on the other side of town. But he also stopped being involved with just about anything school-related; he didn’t even go to half the parent-teacher nights that were scheduled, leaving me to go on my own to find out how Fiona was doing in class and on the playground.
There were also plenty of nights that I came home from work to find out that Andrew had absolutely no interest in cooking dinner, and/or that none of the other household chores had been done. That if we were going to eat that night, have clean dishes to eat off of or have clean clothes to wear the next day, I’d have to take care of those chores after already putting in a full day at work. If I complained, Andrew either snarled at me about all the pain and physical misery he was in, or shamefacedly agreed he’d let things slide and promise to do better-and do better for just a couple of days before slacking off and spending most of his time on computer games again.
Then one day in January of 2009 I walked into the garage, looking for Andrew, to talk with him about some trivial thing… and found him hurriedly hiding a pipe in his pocket. But he couldn’t hide the foul odor in the air. When I asked him, he admitted it: Andrew had been smoking pot. He’d told me in the early days of our marriage that he’d smoke it back in high school, but given it up when he’d joined the Navy (their Zero Tolerance policy is strictly enforced.) I’d had no idea until that moment that he’d taken up the habit again.
Once I’d found out, later that same day when I thought I could talk calmly to him again, we had a painful confrontation over his marijuana use. I had already learned over the decades that marijuana isn’t entirely the ‘devil weed’ that my parents and teachers had said it was; there are plenty of doctors who will swear on their medical licenses that marijuana not only has medical uses, it’s more effective for treating glaucoma and the pain from some types of cancer, than any synthetic drug they’ve come up with so far. And there are certainly a lot worse drugs on the market; compared to some of them and their effects on human behavior, MJ is nearly tame in comparison. But that knowledge didn’t mean I wanted it in our household!
Andrew said he was using marijuana to relieve the pain from his back, hips and knees, bringing it down to a more tolerable level. I had already noticed he had been sleeping better at night for the last few months, sometimes even sleeping the whole night through… and I’d noticed how much more mellow his attitude towards me had been lately. Noticed and quite appreciated the difference, but not known the reason why… So I finally, reluctantly agreed he could keep using the drug, so long as he kept it in the garage and far, far away from Fiona.
It wasn’t until much later, after talking with the friend who’d inadvertently gotten him hooked on pot again, that I found out he’d been smoking it and hiding it from me since the fall of 2008… since the same time he’d started drifting away emotionally and slacking off on so many of his responsibilities.
It took me a long while to screw up my courage, but in January 2010 I finally confronted Andrew about the damage his weed-smoking habit was doing to our marriage and family. He protested A LOT, but finally had to admit to the differences in his behavior, and agreed to see our family doctor about a prescription, non-addictive painkiller he could take instead of smoking weed. And he did, but ultimately nothing came of it; Andrew is allergic to codeine and everything in the codeine drug family, and none of the other painkillers the doctor tried with him were effective enough to make a real difference in his chronic pain. He cut back on the weed for a short while, but never gave it up, and after a few months he was using it on a regular basis again… and when he ran out of his monthly supply, the days between running out and getting more from his supplier were unbearable for the rest of us.
I had a few years of good steady work at Sterling Health Plans, but after Obama started making huge changes to health insurance I lost my job there (though I lasted through nearly a year and a half of quarterly layoffs before my number came up; like I said, they really did appreciate my work.) 2011 was not a good year at all for me; I scrabbled with some horrid temp jobs and thoroughly depressing periods of unemployment in between the temp jobs, for almost an entire year before getting a more-or-less permanent job at Altair Advanced Industries (working as a Kelly temporary employee, but with the understanding that the job assignment would last up to a full year with an option for hiring permanently) as an inspector on the evening shift. I started working for Altair just before Christmas 2011, and started thinking things were finally looking up again. Thinking that now that I had a good steady job again, even though it was on the swing shift and I’d hardly get to see Fiona at all except on weekends, our family life would start to improve.
Three days after Christmas 2011, we got a visit from Child Protective Services. They’d been called in because we once put an antibiotic pill in Fiona’s lunch for her to take at lunchtime, to keep her on the dosage schedule when the school refused to administer the antibiotic without written consent form Fiona’s doctor (and we tried to get that written consent, but the doctor refused to give it for some bizarre reason.)
Andrew had a complete meltdown at the CPS visit and the accusation that we weren’t taking good care of Fiona. We’d already been on thin ice, because right after Thanksgiving I discovered that one of our credit cards had had the account frozen by the company for nonpayment of the bill. We had the money to pay it; he’d just not sent the money in, though I never found out whether he’d lost the bill in the household clutter or just forgotten to pay it. After the CPS visit and a LOT of yelling and screaming on his part, he declared that he’d had enough pain in his life and it was time to end it. Yes, he threatened to commit suicide. He was sitting on the toilet with the gun in his hand (thankfully not loaded yet; he always kept it unloaded and the ammo in a separate room) when I talked him into giving me the gun and not giving up on life yet, because Fiona and I needed him.
Shortly after that, because I’d complained (once, before shutting up about it) about the credit card being cut off for nonpayment, he handed over the responsibilities for our budget and bill paying to me, saying “You can deal with all this from now on, and may you choke on it.” Then he called his parents to blame them for his misery (he had been claiming for years that they’d mistreated him horribly as a child; he hadn’t talked to them for nearly a decade before we started dating, and had reconciled with them largely because I’d urged him to.) He declared our family utterly cut off from them, forbid them from ever trying to contact Fiona and “poison her the way you did me,” and forbid me from trying to contact them either. I was still scared enough by what had happened the day before that I obeyed, after sending the grandparents a goodbye email asking them to delete my email address from their account.
Things didn’t really improve after that. Andrew’s temper became more and more capricious. I tried to make him happy, but no matter what I personally did it wasn’t ever enough, not for more than a day or two at most. And all the while I was trying to make him happy, he was constantly wearing me down with his frequent insults and accusations that I was deliberately hurting him. It got to the point where I realized I felt a lot more tense and unhappy at home than I did at work-and this was with a civilian job, where people could and did get laid off without notice! That was the biggest change I’d had to deal with, after 20 years in the Navy; coming to terms with the uncertainty of employment, and knowing that basically every day had to be a high-producing day if I wanted to stay employed. But even feeling that job pressure, I still felt better about myself at work where people actually appreciated my efforts, than at home with Andrew’s near-constant verbal abuse.
Over 2012 I interacted with Andrew less and less, because so often I just didn’t know what I could say that wouldn’t result in more verbal abuse being heaped on me. In August he had a huge meltdown, declaring he felt suicidal again, and had me drive him to the hospital so he could get himself committed for psychiatric care. I was frantic, flailing to arrange child care for Fiona starting that very afternoon; thankfully my next-door neighbors like her and were willing to take her in while I went to work. We made quick arrangements for the care to continue, but while I was away at work Andrew came home from the hospital and grabbed Fiona back from the neighbors’ house. The hospital had refused to admit him for inpatient psychiatric care, instead giving him a list of psychiatrists in the area and other numbers that military veterans like him could call to seek help.
So I started pushing him to seek help, both mental and physical; a psychiatrist for his mental issues, and a massage therapist for the chronic pain he was in. I’d paid for him to see a massage therapist back in 2009, and he’d continued going for a few months, but eventually dropped it because our health insurance, Tricare, doesn’t cover either chiropractic or massage therapy. (Tricare is military health insurance, and speaking from many years of experience, the military’s general solution to people in pain is to give them Motrin and tell them to get back to work.) This time I told him I’d sign up for health insurance through work, starting at the first of next year; the group health insurance plan would be really expensive (over $550 each month), but well worth it if we could stop or at least greatly reduce the amount of pain he’s in all the time.
So in August 2012 Andrew started seeing a massage therapist on a regular basis, even though we’d be paying entirely out of pocket for it until could sign up for health insurance starting January 2013. He also had two sessions with a psychiatrist, the only one in the city who accepted Tricare insurance-though we found out later from the VA that he’s their very LAST recommendation for good psychiatrists in town. We also went to the VA to see about signing him up for VA healthcare and making a VA claim. But we were told that we made too much money to qualify for VA healthcare, and that getting a claim filed was an exceedingly lengthy process; that it usually takes YEARS to get a claim approved and start getting VA benefits, and that Andrew really should have filed his claim when he’d still retired from the Navy (yeah, he took that ‘should have’ about as well as you’d expect.)
I still tried to help him wherever he allowed me to help, but by Christmas break of 2012, it was becoming so obvious that I was withdrawing from Andrew emotionally that he even commented on it, saying lightly at one point while Fiona was next door, “You know, at some point you’re going to have to say something to me.” But I just stared at him, feeling helpless, unable to think of anything to say.
Two days later during that Christmas break Andrew had another meltdown, this time shouting that our marriage was over, he was done being hurt by me-yes, he still insisted I was deliberately hurting and antagonizing him-he was divorcing me emotionally, and from that point on we were just roommates and co-parents of Fiona. I was dismayed by the news, but not really surprised by it; mostly what I felt was just resignation.
For the next six weeks, we talked to each other only as much as needed to run the household and take care of Fiona. In January, now that we had Regence health insurance through my workplace, I brought home a long list of psychiatrists and psychologists in the area who take Regence BCBS insurance, and even helpfully marked the list with the local VA center’s top recommendations. Andrew tore the list up right in front of me and handed it back.
Then, a week before Valentine’s Day 2013, Andrew brought home a potted plant, a lovely batch of pink carnations. He claimed it had been Fiona’s idea to buy them, but I noticed the slightly hopeful look on his face. It was fairly obvious that he was hoping I’d just forgive and forget about his declaration that our marriage was over, and go back to being his loving wife.
In the past I’d always made a point of celebrating Valentine’s Day, even though Andrew generally scorned it as a “Hallmark holiday,” promoted solely for commercial reasons. I never made a huge deal out of it, usually just giving him chocolates and a suitably masculine-looking floral arrangement, but I still got him something, and he’d respond with some chocolates for me too. But that Valentine’s Day, because he had NOT SAID ANYTHING about actually reconciling with me and I’d just been hurt too many times before, I did nothing to mark the holiday at all. Two days later, another screaming meltdown ensued; this time he all but ordered me out of the house for good, threatening to divorce me and then sue me for alimony and child support.
Since I just couldn’t talk to him without him shouting at me, this time I wrote him a long letter. In the letter I told him how much I missed “us”; missed having a husband I could rely on for emotional support. And told him that our disintegrated relationship was harming our daughter’s emotional well-being, too. We’d already had to pull her out of Cascadia Elementary because of the incessant bullying and ostracism she’d been going through for years, and had signed her up with a child therapist while we enrolled her in another school for a fresh start. Fiona had enough troubles at school; she didn’t need to come home to a house full of tension, instead of affectionate parents who would provide her with a positive role model for her future relationships.
Then I told him in the letter that I couldn’t just turn our relationship back on like flipping a switch; there was just too much pain accumulated on both sides, his from all the time’s I’d hurt him without meaning to, and mine from all the times he’d retaliated with deliberate verbal abuse. That in order to rekindle our relationship, we’d need to see a marriage counselor and he’d need to start seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist for his own issues. I said that I’d printed another list of psychiatrists and psychologists out for him; all he had to do to signal his willingness to give “us” another try was ask for the list. I signed the letter “Daring to hope, Kimberly” and left it on his computer keyboard.
He never asked me for the list of psychiatrists. In fact, it took him nearly six weeks to acknowledge that he’d received the letter at all. But finally, nearly two months later, he agreed to start seeing a marriage counselor, available to us through my workplace’s Employee Assistance Program.
We had two sessions with EAP’s marriage counselor before Andrew declared he wasn’t going back to her, because she was “obviously prejudiced against men,” and said he’d see only a male marriage counselor or no one at all. So I started calling around, found a few male marriage counselors in the area (there aren’t many, but they do exist) and got us signed up for weekly sessions with him.
We lasted about a month with the male marriage counselor, whom Andrew really appreciated at first, but not for long; not when the sessions started making it clear to him how miserable I was, and started hinting about how much of our problems were being caused by him and his issues. In the middle of May, he finally blurted out that we were ganging up on him and hurting him, then got up and stormed out in the middle of the fourth session, driving off without me. Luckily the counselor’s secretary gave me a ride home that day, at no extra charge.
Two days later I came home from work at midnight to be confronted by Andrew claiming that he couldn’t breathe, he was dying of a heart attack, and I needed to rush him to the hospital ASAP. I did just that, and spent a miserable next few hours in the ER with him, first waiting with him to actually be seen by a doctor and then watching as the ER staff poked and prodded but found nothing really wrong with him. I finally went home without him at 3 a.m., because somebody had to be there for Fiona in the morning. I woke up in the morning to find out that instead of being admitted to the hospital proper, they’d given him a shot of something (an anti-anxiety medicine, as it turned out) and sent him on his way, to take a cab ride home.
The very next night it happened again; the same insistence that he couldn’t breathe and needed to be hospitalized. This time I didn’t break all the speed limits getting him to the hospital, and I left him there while still being admitted, to go back home to Fiona. Again, the next day I woke up to find out he’d taken a cab home from the hospital, after being diagnosed for the second time with no heart or lung problems, just another panic attack. (Yes, I’ve had a panic attack myself, decades ago in college, and I know that saying “just” a panic attack is dismissing their actual impact on people. But once you know what they are, an occurrence doesn’t merit going to an emergency room again.)
Memorial Day weekend was AWFUL. I was coming down with a cold from all the stress and lack of sleep, but still soldiering on, while Andrew claimed that I and the counselor had not just ganged up on him, but conspired in an actual attempt to kill him. He actually pointed right at me while bellowing “You tried to kill me!” He still insisted that all our problems were at least half my fault because I was abusing him-at least, that was the way he saw things. He finally admitted that part of it was just his perceptions, but still somehow made that my responsibility instead of his. Then he claimed that part of him actually still loved me and always would, but he’d never go back to that marriage counselor again and I’d have to find another one that he’d tolerate. Other than one dismal confrontation with him I just stayed away from him as much as I could, working on the garden outside all day even though I generally hate gardening.
Then the day after Memorial Day weekend, Andrew announced while I was getting ready for work that he’d had enough, and he’d be dead by the time I got home that night! So I took a sick day from work and took him to the hospital instead, to see once more about getting him committed for psychiatric care. Last August I’d just dropped him off there, at his insistence, because he didn’t want me hearing what he had to say to the ER staff. But this time I went in with him, and filled out an affidavit of all his declarations of intent to kill himself and his other erratic behavior, including how he’d broken the vacuum cleaner two months earlier-when it had clogged on him, he’d just picked it up and beat it against the floor until it shattered into pieces, right in front of me and Fiona. Based on that affidavit, the hospital agreed that he needed inpatient treatment for his mental health, so I went home to take care of Fiona again.
Later that night I got a phone call from the hospital. They’d told Andrew that there weren’t any available beds in the voluntarily-committed psych ward, so they’d have to send him to another hospital that had room, possibly as far south as Seattle. Andrew balked at that, stating that he’d do no such thing-and then, based on that affidavit and on his difficult behavior at the moment, they made it an INvoluntary commitment to a psych ward. Ironically, they then had room for him in the local Involuntarily Committed ward.
Andrew stayed in that psych ward for a week, with me visiting him every day but telling Fiona that her Papa was in the hospital because he was having trouble breathing again. And of course, he blamed me for his involuntary commitment, claiming that the affidavit was full of lies and I’d deliberately manipulated him to get him committed.
After a full week he was released from the psychiatric ward, now with a court order to get psychiatric help at a local counseling center. At least when he came home he praised me for how much of the housework and chores of his that I’d done while he’d been gone; he said he’d feared he’d come home to piles of laundry and every room in the house being filthy, but I’d even mopped the kitchen and living room floor before he came home. He went to the mandated weekly counseling sessions, though he told me nothing about what was being said in them or how they were progressing. But he did start restraining himself from heaping quite so much verbal abuse on me, though it didn’t stop entirely. And about a week before Labor Day, he surprised me by actually -hugging- me, which practically made me melt on the spot; it had been -years- since he’d given me a hug or shown any physical signs of affection. (I stopped counting sex as a sign of affection years ago, or even wanting sex anymore, because it was all about taking care of his needs. Sex should make you feel loved or at least valued, not uncomfortable and just wanting to get him off and get it over with.)
I really do hate holidays now; they’ve brought me nothing but pain and grief for so long. I’d started to have hopes of genuinely mending our relationship after that hug, but this last Labor Day weekend the home situation finally hit the boiling point; Andrew got physically violent not just with me, but with our daughter Fiona. No punches were thrown, just grabbing, violent shaking while screaming right in our faces, but he gripped hard enough to leave bruises on me afterwards. Then he ordered me to sleep down in the basement for that night, and for the rest of our lives.
That incident wasn’t the last straw, that was the last 2x4. I’d told Andrew before we’d gotten married, nineteen years ago, that I would tolerate absolutely no physical abuse and the first punch he threw would be the last. I didn’t remind him of my vow that night, but the very next day while at work, I started the process of petitioning for a protective order against him that would cover both myself and Fiona.
The day after that was the first day of middle school for Fiona. I took half the day off from work, and after filing the petition at the courthouse, I went to Fiona’s school and had her pulled out of her afternoon class to come see me in the school counselor’s office. I told her that I couldn’t live at home anymore, and asked her if she’d rather go with me, or stay home with her Papa-the man who’d been her primary parent since the day she was born, who’d been so gentle and loving in her early years… And Fiona burst into tears and said she’d rather leave home with me than stay there with him, because she was scared of him now.
The school counselor had been listening in while we had our talk, and while giving Fiona some tissues to dry her tears, he told me that his position made him a ‘mandatory alerter’, and he was now obliged to tell CPS about what Andrew had done to Fiona on Monday. Many phone calls were made over the next hour in that office, as we prepared to get both myself and Fiona to a shelter for domestic violence victims, and arrange for how Fiona would get to and from school while I worked.
I left the school with Fiona, planning to swing by work to pick up the burner cell phone I’d purchased a few months back for emergencies (I’d left it in my lunch pack), and then start calling shelters for vacancies and directions. And if we timed it just right, to grab some clothes from the house while Andrew wasn’t there; I was counting on him to leave the house for at least thirty minutes, the time it would take to drive to the school and back, since Fiona’s going to an out-of-district school and we are required to drive her there and back every day.
But as we were leaving the school parking lot to go get the burner cell phone, Andrew pulled into the parking lot in the family van, over half an hour before school was due to let out. Fiona told me much later that he routinely does that; shows up long before school gets out, so he can find a good parking spot, and then just sits in the parking lot and reads until the last bell rings. But when I saw him I panicked, thinking that he’d been served the protection order papers already and was coming to yank Fiona out of school in retaliation, and run with her to somewhere that I’d never see her again. I hit the gas and tore out of the parking lot, and Andrew naturally recognized our car, spun the van around and started following me.
That was the start of an honest-to-god high speed car chase through the highland suburbs of Ferndale, until I got far enough ahead of him that I was sure he’d he lost sight of our car going over the crest of a hill; then I took a tire-screaming turn down a side street that had lots of and connections to other side streets, and lost him completely in the maze. When we ran into a road construction crew that was blocking the street, I pulled over and started hollering for help, explaining that we were on the run and why; the construction crew (a full set of wonderful guys, and I’ll swear that to my dying day) pulled out a cell phone to call the police for me, set out traffic cones and their own burly selves to block the street behind my car so Andrew couldn’t come right up to us if he did find us again, and stayed with us until the police arrived to escort us to the local police station. Soon afterwards a deputy from the county sheriff’s office arrived at the station to take my statement, took pictures of the bruises on my arm as evidence of the Monday night assault, and then left to arrest Andrew for domestic violence. Several hours later, after our nerves finally calmed enough, Fiona and I returned home.
So now Andrew is out of the house, and there’s a protection order in place forbidding him from having contact with either me or Fiona, except for written contact. He’s allowed to write letters to Fiona, but they’re addressed to Fiona’s therapist, who will carefully screen them for harmful language before passing them on to her. He’s also allowed to write letters or emails to me about division of property or child care, but so far nothing’s been sent to me. I know where he’s staying and the people whose land he's living on, and they’re acting as go-betweens for strictly necessary information or sending of supplies. Andrew now has the van for transportation, and a small ‘fifth-wheel’ trailer to live in that I did my best to fully stock with bed & bath linens, kitchenette supplies and etc. before turning over to him.
So, that’s pretty much all the messy details of what’s been going on with me and my family. Congratulations if you actually read through all the above, eleven pages’ worth of venting; I found writing it all out over the last few weeks to be rather cathartic, but I think most people would find it long-winded as all hellandgone!