Living with Fear – A survivor’s tale

We have an anonymous guest post on the blog today.

I was very touched yesterday when this special person made contact with me. Her story is so brave, it is, no matter what she says, and made me ache for her and everything she has been through. Reliving this kind of experience takes an awful lot of courage. I am so pleased to be able to provide a safe space for her to share her story. I hope you’ll give it, and her, the amazing support you always give me.

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The terrible unfolding events of a gun massacre in Cumbria have made some very unsettling feelings resurface for me, and I feel the need to get something down in writing – some sort of catharsis is needed.  It doesn’t matter if you think you know who I am, or can work out my identity at the end of this piece.  That matters little to me, because I know that my ex-husband will never read this and that makes it safe to write without fear of retribution. It also means I can talk about a part of my past that I was ashamed of, and have tried to push to the back of my mind but every so often – especially at times like this – it resurfaces.

My ex-husband threatened me with violence on many occasions, actually hurt me on others, but mainly it was the emotional and psychological violence that pervaded our marriage towards the end.

Our marriage really started to fall apart during my second pregnancy when we started to have money problems.  He had been made redundant from work, and with our second child on the way it was a difficult time.  What I didn’t expect was for his already volatile nature to take a dramatic turn for the worse.  Three days before the baby was born I nearly walked out of the house with our toddler because of his behaviour, but for some reason – fear, hope, I don’t know what – I stayed.  When the baby was born I remember having a conversation with the health visitor about post-natal depression (PND) and she instinctively invited me to go along to a clinic to talk to someone about it.  My husband came with me saying he didn’t trust health visitors and that if we said the wrong thing they would probably take the children into care.  He watched me as I filled in a questionnaire about PND and I felt compelled to give the safe answers, anyway I wasn’t lying was I?  Because I didn’t have PND, I was severely depressed and had been for months.

Some months passed before I was prescribed anti-depressants and I tried to keep them a secret from him, knowing that he would use it against me in some way.  Inevitably, he found the tablets one day (looking through my bag for something, or just checking up on me?) and the glint in his eye was one of joy. Euphoria almost. He’d uncovered my Achilles heel. The taunting about my mental illness – which he always said in a whisper, as though he was protecting me, was unmerciful and he took every opportunity to smile knowingly and tell me how he would take care of things because I wasn’t capable of looking after the children on my own.

Even when he found a new job the aggression didn’t stop as I’d hoped it would. He started pushing me around and taunting me for my weight problem/poor parenting skills/domestic skills, whatever he could think of.  He rarely drank alcohol so I couldn’t blame it on that, but if I ever bought a bottle of wine he would talk to me in a quiet, menacing voice about how he might have to talk to someone about my drink problem.  The message was clear – do anything rash and you will lose the children.

Somehow, without actually saying the words he knew that I wanted a divorce.  I was too scared to say it to him, he was so unpredictable, but he must have known how miserable I was and that in the two years since our second child was born I’d become an emotional wreck. I remember driving to a nearby town, where nobody knew us, and attending an appointment I’d secretly arranged with a solicitor.  I wanted to know where I stood if I went down the divorce route.  Could he take the children from me?  Would my real and imagined issues be held against me? It was when the solicitor asked me for my personal details and the children’s names that it became real and I broke down.  I think I sat sobbing in the solicitor’s office for a good twenty minutes, and although the solicitor was sympathetic he warned me that things could get very nasty if I wanted to proceed with a divorce, and I should prepare myself for that.  He asked me “what’s the worst thing your husband could do?” My immediate reply was “He could kill me.”

I went home to face the nightmare that was my marriage.  On the face of it we were doing so well. We had a nice home in a good part of town, two healthy children. My husband had a professional job; he was intelligent, good-looking, well-dressed and extremely charming.  Who was going to believe me against him?  After all, I was one the one with the problems wasn’t I?

Then, just after the visit to the solicitor,  there was a news story about a policeman who killed his family.  The headline said “There’ll be no divorce, the only way out is death”.  It was a horrific, gruesome episode where the father had killed his wife and two of their children rather than get a divorce.  My ex lauded him as a hero saying ‘that’s the way to go’.   The worrying this was my husband was ex-military and at the time was a firearms officer in the local Army Cadets, so had access to guns.  You can guess where my mind was, and I feared for my life and my children’s.

I decided to take a chance and speak to his parents, who had always been very supportive and knew of his volatile nature.  Their response was to look at me pityingly and say that it must be something I was doing because he would never normally behave like that.  Of course, they asked him about it and he reluctantly confided in them about my mental illness and fondness for the drink.

Then not long after that, as we ate our evening meal one night our 5 year-old calmly announced that she’d told her teacher that Daddy had pulled Mummy over by the throat and made her lie on the floor. As horrifying as it was too hear, I knew that this was a possible escape route, that if I could talk to the teacher about it she might be able to get some help for us. But my husband took the next day off work to escort me as I took our daughter to and from school and somehow managed to charm and laugh with the teacher about the silly things children say.  The teacher commented on how strange she had thought it was, but of course they both laughed it off. If only she’d looked at me she would have noticed I wasn’t laughing.  My escape route had snatched away and I was devastated.

It wasn’t long after that that something incredible happened.  He had been out visiting a ‘friend’ and when he came home he asked, incredibly, “Are we ever going to have sex again?”  I shook my head.  “OK, then I think the best thing is for me to move out.” I could only nod in agreement, but in my head I was screaming “Oh thank you, sweet Jesus.  Please, please make him go through with it.”

A few weeks later he was gone.  He moved out, and hasn’t come back.  Isn’t wanted back, never has been. And now, this current news story about the ‘quiet man’ who suddenly snapped has brought this all back to the surface again. I can remember that feeling of being terrified of what he might do.  What he might be capable of.  And it was this sort of carnage that lived in fear of.

When I contacted Josie and asked for her advice about writing this piece, her advice was to get it written and then work out what we could do with it.  She described me as brave to write about this, but sadly the one thing I can’t claim to be is brave.  I do feel stronger for having survived this, and I feel proud of having raised my two children on my own and see them grow into loving, warm, responsible young people.  But even now, several years later, and despite the fact he’s not allowed into my home I’m still afraid of him. So I’m grateful, yes.  Lucky, certainly. But brave, no.

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Domestic abuse is real, it happens, and it is a subject very close to my heart. If you are in a situation where you are made to feel frightened, emotionally or physically, speak out. Please.

The National Domestic Violence Helpline: 0808 2000 247

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