“What had happened was…” Part 2

Family Court

I don’t want to talk about it and I tell Donna that every week. I’ve “done” therapy before but it was usually to deal with a man in my life: my ex-husband, my dad, or how to best support my son. This is the first time I’ve had to peel back the layers that had never seen the light of day.

My neurologist nailed it earlier today at my appointment: “Oh, so you’re the people pleaser” as we discussed some of my body’s tension through the years. I’m terrified I have brain damage especially since some days I have a tremor. She’s the first doctor I’ve ever told outright what happened who is a medical doctor and not a head doctor. I tried to broach the subject in a broad way asking my rheumatologist if she knew of any connections with domestic violence and autoimmune diseases. She was dumbfounded by the question. “No, I’ve never heard of such a thing” as if it was the most preposterous when it happens to AT LEAST one in three women.

Donna made me tell her what happened. Rather, she just sat there and the discomfort of the quiet made me start talking. I’ve tried to understand where it all began, the slow unrelenting pain. The earliest memories are stomach aches as I was so nervous to go to school. The headaches started in third grade and I got glasses, yet the headaches would continue. When I was nine, the summer before fourth grade, I developed what they believed to be meningitis but apparently never understood what I had. My father would later tell me this when I was helping to care for him later in life and he was a suffering from a bit of vascular dementia.

“We thought we were going to lose you. You know, they never did figure out what was wrong with you or what caused it?” A mystery illness I would later reflect to help put all the pieces together.

By the time I was 18 and a senior in high school, I was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome after waking up during my first colonoscopy. (Only the coolest of the cool kids have spastic colons.) By 22, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, instigated by an assault. My family physician who diagnosed it, acted as a combat doctor in overseas missions and was concerned I wasn’t doing well, hoping I would take time off from school and work on my mental health to understand the pain. He’d been fond of my mother and knew her when she lived in Lexington raising my half-brother as a single mom. He admired her and knew her loss was vast with my father a million miles away in the Caribbean. Instead, I would go to him first when I found a little over a month later I was pregnant. Dr Baldwin found me a good ob/gyn to visit to make sure the pregnancy was viable. I was extremely early along but I’d been taking prescribed pharmaceuticals but still drinking and using marijuana here and there. Dr. B supported me though, believing that this was a different direction to go in, but a good one nonetheless. I’m forever thankful for the kindness of that man and his lack of judgement. He knew I was hurting in so many ways and chose to believe in me.

When I told my ex-boyfriend, who had taken me out for my birthday, he seemed to have a whole plan in place — whereas I did as well (to pack up my car and drive west) but I hadn’t told him. He was stunned but excited, talking me into marriage with a health insurance plan (“UK got rid of pre-existing conditions,” he bragged) and that he would attend law school even though my application to graduate school sat on my desk. He went on about how WE could do this and when he asked me to marry him, I laughed. After he made his case I realized it was more sound than what my plan was — or so I thought. In this life everything I have ever regretted I’ve been talked into. But I was thankful because my ex-boyfriend turned husband seemed to believe in my assertion that I was going to be a mother. That I could do it.

Three weeks later I married H in the Justice of the Peace in Covington, KY. The morning before the ceremony, I was sick, and as I opened the bathroom door my sister was there. She knew I didn’t want to go through with the wedding but I didn’t know how to get out of it now that I was carrying his baby. And so I lied to her, saying it was morning sickness but she knew.

My father sobbed through the entire hastily put together ceremony. I wore a purple dress for my mother and my sister had me get my hair done like we were really celebrating. I knew my mother would be devastated if she were alive with me pregnant, still being in college. But I was lucky and a few close friends were there to support my decision. My grandmother at the cozy reception at the Greyhound Tavern — where we had spent so many family meals with my mother and other family — took me aside and simply said “When we make our bed, we have to lay in it.” Everyone knew the reason for the sudden marriage but I couldn’t imagine the shame my Catholic mother would feel if I was pregnant and unmarried.

A month after marrying, I went on a previously scheduled trip to visit my father in St. Croix for a belated Christmas with his new girlfriend, who I’d just met for the first time at my quickie wedding. Things were strained but I thought getting better until the last day I was there and getting ready to leave. He had me sit outside at the teak table at his new million dollar house. He sat me down and had two piles of paperwork where he explained that I needed to sign one of them but it was up to me. I was confused as I thought he had come home from work to take me to the airport. Instead, he said I could sign a document that his friend, a judge, drafted where I could annul my marriage and live with he and my new soon-to-be stepmother, who clearly did not want me around. Or, I could keep my marriage and sign away my trust fund which was for school. I was hurt, scared and never felt so alone but I didn’t like the way he did it and so I chose to keep my new marriage and signed it away. We weren’t raised to assume money was ours anyway but I was incredibly hurt.

“Well, you’re on your own now,” he said as I returned to Kentucky to move to the outskirts of town in a small apartment with my new husband. My father let us choose furniture from a storage unit but other than that, he wanted no part of my new life. I marvel at how I was able to have a healthy pregnancy with all of the stress, the fighting with my Dad, and the sudden isolation I was in, detached from all of my friends and other regular college students. The pro-choice club I ran asked me to step down and I slowly stopped going to all my classes, unable to handle the stares and whispers on campus. But I dove deep into researching how to be a new mother, how to eat well and I taught myself to cook, making quite a cozy little home for us. But I knew at five months pregnant I had made a mistake with my new husband who couldn’t seem to change his behavior. He was 28 but remained like a college kid, seemingly in arrested development and more of a misogynist than I noticed when we’d dated. I didn’t change my name which would become a point of contention he was never truly honest about.

When my son finally arrived, I was elated, overjoyed and in love with this new magical being. He was here and I was his mother. There was nothing like it. He opened my heart which had been shut down for so long. I didn’t know how much work it would entail on no sleep as I breastfed around the clock. At one point my new mother-in-law, who did not approve of me, came into our home to visit the new baby. I was crying, unsure why but assumed due to the hormones. My MIL coldly walked past me, telling me to “take care of that.” In 2004, there was little support for women post-birth and I was overwhelmed without my mother or close family. The new thing was postpartum depression even though I explained at the time that I was exhausted, not depressed, and anxious. From the beginning, my husband wasn’t the father I was told he would be. In front of people he was quite hands on with the baby but around the house he did very little with most of the work falling on me. The first night home from the hospital he wanted the baby to sleep in his own nursery and so I would basically stay up all night, feeding and taking care of my newborn in the other room, sometimes sleeping on the floor of his makeshift nursery or in the Lay-Z-Boy of our tiny living room. I stayed home with him during the day but attended classes at night to finish my degree. I managed to do well in school and was just one class shy when we moved so H could begin law school.

In 2005 I moved to northern Kentucky and couldn’t find a job with my English degree (I could walk in graduation but was one class short)  and felt like I failed. H was starting to change but I thought — law school and a different venue will help this. You can move an alcoholic, take his friends away but the problem still lies there. The unhealed man slowly becoming worse and more angry.

But this story isn’t about him.

We got in a fight because I couldn’t find a corporate job which I truly needed in order to get health insurance. H could get on student health insurance but I had none and that was concerning to me after having incredible health insurance for a year. So I did what any redhead would do and I drove to the first place that I saw had a help wanted sign and, since I had prior serving experience in college, got hired that day. I got a job as a server in a beer and wings/family restaurant, where I would quickly become a bartender because I was so fast and could keep up with orders and separate checks while being friendly enough. The job was grueling as I took care of my son from the time he woke up but we would spend the day together and it didn’t require daycare. I’d take care of him until I went to work at 4PM/4:30PM where I would close the restaurant because that made the most money as a server. I’d get home after 1am when I served and usually at 3PM when I bartended for the rest of my time there. Sleep became difficult but I had always struggled with sleep.

I hated my job at first and in some ways for the majority of the time there. I have a keen empathy feeling and am extremely sensitive to people. Working in a bar is difficult because you are constantly anticipating behavior and it can be nerve-wracking. I started smoking again during that time but only at work and I hated going to bars which is what every other 25 year olds wanted to do. I spent most of my time with very few friends and my little family. I got to see my sister maybe once or twice a year and visited my grandma who took an interest in my son, thankfully. My father was distant and still living in the Caribbean. It could be lonely but it was my happiest time with my little baby. And so I pushed my body to keep going with this schedule for almost four years.

One night early on when I began working, I was serving on a two for Tuesday beer night, which was the busiest night of the week and I began getting sick. It wouldn’t stop and eventually I had to leave, terrified I would lose my job but more-so frightened of my husband, knowing I didn’t have health insurance. So I left work and drove to the nearest open urgent care where they hooked me up to an IV and wouldn’t let me drive home. He had a friend who watched our son while he could come get me and I’ll never forget his face: annoyed, put out, angry even. And so that would be the course of my illness in our marriage. My own brother in law, a physician, called my fibromyalgia “soccer mom’s disease” implying whatever was going on with me wasn’t real.

I couldn’t function at 100 percent for most of my life but there were always excuses: “She worries too much, it’s in her head,” and those types of things I heard from not only my husband but my family and ensuing physicians. So I kept going. Eventually the trauma returned and it hit a head when my husband did something very deceitful. I felt like I had been sliced, pierced with a knife into my guts and I was scared of him — and not for the first time. It resulted in a panic attack at work where I walked out on my bartending shift. But the only person I could tell was my friend from work and so I drove to her house. I’d seen a man and I thought it was my half-brother, coming to hurt me. The shadows would happen every now and then but at this time I didn’t know who to trust. My husband was showing more and more that he did not seem to genuinely like me while also not allowing me many close friends of my own. We had a home phone number but I gave up my cell phone to save money. My friend would usually call while I was working and after awhile, stopped calling since H would not give me my messages.

I hadn’t told anyone at work what happened to me or to my family after my mother died. I suspected everyone wanted it to go away and I was then reminder of it that no one wanted to look at or witness. But in my life, my back issues wouldn’t go away and I was in pain throughout my shifts, still moving cases of beer, still hunching over, still on my feet for eight hours at least (usually 11). I cut down to part time and then out of frustration, I quit. I was becoming cranky at work because of the pain and frustration every time a customer would ask me why I was still working there. Plus, I was growing resentful. He’d already talked me out of opportunities in my life which were about me and not about him.

My professor, Gurney Norman, from undergrad taught a special section of a memoir class one semester and I promptly signed up. By the end of the class, Gurney suggested I write a book which he would edit and help me produce. I was elated and shared about it excitedly with my husband. But H talked me out of it, telling me that I wouldn’t have time for that during his last year of law school and in taking care of our son.

That is why these situations are so insidious — one minute the person is asking you to marry them three months after dating and the next, they seem to hate you and anything that makes you shine. But we grow used to swallowing the little side comments or put downs in front of others. When our new neighbors moved in, we invited them to dinner in our upstairs apartment. Before dinner had been served — I’d just made drinks for them — my husband told these relative strangers that I was quite recently diagnosed with rapid cycling bipolar disorder. I was still absorbing if that is what I indeed had but my husband had run off with it, telling everyone who would listen, discrediting me instantaneously in most people’s eyes.

Two years later, my now neighbor turned friend, reminded me of this night. We’d just had a come to Jesus moment where she explained her new boyfriend was worried one night about the noise upstairs and he wanted to call the police, frightened for me and our son. I started to cry and it was then she remembered some of the things H said about me. She was now realizing that I wasn’t the problem like he led most people to believe. It helped that a neighbor next door, who’d just moved in as I was separated from my husband, saw how I took care of our son. Plus, my husband couldn’t fool her somehow. She knew what was going on, somehow, and helped me feel safe in her presence.

It was the bipolar diagnosis from the psychiatrist — assigned to me from the first and last meeting with an older male marital counselor — who listened to my husband blame me for our issues and used my recent depression from a miscarriage against me. The miscarriage put into perspective the situation I was in and how devastating another child would be. Alas, the match had been lit and the diagnosis was set with the newest manipulation tactic. But I also know in my gut that I was struggling, trying to be a person to fall in line the way I needed to be as a mother, especially in the eyes of my mother-in-law. So much of anxiety and depression is living in the wrong truth. But I am impressed every now and then at my quiet tenacity.

I don’t want to tell this story. I honestly don’t want to tell any of it or even bear witness to the events that happened but my writing is stuck the past few years and all I can seem to write about is the return of memories and the process of losing control over my body. It’s a mind fuck. An absolute mind fuck, especially when you look “fine” on the outside and can’t possibly be the person the MRI says you are. I’m a sensitive person — some of the hardest shell people are because we have to be — and feel the reactions sometimes of people. I walk into a room and I can feel the energy, usually tension, and my body reacts to the atmosphere. It’s a glitch as I can’t seem to deaden it and I simply used to numb it with a cocktail when we went out and about. No one told me what was going on with my body. Every time I try to get doctors to take me seriously, it requires proof of an MRI and even then, there is no apology for your cardiologist blowing you off after a high D-Dimer test because yes, indeed, you did have a stroke. Now, two years later after blaming marijuana or genetic dementia, I’ve learned that it isn’t all in my head and not only do I have damage from a previous stroke, there are more issues. But in my chart they’ve focused on the anxiety and depression I get from having a body which I can’t control.

The patholigizing of women’s physical pain into mental health conditions is another instance of Western medicine silencing women. It’s reflective of our patriarchal society as a whole, omitting women’s own voices when they describe their pain or discomfort and instead, with a flick of a pen, they’re labeled hysterical. It’s the same method decade after decade and so I share the story so that it doesn’t happen to another woman. Whether that be the misogyny in healthcare or family court, I don’t want someone to feel as alone as I did. I believed I did this to myself and it was my punishment of some sort.

Last week Jess colored my hair. She’s been doing so for the past five years or so. She makes me feel at ease and I don’t flinch when she touches me or comes near my neck. She knows by now how much the white spot in the front of my hair bothers me. I initially bleached my red hair so it would all go white as the white spot grew and it’s difficult to keep up with it as the spot is in the front of my hairline. Suddenly, at the last appointment, she asked,

“Oh - it’s a scar, isn’t it?”

Only the second person I’ve told. She then went quiet after my face fell when she asked. She understood then and it made much more sense of why I have a difficult time seeing it grow out. I see the violence.

The last week of my quarter in the first year of graduate school, H (we were still married) returned to the house to visit our son. He would stay on the couch and I would sleep in the bed, where our son had been sleeping most of the time lately. After I put our son to bed, I finished a paper and since H was there, he edited my paper. I was thrilled the quarter was over and that now I could spend some time with my son but I was terrified of the transition. I thought I could keep the relationship with my soon to be ex friendly since I assumed we both wanted the same things for our son, which was a smooth transition and two parents who could co-parent.

To celebrate I was finished, I shared margaritas with H. It was a silly idea and I would destroy myself for years looking back at all of the missteps. But I didn’t want to admit or see the real danger I was in. Already that evening, H made a few digs at me, including insulting my writing. But it wasn’t until a few hours later after I put my guard down that the conflict would arise. Somehow he started talking about when he stepped out on me when he was in law school. How he had done it to intentionally hurt me and he was glad about he had done that. And then he cooly walked into the house.

Each day the veil would lift more and more where I would realize I didn’t truly know this person. I followed him up the stairs into the kitchen, upset, but more so desperate to understand. Desperate because suddenly I didn’t know who H was at all. What would happen next wouldn’t be the first time he put his hands on me but the most dramatic. As I got close to him, he grabbed me and slammed me against the brick wall in the kitchen, in our East Row house in Newport. In response, and in my survival skills, I pushed him off of me. He would fall into the barstools which then fell into the window, which were old and thin and just as the corner of the chair hit the glass, it shattered.

Hysterical, shaking, I ran from him and he grabbed me, sitting me down at my desk chair, screaming in my face.

“You crazy fucking bitch! Everyone will see you for who you are! You’re crazy and I’m going to take your son from you!”

There was more but those lines are the clearest in my memory. And just as he was doing this, our son walked out from the bedroom. My husband took on the role of comforting our six year old son while telling me to get myself together. He often did things like that, trying to make me look like the problem and was beginning to do it in front of our son as well. I continued crying, terrified and not knowing what to do. I blamed myself for drinking, for drinking with H of all people and I thought I would just take it to the grave until I died. It was my fault, I told myself.

The next day a friend took photos of my bruises after my gut told me to check H’s phone. He’d taken pictures of the glass and I knew, with a sick feeling in my stomach, I was in trouble. So she documented my injuries and that was when my neighbor downstairs began to see what was actually happening upstairs. A few weeks later this spot in the from of my head began to go white and grow.

I’d develop more severe pain after the attack and more frequent migraines. I saw a rheumatologist a year later and she’d diagnose me with aggressive arthritis and a few other autoimmune issues. But she was expensive and I didn’t manage my symptoms as I didn’t have the extra money and I certainly didn’t think I deserved it. That’s what is wild about our bodies failing us — they didn’t fail us with one sign, but constant screaming at us to listen. I was abusive to my own body, believing I deserved the behavior of my soon-to-be ex-husband.

It would be a long divorce with us attending family court for either child support which he refused to pay once he got a job that paid in cash and/or for contesting the divorce agreement making him 2/3 responsible for our son’s healthcare. Money was his last link and so I stopped fighting about the payments and just went to court yearly instead. It was a stressful ensuing 11 years divorced from him which I believe greatly impacted my health and the conditions I acquired.

And so the scar remains, the white spot growing large as my pain and increases through the years. Donna reminds me these things weren’t my fault, but moreso that I didn’t deserve them.

When you’re different and mouthy, opinionated and strong, you assume that it caused the violence. Something about me seems to anger certain men and I remain in fear a lot. But I am 45 now and I refuse to let the fear run my life any longer. I tell the story and will continue to telling more because I am not unusual. In fact, this story is very common with men attacking women and not letting them leave after they try to escape bad marriages.

If you or someone you know is in a frightening situation or even if you just need someone to advise how family court goes, please reach out to me. It’s lonely and isolating and my story is actually the best case scenario where I was able to retain custody of my son.