Escape?

Posting this is a leap of faith for me.  The people closest to me know about my abusive first marriage.  I have been wanting to write my story for a long time, but I have been worried about doing it for many reasons.  Now I feel that I need to tell my story because it happened and it happened the way that I remember it. 



    It took many years years of debilitating brainwashing and painful abuse, but I finally reached the point that I knew I could not stand any more.  I could not stay for the kids anymore.  None of us were safe.  I could not keep telling myself, "Someday life won't be this way."  I was finally seeing my situation for what it really was.  I was in a vicious cycle that was never going to end unless I did something to break it.  I was beginning to feel the inner strength that maybe I had never actually lost in the first place.  In my mind I started sorting through ways that I could get away from my husband.  When we were out running errands I would pay attention to the business and buildings that were nearby.  Maybe I could go to a church, restaurant, or hospital for help.  A small flicker of excitement made me think that was a good idea, but questions in my head began making me doubt myself.  Would the restaurants be open or the church be unlocked when I needed to get in?  Would the people there believe me?  Would they allow me to stay until someone came to pick me up?  Of course the answer to all of these questions was yes, but my own mind wouldn't let me understand that people would be more than willing to help me.

    Some nights when I sat on our bed in a tense huddle, slowly rocking with my arms around my knees, I thought about quietly sneaking out of the window in the spare room across the hall.  It was the only one close enough to the ground to get out of safely.  Our room was on the second floor of an elevated ranch, but the other two bedrooms were in the front of the house, and were level with the front yard.  The problem with this plan was very simple.  I was not only deciding if this escape was plausible, but I was waiting for him to come back to our room to abuse me.  My stomach was nauseous and my body was shivering.  He was in the living room watching television, but kept returning to the bedroom to continue a delusional argument going by hitting me, screaming at me, or questioning me during the commercials of whatever he was watching.  "Ready for more?", was he usual greeting as he entered the room.  Then a punch to the leg, or a smack to the head, or a yank off the bed accompanied my pleading for him to stop and let me go to bed.  "You'll go to bed when I go to bed!"  When that time came, he was just as awful.  I didn't want to lay there beside him any more than I wanted to lay beside a rat.  It made him angry that I was actually able to fall asleep after our "argument".  The stress of these evenings was exhausting for me so I couldn't help that my body shut down.  If he thought that I was falling asleep he would slap me in the back of the head, or push me toward the edge until I was about to fall off of the side of the bed.  He had an easy time getting to sleep, so by the time he finally went to sleep it was very late.  The wait felt like it was never going to end.  I was always so relieved when he began breathing slowly and fell asleep.  Sometimes I was never given the gift of him falling asleep, so instead he went in the other room to surf on the computer.  During all of this three small children were trying to sleep as well.  My seven year old daughter and five year old son were across the hall, and my two year old son was in his crib in the same room as us.  Their ages really don't make a difference because all of this had been going on for their entire lives.  Heaven forbid that I woke any of them up by upsetting my husband.  This was becoming everyone's nightly routine, but it usually started quite early in the day and dragged into the night.  Really, it felt constant.  It had been going on for years, but it was happening more than it had in the past.  Needless to say, my plan to escape through the window was never going to work.  He would have heard me rattling around and found me trying to get out.  My imagination would run wild with vivid images of what he would have done to me if he knew I wanted to leave.  Dragging me back out of the spare room, and… maybe I wouldn't have ever came out of that room.   

    Another thought that I had was leaving in the car, but I hadn't driven in five years, so to me that was barely an option.  It made me nervous to think about getting behind the wheel again.  We only had one car, and I never went anywhere alone.  We packed up all three kids, and went everywhere that we need to go together.  I imagined a movie like escape in the middle of the night.  I might have pretended that I was getting up to go to the bathroom or to check on one of the kids.  As quietly and as quickly as possible I would get dressed, tiptoe to get the car keys, slip out of the door and speed away.  At that time of night my rusty driving skills wouldn't have made much difference.  Maybe I would have gotten pulled over and I could have told the policeman my story.  The same fears about escaping through the window haunted this plan as well.  What if he heard me before I made it out of the house?  What if I was almost to the car and he came bolting out of the front door?  I didn't believe that I could make it all the way to the car, lock the door, and drive to freedom without being caught.  If I did make it I would be leaving my children behind.  I had no idea that once I was away from him and people knew what had been going on behind closed doors that I would be given custody of my children.  Naive ignorance was keeping me from doing what I knew needed to be done.

    I continued to search for a get away that I felt was possible.  I finally came to me.  I often took walks around our neighborhood.  It may sound silly, but they were a little taste of freedom, of the real world outside my hell.  Sometimes I couldn't believe that he let me have that time to myself, but that was how he labelled it.  He was "letting me take a break from the kids".  There were times that I wanted to take a walk because I was angry and he wouldn't "let" me through the front door.  When I was outside, I walked through a beautifully oblivious neighborhood, unknowing of the horrors happening at my house.  The streets were lined with cherry trees that snowed their blossoms in the spring.  Green lawns were manicured and landscaped with colorful bushes and flowers.  All of the houses were different.  It wasn't one of those cookie cutter subdivisions.  The roads were hilly and windy, not just flat and boring.  Kids rode past me laughing on their bikes, and dogs barked at me guarding their families.  Dads washed cars, and moms pulled weeds.  I almost felt normal during these short outings, like I was going back to a normal house on a normal street.  But I wasn't.  After my walk I returned to my normal.  I always went back, hoping that he had calmed down.  Usually, he hadn't.  He was still his normal too.

    Every once in a while my walks took me to the park that was in our neighborhood.  That was where I went if I didn't feel like walking, but needed to regroup my thoughts and just sit somewhere for a while.  I always hoped that there wouldn't be anyone there when I got there, because I was usually crying.  I didn't know what I would say if someone had asked me what was wrong.  The park had a small playground and a good sized lake that the sun set into.  It was relaxing to me to watch the breeze move the water.  One of the last times that I walked that way was a cold, gloomy October afternoon.  It had been raining so it was a bit muddy and sloppy as I went down the gravel road to the park.  This time I went there with a specific purpose.  At the end of the lake that was a tall chain link fence.  I wanted to see if it went out into the water or stopped in the sand.  Even if this fence did into the water, I didn't care because I would have gone up and over it if I had to.  The park was going to be my way out.

    The fence did end at the water and was surrounded by tall grass and wet, muddy leaves.  Because I could simply go around the end of the fence, I needed to see where I was going to end up.  The land on the other side of the fence was not cleared, but was wooded and littered with dead leaves.  Still I had to know that I could get through if I had to.  I ended up just down the street from the two large gas stations and several restaurants that were near the express way south of the neighborhood.  I knew that leaving in that direction would be safer than just running through the the neighborhood where he would find me if he started out in the car.  I was even afraid to leave and ask the neighbors I knew around our house for help, afraid that he might see me go into their house and fight his way inside.  Now I had a plan.  It was going to work, but I didn't leave that day. Not yet.  I still walked back up the road to my house, but it felt empowering to know something that my husband didn't.  I knew how I was going to get away from him.

    On a particularly bad day I decided that it was time to leave.  I took a walk down to the park.  I paced down by the lake, quickly losing my nerve.  Not because I wanted to stay, but because my kids would still be in the house.  It was around eleven o'clock in the morning, because I remember that my son was going to be getting off the bus after his half day of kindergarten shortly.  My mind was suddenly full of questions and doubts.  I couldn't focus.  Do I leave without my kids and then come back for them?  Would I see them again if I left?  Did they even need me?  Would he disappear with them?  How long would it take him to realize that I wasn't coming back to the house?

    I could hear the school bus engine driving around the block as I stood at the bottom of our street in total confusion and panic.  More pacing back and forth.  I thought about at least taking my son with me.  If I called him from where I was standing would he hear me?  Would my husband hear me?  He would know something was wrong because my son didn't go into the house and the bus had just been outside.  Even if I managed to get my son down to me unnoticed, my daughter was still at school and my youngest son was still in the house.  The thought of leaving them with him scared me to death.  I stood frozen as the bus stopped in front of our house at the top of the hill, as my son got out, and as he ran to the front door.  He had no idea what I was planning to do, what I hoped I could do, what I wished I had done.  My feet felt like bricks as I trudged up the hill.  I couldn't leave without my children.