The first time I thought of leaving my husband I was just 8 weeks pregnant.
He was unemployed again and spent his days parked on the couch without a care or worry.
“I’ll get a job when I need to, just stop to talk,” he would say in his thick French accent. The accent wasn’t sexy anymore. It had lost all of its luster.
Then there was also his complete unwillingness to improve our relationship. But instead of leaving him - I kicked him out. Two weeks later and two marriage counseling sessions I took him back.
I didn’t want to give up the chance, a fat chance, but still a chance that maybe he would be a better husband once the baby arrived.
Some men do change.
He wouldn’t.
It actually just got worse.
When I was five months pregnant we moved into a bigger apartment. In full nesting mode, I wanted to get everything unpacked.
Boxes were everywhere.
I did what I could. After work I’d come home and unpack. Soon I had managed to clear every small box and scoot every light piece of furniture and even decorate most of the walls.
But there were still piles and piles of boxes too heavy for me to lift. Days went by and the boxes sat there. Every night I would ask him to move them and every morning I’d wake up and they’d be in the same spot.
Finally I started crying, pleading with him - practically begging, “can you please just move them? I’ll tell you where they need to go.”
“Why? Why right now? I’ll get to it,” he yells from his spot on the couch.
And then it happened. He picked up a heavy medium sized box and threw it at me.
The box barely missed my pregnant belly and hit me in the knees. I kept my balance and then, shocked by what just happened, felt a little scared. I realized that I actually didn’t know this man at all. I didn’t know who he was when we got I married and I didn’t know him now. But I was pregnant with his child, “No,” I remember thinking, “this is not his child, this is my child.”
It was a whirlwind marriage.
We met and fell in love. But to stay together I would have to marry him. There was no other way for my husband, a French Canadian, to remain in the U.S. I chose love and so did he. In fact, he didn’t even intend to stay here.
They called us fools and we were. Soon I realized how ill matched we really were but I still loved him, I wanted it to work.
One year in, I got pregnant. It was an accident but - despite my marital problems - there was no way I wasn’t having the baby. How couldn’t I? I could feel Benjamin inside of me and I had already fallen in love. I suddenly knew why I had met my husband. Destiny, it seemed, had a little surprise up her sleeve.
For the remainder of my pregnancy I focused solely on myself and the baby. I would talk to Benjamin while he was growing, patting my stomach and telling him everything was going to be okay.
Meanwhile my relationship with my husband continued to deteriorate.
The fights and the violence continued and one night he actually pushed me - belly and face forward - into the stairs.
I caught myself with my arms saving the baby from the impact. I didn’t tell anyone about it. Not a soul. I was ashamed that I was married to such a creep. I couldn’t leave him though. Not then, not while I was pregnant. Instead I chose to play the happy little wife to keep everything calm and relatively peaceful.
Three months after Benjamin was born my husband came home early from work.
“I got fired,” he told me. There would be no discussion. No conversation about what to do next. As always, we didn’t really have a relationship.
Later that week he told me he wouldn’t be finding a new job and that he would be a stay at home dad. This was a financial impossibility. I had just finished three months of unpaid maternity leave. Now my husband was officially giving me nothing. He wasn’t bringing in an income, wasn’t sleeping with me and he wasn’t even there for me emotionally. He was useless to me.
But, he’s Benjamin’s father… I thought I needed him. And what would I do? How would I leave him?
I had been playing the guilt cards delicately in my mind, avoiding reality for too long and in turn, effectively overlooking it all - giving myself one reason or another to stay.
And then my moment came. He was pounding on our bedroom door. My body was pressed up against the wood, my cheek against the grain. Benjamin was nestled in our bedspread - listening to it all. Yes. He couldn’t understand. But then it dawned on me - if I stayed with this man, my son would one day grow up and speak to women this way, or worse, treat me this way.
And that was that.
Having no father at all, or one who is barely around, can’t be worse than living with a father like this. And if this was what marriage was like, or my marriage - then I’d rather be single and alone.
Was I really going to give up my entire life or any chance of happiness just so my son could have a father in the house? Did I want Benjamin to grow up with miserable parents who were only together for him?
For some women this is possible. For me - not an option.
So I did it. I left him.
When I told him I was leaving he looked defeated. For a moment, the anger between us was gone and I realized that I was doing the right thing - for both of us - for all three of us. This was a mistake from the beginning.
He refused to leave the apartment, giving me no option other than to uproot our lives and move with a newborn. I left my career, my friends - everything I had worked for - and moved in with my mother, who lived hours away in my hometown.
The first night at my mother’s house I started crying hysterically.
A rock up until that moment, I had suddenly become overwhelmed with the reality of what I had just done. And my husband, what would he do? All alone in our now empty apartment. It’s funny now to think I was actually worried about how he would make it without me. I had no idea what I was about to go through myself.
I was now a single mom. I took it one day at a time. I didn’t think about the future or how I would get back to the city and back to my career. I just buckled in for the ride.
There are no words to describe the year that followed. I survived by facing my fears but not letting them consume me. My maternal instincts were also in full gear. I was still breastfeeding and all I could think about was keeping my baby happy and healthy. That helped take my mind off of everything else. We were hibernating, hiding from the world until I could get us back to it.
Somehow I would.
Just under one year later I found an even better job in the city and moved back. Now I’m completely supporting myself and my son.
I know there are so many women out there in horrible marriages, sucking it up for the sake of their children or because they have no way to leave him financially and it’s those women who my heart really goes out to. Sometimes I look at my life in two alternate universes or scenarios. What if I would have stayed?
I can’t even imagine…
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