Dear “Unlikely Girl”

Dearest Unlikely Girl,

This is the first time I’ve ever written this down. This is the first time that I’ve actually put pen to paper and shared any REAL level of details on the abuse that occurred in my marriage. But here it goes. I’m doing this scared. This is long. I think it’s worth a read if you have time.

Hi, I’m E. I’m 38 with two kids and after 12 years of marriage to a human I hardly recognize anymore, I said “No more.”

I made a safety plan, called my parents, the police, my pastor and his wife and I left. I had two bags of dirty clothes, a golden-doodle and my two sweet kiddos. We rode in silence for hours until I decided we needed some 90s music or a Disney sing along- so typical. Well, that’s the short version. There’s a bit more to the story.

You see, I never told anyone. I’m a professional counselor- never in my wildest dreams did I think this would happen. I couldn’t even be honest with myself about what was happening. Because it shouldn’t happen, right? Not to people like me! (how silly is that?) I’m an “unlikely girl,” and I’m writing this letter because you might be too.

I’m a Jesus loving girl, whose hobbies consist of reading homeschool books, gardening, and writing. I like babies, golden-doodles and Hallmark movies.

Ive never considered myself a perfect catch, but I sure wasn’t a bump on a log as a wife. I could talk to the wall, remembered all his family’s birthdays, wrote thank you notes, homeschooled the kids, made bread, tried to keep a clean house AND work remotely as a writer. But, yes, balls were dropped. Clothes were dirty. It happens.

I couldn’t ever figure out what else I could do to be good enough. I was NEVER good enough. I didn’t realize how far I was going to keep our family life afloat, balancing the eggshell walk around the narcissistic rage.

In fact, it wasn’t until I broke my leg and found myself cleaning in a cast out of fear of the response when he got home and the “things” weren’t done.

But at some moment, I sat down on my black and blue swollen leg in the floor, and there on the cold tile, a lightbulb went off. I sat on a dirty bathroom floor, in panic that my “checklist” wouldn’t be done before he got home.

It was then, that I openly received one of the most horrific days of my life, the day I realized my marriage was a lie. Not all of it, of course. But the snowball effect of the downward spiral was clear now.

In reality, my awakening didn’t happen as swiftly as it probably should have. But within days, small portions of the scales fell off and I realized, I was married to a narcissist.

The problem, the fear and anxiety, the constant striving was because of HIM and not because of me. This took a while to swallow.

Days passed and my thoughts were everywhere, “How could this be?” “He’s so charming, all American.” “He’s like a real life pediatrician.” “He’s one of the good ones, right?”

“But my dear girl,” I told myself, “he’s also a pathological liar and deceiver. Enough is enough. Remember who you are!”

So, here I am, writing this memoir of sorts. Equal parts terrified and also feeling like someone opened the closed bird cage for the first time. I’m only just now stretching my wings, creeping towards the open door, not yet sure of my path.

I’m anxious about sharing at all, of course. Covert is his game. Silence is his weapon of choice.

His false self is meticulously rolled out. High level, high paying job, sports car, teaches soccer, Eagle Scout, helps the elderly cross the road, knows how to cook- at this rate he’s more of a candidate for “Good Housekeeper of the Year”than I am. But know I know it’s a game and frankly, he’s very good at it.

That’s exactly why I was quiet. I had no visible bruises. No documentation. No recordings or witnesses. I know what that means- I’m a COUNSELOR- a mandated report for goodness sakes. Of course, everyone loves him. “He would never do ____.” “He’s such a Renaissance man.” “You are just so lucky.”

No girl. I’m not lucky. I’m tired and he’s a liar. But the lying I’ve done to myself has to stop and maybe it does for you too.

So, I’m writing this for the girl who might be on the fence thinking maybe he isn’t “that bad.” Maybe “he doesn’t hit you,” either. Maybe he “only drinks when he’s stressed.”

Sweet girl, love is many things in many ways- but it is not this. PLEASE hear me say this loudly. A person cannot and should not do ANY of these things to you, in this way. This is not love. Maybe you haven’t seen love before in real life, so it can be confusing. But I know without a doubt, this isn’t it. If you want to know more about love, I’ll be happy to share with you about the love of my life, Jesus. This, this is definitely not it.

I’m here in blind faith writing this letter, basically just knowing I need to just say it to someone. Even a stranger on the internet or a patron buying a magazine, might need to hear this message, I guess.

Abuse of this kind is different than much of what we’ve been taught. Not just because the “abuser” looks different but because of what it does to the one on the receiving end.

I’ve been scared to just be a normal person anymore. I have always been so happy go lucky all the time, always in a good mood, peppy, I love people and life. But that started to dwindle. Slowly but surely.

I didn’t laugh anymore when he was home. I stopped making music, painting or all the things I used to do in good times. I stacked my plate with a million tasks to complete for his approval. Maybe if I was thinner, made more money, said the right things, secretly knowing it really didn’t matter. The fact remained that I ignored all the signs and abuse until one day, he found a new supply and I became the discard.

I admitted to family and close friends that something was wrong. It shouldn’t be like this.. I told them of incidents I kept quiet for years, just trying to care for the children. But I admittedly have shouldered a lot over these 12 years. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this iceberg.

It’s hard to believe, but the downfall became clear one normal Saturday morning. He sat down on one side of the couch while our six year old played with her toy horses on the floor at our feet.

I sat on one end of the couch drinking coffee and preparing myself for my usual weekend “clean to his expectations” “recreational” time period.

I braced myself for his weekend expectation list. But rather than hearing the list I anticipated, I took a sip of coffee, he looked at me blankly ans with no emotion said “I don’t love you anymore, I want a divorce.”

I just stared at him. Dumbfounded. Wait, what?

The suffering narrative we had been living for years seemed like it was already too much. I think I may have even zoned out to some extent as he listed some irrelevant reasons for ending our 12 year marriage.

I had just had a freak fall on vacation and broke my leg. 7 miscarriages and one still birth in 7 years. My intake button was broken.

Yet, somehow I listened to him go on for an hour, still staring blankly at him and quietly sipping my coffee. Eventually as his temperature began to rise, his voice got louder, the accusations and projections stronger and once he was done, I let the tears roll down my cheeks. But, not for him, he didn’t deserve them.

He puffed off to the outside porch. In that moment, I got up, I took my 2 children to my room, shut the door and without even knowing it, I said no. Not loudly yet, actually not even out loud, especially to my kids… at that point I was only quietly saying “no” over and over again in my head until I had everything prepared. But it was time to wake up. Wake up, Erin!

I gave the kids their iPads and began putting things in a laptop backpack I grabbed from my closet. I put one charger and one notebook in it first. Then, I hid it under a heap of clothes in my closet. over the next three days, I accumulated the basics and kept life going normally for the children. They played with friends while I made lists, took photos, made a plan.

I slept on my cell phone. I had one hand on each child as they slept every night. I taped index cards of Bible verses of protection on the headboard of the bed, the doorways, the closet, the mirrors. I put Psalm 91 in scratchy purple ink on an index card and put it under their pillows as they slept with me in the night’s preceding my planned exit of safety.

I knew I could do this.

But, then one night, I felt the temperature increase, the urgency of safety dominated my thinking. The night before I left, I knew he was watching me- in the dimly lit master bedroom as I slept with the children. The dog growled quietly and had woken me up. But realizing quickly where I was, I pretended to sleep with my forearm on my head. With a crack of one eye, I could see that his shadow was cast on the outside of my bedroom door…. Standing in the shadows, watching me sleep. At one point, he went into the Master bedroom closet through our room and I heard him in my closet. Later, in court, I heard he had found my bag hidden in there.

Moments passed so slowly and my heart raced. Knowingly, I breathed deeply in the dark, realizing that the rise and fall of my chest meant the difference between leaving when I felt safe or risking the rage that would ensue if I took the children when he knew about it. Eyes half shut, I practiced breathing slowly until the shadow from my doorway disappeared. I felt under my chest to make sure my phone was still there. It was. After he closed the door to the room where he was sleeping, I quietly tucked another index card of Psalm 91 under my pillow. “I lie down in safety” repeated over and over in my head until I drifted off.

By the time I left that afternoon, I had nothing but a backpack with underclothing, a small notebook of phone numbers, a new safe phone, my travel Bible and my kids vaccine cards. That’s it.

I walked straight out the front door with my goldendoodle in the front seat. I drove to the church to pick up my kids from VBS while he was at work. I shared my plans with a police officer friend. Then carefully, I ditched the car, the phone, and ultimately a very expensive lifestyle. I didn’t care. I still don’t. Money is a moot point to true freedom and anticipated healing.

But these Narcs, they never really go away forever when there are children, do they? It’s like a chess game, wondering if every next move is going to be “check mate.” The kids are just pawns, really. Pieces on the board of the strategy game.

On our first custody exchange, I went back to our empty, expensive house to get a few more things. As I stepped onto the threshold of the front porch, the door unlocked. How kind of him to let me in and waiting on me through the doorway camera. The deputy politely asked me if I had a protective order, I laughed. At this rate, did it matter? He followed me into the house and in each bedroom. I just wanted mainly books and my clothes, but it felt like a marathon in front of me.

When I walked in, the air was chilling cold, yet it was the middle of the summer. Unknowingly, I walked into the master bedroom where the door was shut. It was odd, we never shut the doors in our house in the summer. It’s too hot. But I realized why it was shut. I walked into our master bedroom with the sheriff’s deputy at my heels, to find that not a single item I owned was in a drawer or closet. No trace of me, anywhere. I opened every drawer… nothing. I went to the bathroom- nothing. I walked into my once filled beautiful master closet, only to see five suits, three pairs of shoes, and not a single item I owned. I sobbed uncontrollably. It was like someone had hit the erase button on the DVR of my marriage and my life.

I walked across the hall and he had neatly packed up everything I owned and labeled it in bins in our guest room. Floor to ceiling storage totes. Along with every portrait from our wedding, all of the baby items I had saved for my desire to adopt a child, and life sized photos of our now shattered family. Not a single item of mine was in the house. Down to my “Homeschool Mom” coffee cup and pathetic gluten free pasta. He had labeled each bin with its contents, including my wedding dress and the notebook of letters I had written to my future husband. One of the entries was a letter I wrote to him on our wedding day. A day that now only feels like a dream starring someone else.

After my initial inventory of the guest room “bins of my life,” I noticed on the dresser in the master that our stillborn son’s ashes were missing. He passed in April of 2020.

I felt unsettled and so I asked about them in front of the deputy. He said they were locked up and we would discuss it in court. Of course we would, I thought.

My stomach flipped. I knew he had done something. We just know, don’t we?

But I walked out out the house, too tired from this emotional vacuum and I took the frame of my baby’s last photo with me. Before I left, I had slipped one of his blue small knit bootie socks, into the bottom of my backpack. “Some things were just for Mama and Malachi,” I thought.

A few weeks later, I went back to the “marital residence”as they now called it after he had summer visitation for three weeks with the kids. Those three weeks felt like a lifetime of both pain and sadness. Mothers should always be with their babies. Now I knew this on a level, I had never known before. The space where one darling girl with blond ringlets slept with her hand on my back, felt desperately empty. I couldn’t drink coffee for weeks because the sweet, curious boy who made the best coffee for his mama in the mornings wasn’t there to bribe me for screen time before school with a steaming cup of coffee in bed.

After those three weeks, a night in hotel, and watching every video of my children I ever took, I’ll never forget pulling into that driveway to pick them up from what used to be our family home. I opened my door to the sweltering Savannah heat and within seconds, I was holding my golden haired children tightly in my grasp, feeling a wash of relief unlike I’d never felt.

This reunification wasn’t without its own chapter of drama of course.

As I packed the kids things into the car, he “allowed me”to go into the house for some books he had packed for our new upcoming homeschool year. Being on guard and mainly concerned with getting my children, I went only into one main room of the house. This room, our library, was my favorite because of its natural light from all the windows. Knowing its close proximity to the front door, and being in clear view of the door and with the children each time, I only halfway checked the items I had. He attempted to pack some things for me, but I knew this game. Being alone with him in that home that was once ours would and will never happen again.

Again, listening to my gut, I saw his energy as palpable, so I asked about the ashes of our son. He started shifting his weight, acting oddly uncomfortable. He cleared his throat 17 times as though I wasn’t familiar with that incredibly annoying tic that occurred under his covert emotionally manipulation, or his now (obvious to me) lying or projection attempts.

Of course, then he asked why I wanted to see them. Nonchalantly I told him I just wanted to “ensure they were safe.” He bought it, thankfully.

I stood quietly in the dining room by the window, scanning the room, noticing things were different in a way that only a homemaker would notice. A plant moved here, wine glasses missing, my table runner missing, things like that.

He went to the large safe in the master closet, the one he wouldn’t allow me to access. The safe that very well could be larger than my car and took residence in my former closet. I never knew what was in it- although, I assumed a large number of weapons according to the credit card bill.

After hearing him type the code and opening the safe, he rustled around before shutting the safe door and walked into the dining room where I stood by the window, always ensuring our distance and having the door in eyesight. There he stood, acting nervous, holding a chipped box that looked like it had been trampled. He slid open the lid slowly, like I wouldn’t notice the condition of the house of the wooden, hand carved box.

Just as I suspected… instead of a large bag of ashes, sealed with my son’s name and birthday, he held up a tiny fingers worth of ashes, my necklace with his ashes and the urn… which was empty. He tried to change the subject by asking about the necklace, but obviously refusing to give me any of it.

My body screamed in agony and frustration. Yet on the outside, I didn’t react. I had learned by now how to ensure my safety… How to preserve my emotional energy and quite frankly in some cases, my very life. I didn’t know that then, but I suppose I do now.

Me Being silent made him nervous, I didn’t do that often. He launched into a story about how “the dog” had gotten the box out of my jewelry drawer and chewed it up, so that’s why it was scratched. But “see, it’s fine,” he said. I nodded. Not in agreement, but in understanding. This was his story and he was sticking to it.

I just blinked blankly at him.

Oh, you cowardly man.

You actually thought that a grieving mother wouldn’t notice that her baby’s ashes were almost gone? You thought thAt she wouldn’t know the quantity of the remaining ashes of her stillborn son?

You didn’t think she may have inventoried it a thousand times or sat in a chair in her bedroom and stared at for days after his death?

A mother knows.

Yet. Still. The comedic portion of it was hard to ignore.

The dog? The goldendoodle with opposable thumbs?

The dog retrieved the box of ashes?

The box, that was sealed with a screw?

The box was taken from my closed closet door from inside a large jewelry stand?

That box was obtained by who??

A goldendoodle who enjoys costume jewelry??Just no. NO. I said it loudly this time. Only the difference is, my “no” wasn’t just a word, this time it was a walking away command.

I was angry. Livid. I’m still angry.

But I’m angry in a more definitive way, really. Because now I know how low he can go and frankly, that makes my steps much easier to determine.

After I saw the box contents, I immediately felt that fight or flight response and I quickly changed the subject and left. Again, we learn quickly. Always listen to your bodies, friends. Listening to our body’s natural fear, I’ve learned, can be a gift in disguise.

The level of hatred and violence that was represented in that exchange has just chilled me to the bone.

I picked up the books, put the kids in the car and drove 8 hours to my parent’s house. Again and again with each action, I said “no.” “NO MORE.

In true honesty, I haven’t told many people about the ashes of my son or the behavior that occurred as a blatant warning to my very soul.

So why am I writing this, you ask? I’m writing this because I can’t believe I am ACTUALLY writing this… I’m writing this to the “unlikely” girl.

I thought I would be the most unlikely candidate.

I mean, I have a therapist, so many supportive friends, wonderful family and yet, I want them to understand what this is lie, this type of abuse. It’s presentation is so different than the brochures we get in the mail or see on the back of the bathroom stalls in public restrooms. The level of covert evil is unprecedented, so undetectable.

I suppose I’m also wondering how many of us “unlikely girls” got here?!

The audience of all my sweet, loving Christian friends can’t ever imagine this happening to a trained counselor. They say it’s there worst nightmare. They can’t imagine their husband doing that…

WELL, Karen, neither could I, but here I am. 38, broke, mid life chunky from stress, two kids and living with my parents. I’m a dream girl, I tell you.

Really what I want to say is this- It can happen to ANYONE.

The trauma is unreal, so tangibly evil and yet so hidden from the world. I wanted to write this not just for me, but knowing that there may be MANY someone(s) like me.

So if you’ve been in a car full of bins filled with stuff you really don’t want to deal with, a trash bag of laundry, some kids and a scruffy pup in your front seat… just know, it could happen to any of us and you are worth infinitely more that what you’ve been given.

Sometimes your past is in the rear view mirror for a while. It feels like it’s just constantly riding your take.

But eventually all of those bags and bins will be unpacked, your heart will be centered and you’ll know you did the right thing. For the first time in a long time, your body will feel safe. Subtly at first, but then securely.

If you are the “unlikely” girl. Remember there is no such thing. Abuse of any kind is NOT love and you CAN say “no.”

Signed,

The Unlikely Girl