Collect Clues, Not Wrongs

Hands and voice shaking in equal parts fury and fear, I stared him in the eyes and said:

I don't think you understand how serious I was, or how far I would go to protect my kids.

I said this after physically shoving him to stop him from going after my daughter, which made him furious and made me actually fear him for the first time in our marriage.

I am recounting it to you from the journal I finally decided to keep.

You see, I was a Good Christian Wife, and I knew that love does not keep track of wrongs. That was what I told myself to forget the stories, the pain, the trauma.

I don't gravitate toward anger or negativity in general, and I knew if I started keeping track of the things he'd done, I'd become an angry, bitter hag. I didn't want that for my kids or for me. I wanted to keep trying.

Every night, I'd fall asleep quickly, exhausted. And every night, my nervous system would fire and I would jerk awake, heart racing, seeking the threat.

Every night, I would wake at the smallest sounds.

Every day, I wore myself out scanning for those same threats, being the shield.

It was never overt. That's what made it so hard to believe. It was a thousand little cuts.

The time when one child got angry at being hurt by the carelessness of another:

someone protect me please dad was yelling at me cause he's pissed at me for being mad at j for hitting me with an arrow in the face and i swore and he's all pissed and went from talking about j to being pissed at me for swearing and im in here crying and he turned the router off so i cant talk to mom help please

The time when, for reasons I have never been able to discern, a grown man turned to the 7-year-old who had just sat down next to him on the couch and yelled, "Fuck you!"

But love does not keep track of wrongs.

One day, I realized something and though it is tearing me in pieces to write this, I feel that you need to see this, because if someone had reframed it for me earlier, I might have been able to leave earlier. A 7-year-old would be unscathed. And these tears wouldn't be threatening now.

What if they're not "wrongs," but instead "clues"?

What if, instead of finding things to hold against him, I told myself I was simply collecting data?

I began doing just that, and it took me 26 entries to see clearly.

Then I left.

I have been meaning to write this for months, but I fear that I cannot be the gentle coparent if I really see how much hurt is still there.

For what it's worth, he came to me a couple of months ago, telling me how he falls asleep so quickly, then jerks awake. How he wakes at the smallest sounds now.

I am sleeping safely for the first time in two decades.

Collect the data, not the wounds. And let the pattern speak its own truth.