Making a Statement

You want a written statement, your honor? I'll do you one better. I'll paint you a picture. I'll tell you a story.

Once upon a time...and every day thereafter…

“Why do you have a secret bank account?” he asks, out of the blue.

“What?” I respond, startled.

“Your secret bank account. Why do you have it? It’s okay that you do, I just want to know why.”

“My account isn’t secret. You know about it and I gave you the passwords to access it.”

“I’m talking about the other account.”

“There is no other account.”

“I saw that you transferred money into it.”

“I don’t know how you saw that, since I never did it.”

“Where did all the money go then?”

“You spent it on Transformer dolls and bullet reloading supplies at Sportsman’s.”

We go on like this for hours. I ask him to show me the transfers he’s talking about, but he won’t. He refuses to believe I don’t have a secret account, insisting over and over again that it’s okay I do, but he doesn’t know why I won’t tell him about it.

I shift into ignoring him, going about my day, taking care of things. He follows me, continuing with the questions, the harassment. I answer his questions honestly for a few hours. Then I begin to get upset. He won’t leave me alone. He won’t stop. He does this all the time. He has made up this story in his head to blame me for his mistakes. Again.

This goes on for days. My only respite is going to work. I get home and am glad that he is in bed. But he got to sleep all day so he goes after me all night. Same questions, over and over and over. He doesn’t hear the responses, except for the ones that make him angry. I beg him to stop. I tell him I have to work in the morning. He won’t stop. I leave and go upstairs to the guest room. I lock the door. He yells through the door. He gets the key and unlocks the door and comes in and keeps going. I go back downstairs because I don’t want him waking up the kids. I want to get in the car and drive away but I can’t leave my children there alone with him. I beg, I plead, I cry for him to stop it and leave me alone. He won’t stop. I go into our closet and curl up in the corner in a fetal position, sobbing and screaming and broken into pieces. He follows me and stands over me, still talk, talk, talking. He just wants to know about my secret account. That’s all. He just wants me to admit I have it. His voice is calm now. He doesn’t understand why I’m so upset. “Tell me why you’re so upset,” he asks, so full of concern. I shut down. I have nothing. I am nothing. I stop crying and get up and go lay down in bed. I have no choice but to wait until it’s time to get ready for work.

Now he wants to have sex to fix things, to make himself feel better. I laugh in his face. I am beyond being broken by him, now. Now, I just hate him. He gets angry. I don’t care. Monsters are always angry. I grew out of being afraid of monsters a long time ago. He yells at me, threatens me, I just look at him. I hope he attacks me. I hope he leaves a bruise that people can see. But he doesn’t. It’s just emotional terrorism. Just emotional battery. He doesn’t hit with his fists. His weapon is his sick mind. His twisted words. His deluded imagination that is his only known reality. My scars run so deep I am sliced into a thousand different pieces. But not a single bruise that people can see. That is what the police like. What the judges like. The bruises they can see. That is what matches up the tidiest with the lines in their law books.

The next week, he goes on and on with his old tirades, but adds something new. Now, I am also being stalked by a sex predator. I shouldn’t go to work he says. I need to be careful he says. He got a call in the middle of the night from someone warning him that someone was after me. I ask to see his phone. There is only one outgoing call from that night to a scam background check company he has given money to before. “You’re a lunatic,” I say. He doesn’t like that very much.

This is my life, over and over and over again with him. There will be a few days, sometimes even a few weeks of him acting like a human, and then a delusion hits or an obsession resurfaces and I am harassed, manipulated, threatened, until I wonder if his lies are the truth and I am the crazy. For it is always my fault. Everything of his crazy is my fault. The kids try to protect me. They don’t allow us in a room alone together. They sleep next to my bed on the floor. They yell at him and tell him to leave me alone.

I see them trying to protect me and it wakes me up a little bit. He abuses his medication again and ends up in the ER again. He accuses me of “attempted homicide” because I “let” him overdose. I tell him not to come home. Finally, I free myself from him. I divorce him. He loses it even more and stalks and harasses and threatens me. I get a protective order. He does not follow the order. He shows up at my home. He stalks me at my church. He calls my work. He texts and emails incessantly. He goes to jail over and over again. He gets bailed out, and starts at it again. All of it is my fault. And now, he starts on the kids.

“What is your mom doing right now? Is she on a date? Has she been on any dates? Does she have a boyfriend? It’s okay, you can tell me,” they hear from him over and over. They are uncomfortable. They don’t want to answer his questions. My daughter gets tired of him and goes up to her room. He follows her. He yells questions through her door. He demands she answer him, that she obey him. She tells him to go away. He won’t stop. She screams at him, calls him names, tells him he’s crazy. He is so hurt, so wounded, so victimized. He hasn’t done anything to deserve this treatment, he professes. And he still won’t stop.

He goes to my son. My son answers in short, one-word responses. He feels uncomfortable with the interrogation and the ranting, but he is ten years old and he doesn’t want to make his dad mad. He turns inside of himself. He doesn’t lash out. He doesn’t scream. But he feels afraid. He pulls his hair out of his head and wets himself.

“I didn’t want a divorce. I didn’t do anything wrong. Your mom is overreacting. It’s not my fault.” They hear, over and over.

“I have evidence you didn’t really go camping this week like your mom said you were,” he tells them, even though we actually were camping. His delusions frighten them.

“You’re never going to see your grandparents again. I have a protective order against them,” he threatens. They know he is lying but they still feel afraid.

“Your mom is going to be in trouble with the law if you don’t sleep over here,” he says to them when they want to go home because they are exhausted from his tirades.

He wants to take the kids for a ride, but they don’t want to go. His eyes are red. His speech is slurred. He can’t walk straight. They don’t want to get into a car with him. They don’t want to get on a 4-wheeler with him.

He loses it even more. He tries to kidnap the kids from church. He breaks into my house when he thinks no one is home but my daughter is there and she is terrified and runs away from him out into the street in the cold rain to a neighbor’s house she doesn’t even know. She’d rather run to a stranger than her father. Even when he is being “nice” the kids are uncomfortable. They sense something off, something wrong, something creepy about him and they don’t like it. They don’t want to mistrust their dad. They don’t want to think of him as crazy and a liar. They don’t know how else to keep themselves safe besides refuse to see him. To hate him. To keep him away from them.

But they don’t have any bruises anyone can see.

I hereby declare that the above statement is true and correct to the best of my knowledge and belief.