After I was released from jail I spent the next month at my
friend’s home until after the hearing in the family law court where my case
was dismissed with prejudice. The court refused to sanction my husband’s
attempts to get a restraining order against me and I finally returned home. My
friend’s thought it would be a good idea to have an impromptu “welcome home”
party to show my husband that I had friends who were supportive of me.
They all came over armed with food and drinks. My husband
went up to our former bedroom and hid while they ate dinner with me. He neither
spoke to anyone nor greeted any of them though he had known them for years.
When dinner was done, everyone walked up to my daughter’s
former bedroom where I had been sleeping the past few years and were horrified
at what they found.
They could barely open the door. In the brief space of time
that I had been gone from the house, my husband had taken everything he could
get his hands on and dumped it into that room. It was piled from floor to
ceiling with crap. It was just his way
of making me feel totally unwelcome. It was literally Fibber McGee’s closet.
You couldn’t even open the door all the way because it was blocked.
For the next several hours, my friends formed a chain gang
and carried stuff out of the room and dumped it downstairs in the garage until
there was finally enough room for me to walk in and the bed was cleared of
debris. Every once in a while he would come out of his hidey hole and pass the
chain gang cleaning out the room with a polite “excuse me” as if nothing at all
were amiss.
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| The view from the door |
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| The mound on the bed |
Everyone was extremely nervous about me returning home,
convinced that he would try to find some way to set me up to accuse me of
domestic violence again. I was left with explicit instructions and pleas that I
would never be caught alone with him in anyway and would stay in my room until
he left for work and blockade the door with furniture at night. They called me each
morning and each night to make sure I was okay and panicked if I didn’t answer.
My son later confessed to me that he was seriously afraid that my husband would
try to kill me or do me harm and was having panic attacks from the stress while at
school. He acted as my protector and always stayed nearby me.
My stay there wasn’t to last. Despite all my heroic efforts
to save the house through a government program (with the help of some real
estate attorneys) the house was about to go into default because of my husband
being out of work and not paying the mortgage in over a year. I was forced to
move again. Despite the fact that I had
no money, he left all the packing and moving of a three bedroom house
completely to me when it came time for me to move into my own place.
Adding to the stress of the move were the emergency calls I
would get because my high school son (at the time) was having disabling panic
attacks at school. The school was very considerate and helpful to him. They
referred me to the same toll free numbers for victims of domestic violence and
support groups. The school also said that the district would provide counseling
for my son at school if I did not get him one soon. My therapist soon referred
me to one. After I made the appointments, I was shocked to find out that my
husband had canceled them and forbid me to take my son to the counseling he
desperately needed. My son was so frustrated. After counseling and guidance
from his school, he made arrangements with a friend of his to pick him up from
his home and left his childhood home and stayed with them until he could move in with me elsewhere. It took me
months and hundreds of dollars to get a court order for my son to see a
therapist in order to get treatment for his anxiety attacks. In the meantime I agonized
while I watched him suffer, feeling totally helpless.
To this day, I do not understand, why, if my husband was so
convinced that if I was this "abusive mother", he would try to stop professional
therapy for his children. I finally got my court order and my son was able to get the help he needed but he really resented his father's interference.
