Post #9 ~Part 3 - The Loss Before the Violence

Not long after I told myself I had it under control, I found out I was pregnant.

Before I used again, I had started feeling off. I knew I was late. Something in me said, Take a test first.

His mom brought it over.

It was positive.

I didn’t get loaded.

When I told him, he was excited. For a moment, it felt like maybe this would change things. Maybe this would ground us. Maybe this would be the reason everything turned around.

A few weeks later, we found out it was an ectopic pregnancy.

I was rushed into surgery.

We lost the baby.

There aren’t words for that kind of grief. It was physical. Emotional. Silent. Heavy.

And still, I didn’t use.

We told ourselves we would try again. We believed we could fix what was broken by starting over.

Three months later, I was pregnant with Karl.

And that’s when everything began to unravel.

He kept drinking. He kept using.

I didn’t.

But something else started creeping in.

The fighting.

At first, it was just words. Yelling. Slamming doors. Dishes thrown against the wall. I told myself it was stress. I told myself it was grief. I told myself it would pass.

It didn’t.

One night, it crossed a line.

He put his hands on me.

I never saw myself as someone who would stay in a relationship like that. I was the girl who fought back. The girl who didn’t let anyone control her.

But abuse doesn’t begin with a punch.

It begins with erosion.

It slowly convinces you that this isn’t who he really is.That it won’t happen again.That you somehow caused it.That love can calm it.

I didn’t realize I was in a verbally and physically abusive relationship.

Until I was.

After I had Karl, it only got worse each time. I remember having an argument that led to him kicking me in my stomach after he had pushed me down. Thank goodness my good friend was there to ask him to stop.

One day, the day before Father’s Day, I spent the entire day at the hospital helping admit his mom. By the time I got home, I was exhausted.

He was drunk.

I had never seen him that angry before. The air felt heavy the second I walked in. I won’t go into every detail of what was said because it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I chose not to engage. I chose to go to bed instead of arguing.

I thought that was the safe choice.

I was wrong.

Sometime later, he came into the bedroom and woke me up.

“Can we move to Spokane?” he asked.

I remember answering calmly, “We aren’t going to move to solve our problems. We’ll just have the same problems somewhere else.”

He stormed out. A few minutes later, I heard Karl crying. He had woken the baby.

I got up and yelled at him for waking him.

And that’s when I saw it.

There was a look in his eyes I will never forget. It was empty. Like his soul had stepped out of his body.

After that, everything becomes blurry.

What I know is this:

I was very lucky to be alive.

I lost my front teeth.My wrist was fractured.My larynx was crushed.

I remember ending up outside. I remember my neighbor opening her door and pulling me inside.

He came pounding on her door.

“Send out my wife. We had a misunderstanding.”

She answered him with words I will never forget.

“Blood is not a misunderstanding.”

She had already called the police.

He went to jail.

I survived that night.

But something inside me changed.

And I still didn’t understand how much more I was about to lose.

He went to jail.

In the days that followed, I should have felt relief.

Instead, I felt confused.

Weeks later, I made a decision that even now is hard to explain unless you’ve lived it. I needed to know how I felt when I saw him. I needed to know if I was still afraid. I needed to know if I still loved him. I needed to know if it was really over.

So I went to the jail.

He was shocked when I walked in.

I remember thinking that this was the safest place to see him. There were guards. There were walls. There were rules. If I was ever going to figure out how I felt, this was the environment to do it.

That alone should tell you how distorted my thinking had become.

We talked. He cried. He apologized. He said he didn’t remember parts of that night. He said he loved me. He said it would never happen again.

And part of me wanted to believe him.

That’s the part people don’t understand about abuse.

It isn’t constant terror.It’s cycles.It’s remorse.It’s hope.It’s a mix of memory loss and selective forgiveness.

Eventually, he came home.

But something had shifted inside me.

I didn’t trust him.I didn’t feel safe.And no amount of promises could undo what had happened.

It didn’t take long for us to realize this wasn’t going to work.

He left.

And just when I thought the worst was behind me, there was a knock at my door.

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