Living With An Abuse Victim

Has there been too much topic on this subject? I don’t know or should there ever be. But, I would like to share with you another side of this terrible issue. Being married to someone that had a childhood so terrible that even he had blocked it for years.

I can’t imagine his childhood. Mine was wonderful. I had a calf that I raised to a bull that I rode like a pony. I will someday tell you the story about my dad selling him and my devastation from that event. Then I got a pony until I out grew him and then I got a horse. I got a brand new SS Chevy 327, 275 hp, 4 barrel a month before I turned 16.  I have already shared the story about my dad and his love for me and my children in a snow storm. Enough about me but I just wanted you to see where I was coming from before I ended up in this relationship.

I won’t go into my meeting my husband but it is a great story. He took on a woman with two children only a mother could love. And, he has loved them as his own ever since. To the point that the girls refer to him as Dad and the other as Our Father. He has been there for every traumatic event in their lives including wrecking 4 cars. (They called him, not me. That tells you something.) He is still the first they call. So, after many years of marriage, he had a breakdown.

The breakdown was brought on probably by my illness and almost dying twice. He says he can’t live without me and he thought he was going to have to. This left him feeling alone and stacked with problems to deal with. I had lost my job because of the illness. I had made more money (not a brag, just to give depth to the problems). We had live to the end of every dollar. I did recover but all those toys had to go for us to survive. Including the vacation home, the boat, and the classic cars collection that he loved and found escape when under their hoods.. Of course, they were our investments, not the stock market. Gone. Now, even though he wasn’t any of these things, he felt he was a bad person, let us down, and wasn’t doing enough to take care of things. He collapsed. He was at work in his truck and all of a sudden he didn’t know where he was on a route he had driven for years. He was put on medical leave.

Things started to happen, things he never had done before. Oh, he did drink and probably too much but not like this. He would leave and not come back for hours. He would take off walking and not know where he was going but he just had to walk. I would get frustrated and of course get angry. I didn’t understand it. I never thought he was out cheating on me because I felt it was something else bothering him and not another woman. (At least I didn’t think so then.) Now, he was letting me down. We started therapy. They gave him pills, cause you know a pill will take care of everything…….and a psychiatrist no longer sits down and talks with you while you are on the couch. No they send you to a psychologist for that. The psychiatrist is the only one that can write a prescription. Having to have both went through our insurance real fast!

While under all this “professional” care he was not getting better.  One night he was off for hours and we couldn’t find him.  A friend came and told us he had seen him and he was acting very strange.   My husband came home and told me he had this evil thing in his head that he could not get out.  I tried to understand something that he was even having problems with understanding.  Reading the side effects of the drugs he had been given they said that they may cause strange behavior.  Really????  He is already having problems, so, lets give him a pill that may cause “strange” behavior!   He had taken on a new personalty.  One that was a female that was mean, rude, nasty and telling him he was bad and no one loved him. Until one night I had had enough and knocked him down in a chair and sat on him. I said, “You tell that bitch to get the hell out of here. No, I will tell her. You get your evil ass out of here or I will knock you into another hemisphere. I love him and I won’t let anyone get or hurt him again. You got that, bitch. Oh, don’t think I can’t take you on. You don’t have a little boy here, you have one mean bitch on the other side facing you off now! Get out! Get out! Get the hell out!” I know this might be sounding crazy to you reading it but it worked. It really worked. He looked at me surprised and said “Honey, she is gone.” Now how did we get to this point. Let me tell you.

As I said he had been going to all these professionals and getting nowhere. One day I had a friend of mine come over and we were talking about things. My husband starting saying a few things he was feeling and such.  She looked at him and said, “You sound like someone who has been abused. How do I know?  Because I was. I was sexually abused.  I felt just like you are describing.” He told her that he had been talking with the doctors about his alcoholic father that beat him physically and mentally.  For instants, one time had tied him onto a horse and made him and the horse go round and round in the corral, whipping and yelling, for 4 hours. Of course he was drunk.  Oh, there are so many stories but I won’t go into them. But, during this “rodeo” night, where was his mother? She was standing at the kitchen sink watching out the window. She did not come out and stop it. When things would get bad, she would load up the sisters and go to town. She left this little boy to take it from the dad so she didn’t. He grew up thinking girls get to escape. Our friend said she understood that but she was hearing more. Something more that spoke to her from her own experiences. He told her about a re-occurring dream he had had for years about a house and a porch and opening the door to see the house went on forever. A woman in underwear standing at the kitchen sink. All of a sudden he shouted, “She hurt me! She did things to me in the bathtub! She’s laughing!” He started crying. Our friend that had lived abuse was able to help him pull this buried evil out to see it in today’s light. It was this evil woman that had been haunting him along with his father. There was another woman! Not one he was out cheating on me with but she was taking him away from me just the same.

He had been a little boy around 9 when his dad left his mother and sisters back in Missouri and took the son with him to check out Wyoming to see about a job as a cowboy. (He was a Cop in KC and wanted to be a cowboy……) Anyway, they rented this room in this woman’s house and she watched the boy during the day. She was a very sick woman!

Now, you have a little boy with things happening to him that he doesn’t understand or how to explain. And, he would have to tell his alcoholic father! Or, a mother who didn’t do anything about anything anyway. So, he buried it. Until someone who heard more in his story than anyone else had because she could relate.

After talking to the doctor, the doctor said he needed to ask his mother about this time. (His father had passed away by now and probably the woman, even if she could be found.) His mother didn’t remember anything about that time. When he told her that the doctor had told him that his father was an evil man to him growing up, too. Her answer, even years later and even with a new husband, answered him, “Well, he was your father!” As I said in a post early on here, to me she is the worst of all.

So, how do you deal with this? It can be out of our lives for long periods and all of a sudden something reminds him of his father or this woman. Maybe a movie, or something he hears, or an event like Penn State and it is out in the front again. You listen all over again about all the hurts or stories of abuse that happen that relates to whatever made him think about it again. You keep saying you wish you could take it away, out of his head. You love him and he is a wonderful person, a wonderful dad. And, you try to make him laugh. He loves to hear stories about my funny family. He loved my dad and my dad loved him. They had too short of a time together. I feel my dad, if he had had enough time, he could have given him wonderful memories of a dad that loved you. They had so much in common. He now tells everybody that they were and are his family. So, hearing stories about them are his stories, too.

You just have to love them and even through your own frustrations. Hug them. You just have to take it day by day. You have to realize that it will never go away. Both you and him will live with it forever. But, with more wonderful memories you make of your own together, well, around the Thanksgiving table we all can laugh! We have some wonderful, happy, crazy funny stories now that WE have made and are a part of US and OURS.  And we laugh, and laugh, and laugh.