No one told me

No one told me that once you give something away in court, it is impossible to get back.

No one told me that temporary orders are permanent.

No one told me that I would have to prove everything: the time he drank a bottle of whiskey and punched me in the face, the time he was up for days on end smoking meth, the times he fell asleep with the door open, the time he crawled into the closet and screamed inconsolably for hours until the neighbors called 911, the time he humiliated me on social media so all my family and friends called me in shocked, horrified tones, the time he trawled through my emails and recorded every conversation and fell asleep at a stop sign and made me drive for 24 hours straight while he was passed out on drugs in the back of the van…. I would have to prove all of this, with video, and recordings, and witnesses, and statements, and police records. My word, my diaries, my therapy sessions, my emails, my texts, his drug tests - none of it would be enough.

No one told me that the rules would be different for him. That he would not be required to show proof of anything. His word would be sufficient.

No one told me that when I worked so hard to pay the rent and the bills and the insurance because he would not, this would not go against him, it would go against me.

They told me that if I didn’t leave him I would lose custody of my son because my son was not safe in the presence of his father. But they did not tell me they would hand my son to him as soon as I left the relationship because his father had ‘parental rights’.

No one told me that the worst people would clamour to get involved, showing up in court and writing long, passionate statements, inserting themselves in the drama of my decaying life, just because they were bored.

No one told me that the best people would quietly decline to get involved, and eventually just slip out of your disaster of a life completely, leaving you to deal with this shit alone

Everyone told me that once we were divorced, things would improve. Life would get back to normal.

No one told me me that things would get worse, and worse, and worse with each passing month, and that leaving him was not the hardest thing I ever did.

No one told me that I had lost my civil rights. My right to return home, and to travel, and to work, to make simple choices about where to live, where to send my child to school, where to spend a holiday, who to love.

Everyone told me that he would do something so monumentally stupid, and heinous, and dangerous, that it would become apparent to everyone that he could not care for a small child. * ** ***

No one told me that when he did this awful thing the courts would not care.

They told me that the custody order was God and I had to follow it at all costs. If I did not follow it, I would lose my son.

No one told me that when he did not follow it no one would give a fuck. That he would take my son, take my son’s phone, disappear, and that the courts would do nothing about it, but would label me as problematic for bringing it to their attention.

No one told me that when the social worker walked into my house when I was finger painting with my son and making kale chips, that she would later file a report claiming that I had ‘refused’ a drug test she had never asked me to take.

No one told me that every single professional who became involved in my case would make similar awful mistakes which were so profoundly bad they had to be malicious. Like the time my son was screaming and screaming on the phone, and when the cops came to do a welfare check my ex told them I was a homicide threat and I was thrown into a psych ward for three days and everyone around me accepted his explanation that I ‘needed help’ and was ‘mentally unstable’

No one told me that the chaos, the panic, the emotion, the fear, the desire for this to stop, please stop, please fucking stop would be taken not as an indication that abuse should end, but that I was insane, broken, fucked up, crazy and absurd for not being able to take the abuse

No one told me that you would often just - not know where your kid would be. That his phone would be turned off. That you would not see him on the days you were meant to, that the custody schedule - so Holy - would ultimately turn out to have no meaning, that every time I made a report to ask where my kid was, the cops would hand me a piece of paper that somehow made it sound like I was the threat, that I had fucked up.

No one told me that I would spend the majority of my time simply trying to find a way to survive because everything that I had built would be taken away from me: my job, my home, my family, my savings, my sanity.

No one told me how lonely this would be. That eventually I would stop talking to my family and friends because there is only so many times you can hear someone say, “Well, you chose to have a child with this man,” without dying a little inside.

No one told me that I would be too afraid to make friends with other parents because they would end up in court.

No one told me that I would be the only one to see how awful things were. Everyone else would nod sympathetically, but find a rational explanation to excuse the insanely irrational, horrifically violent things happening to me on a near weekly basis.

No one told me that I would never get invited into another parent’s home for coffee, or a chat, or a hug again.

No one told me that I would reach a place of complete and utter despair, a place where I think about leaving my child because the bar has become only that he survives.

No one told me that my child would grow up with only two options: either believing everything his father did was justified because his mother is crazy and ‘deserved it’, or growing up knowing that she didn’t but everyone let this happen.

No one told me that the cost of this would grow and grow with each passing year. That I would say goodbye to my career, but that the lawyers would hike up their hourlies on a monthly basis while you were stuck earning less than you did in 2010. That while everyone else’s life grew and changed and blossomed, mine would stay stagnant, stuck, and eventually begin to go backwards, like Benjamin Button

No one told me how many fucking times I would hear the words, ‘You’re so brave’.

*My toddler son was found walking barefoot along Manchester Avenue alone at 11am on a Tuesday in 2016.

**My dog was crushed to death by three cars while my ex was watching him for a few hours as I moved house during the pandemic. My ex did not even realize he was missing.

***My son lost all the skin on his legs after being left alone to play on a treadmill.