My Story Of Abuse

Originally published here – Maureen is a contributor at Put Your Damn Pants On. 

Have you ever put someone’s feelings above your own? Have you maybe ever had a parent, growing up, whose feelings you worried about? Or maybe you were just born that way, always worrying about other people’s feelings, even as a child. Have you ever gotten into a romantic relationship where you worried about the other person’s feelings, and they used that very fact against you? I have.

I’ve been choked, picked up and carried away, had my child put in danger and my car tampered with so I couldn’t escape. I had my front door to our basement apartment barricaded with guns in the middle of the night because my (now ex-) husband, a former Marine, was drunk and wouldn’t let me leave because he said the neighbor had a bomb in his car…. That was the night before I left. I stayed awake, afraid, seven months pregnant with our second child, while he lay a foot away from me in the bed, drunk and eventually snoring. The part that bothered me the most that night is that he insisted on sleeping with a rifle next to him, leaned against the thin particle board that separated our room from the baby’s, the front of the rifle pointed right at the crib.