As I sat down this morning in my sunny living room, coffee in hand, I was transported back seven years ago to my then my husband greeting me with “Good morning,” barely looking up from the newspaper he read.
I vividly recall sitting quietly for a few minutes, mustering the courage to tell him I wanted a divorce. As someone who doesn’t give up easily, this was an enormous defeat in my eyes at the time. The months leading up to the decision were filled with example after example why my singular efforts to make the marriage work would continue to be futile. I’d finally accepted we needed to live apart.
“Can you put your paper down?”
Moving the paper to the side, peering over his glasses, he looked over and asked. “What’s going on?” When I asked him if he was happy, he replied cheerfully: “You know me, I am always happy!”
It struck me as almost comical how out of touch he was with how he actually acted, which was not only unhappy, but unhappy about every single thing any of us in the house did, and very vocal about it.
I continued, “I’m not, and I haven’t been and you know we haven’t been for a long time. I think we need to talk about separating.” Any doubt as to whether my perception was askew was immediately quelled when he reacted angrily exclaiming: “You’d deprive your children of a father?”
I took a minute to try to make sense of what he’d said. “How would divorce deprive them of a father? You’ll always be their father.” His response was that if I ‘left him’ he’d never want to see any of us again.
I had grown accustomed to this sort of extreme nonsensical thinking and responses, and continued on unemotionally. “Well, that would be your choice, not ours.”
Realizing his first assertion didn’t elicit a reaction in me, he tried another tactic. Not skipping a beat, he glared at me and with a controlled calm voice he declared “If you think you are leaving with the kids, I will go for full custody, and you’ll never see them again.”
“Wait, you just finished saying you’d never see them again. Now you want full custody?” I stood up to leave the room, realizing there was no possibility of working out a reasonable arrangement with him.
As the summer progressed, he refused to leave the house, insisting I leave instead, with nothing of course. Despite his continued verbal attacks and controlling nature, it never occurred to me that the shotguns he kept behind the bedroom door and the hand guns he kept in a closet should be removed from the house until a few weeks later when I walked in on him in the dark putting bullets in a gun.
After that night I demanded all the guns be removed from the house. There was no making a request to law enforcement, there was no legal way to have them removed, there was only me asking someone who proved to be unreasonable in all other matters to get rid of them, on his word.
It’s hard to fathom someone you have spent your entire adult life with, the father of your children, will shoot to kill you. When it happened I believed I was unique, that it wasn’t about the gun, it was about him. These seven years later it’s excruciatingly clear that it is the combination of people like him who have access to a gun.
It is the enticement of a detached, clean way to create devastating destruction that lures someone like him to carry out the final act of control. The statistics bear it out, just as I am living proof of it, yet no amount of awareness erases the reality my life, as blessed as I am to be here against all odds, will never be the same and the dividing line was at the intersection of a gun.
