Life Has a Way of Drop-Kicking you. – Editor-in-Chief, Kelly Fitzharris Coody

I think you guys all remember the upheaval that my life has been under, right? That divorce from my children’s father, having to start over and try not to be bitter while all I wanted to do was scream after throwing away 12 years of hard work, good times, bad times, a love that I’d thought was there, and two malleable children who deserve the world. They are bright and wonderful people.

I got married again, on August 12th, 2017. I got married to a man with whom I thought I could share forever. At first things were good – well, actually, they were miraculous. I didn’t know how I deserved someone so loving and giving; someone who actually loved me for ME and wasn’t going to constantly throw my misgivings in my face. Someone who loved the kids and told me that he missed them when they were gone…

You know what they say about something that seems to good to be true, right? Well, it turns into a tornado of violence, manipulation, and blackmail. I’m 34 with a job and two children and it was not only the last thing I needed , but the last thing I’d ever expected from my new husband.

He and I lost a baby in December of 2017. I was probably 11-12 weeks along. The doctors did the DNA/ genetic / chromosome testing and found the baby we’d lost had had Trisomy 21, aka, Down syndrome. This past summer, we decided to give it one more go to see if we could have a baby. Now, this was the time that everything spiraled out of control. He’d stolen 71 pills from me the minute we found out I was pregnant. Before that, when I went back to work Feb. of 2018, right before my first day, I’d looked into a nearly empty bill bottle. So he had stolen pills from me for a long time and I guess I just wanted to make it work so badly that I couldn’t see how bad he was getting.

Flash forward with me. As the pregnancy went on, he could not control his anger. He became erratic, frightening, aggressive, and made my blood pressure rise to a place that it should never have to go. One night, after I’d begged him to just let me be and let me lie on the bed, he stormed into the bedroom and threw a steel cup that was full of water, all the way across the room, dousing everything and simultaneously skipping along the wall, damaging it as well. He punched an enormous hole in my wall that I’ll never be able to fix.

He started to get mean with my children too. He made them cry. There was a night that I was in the bathtub and he got mad about god knows what and started pounding his fists over and over again on the tile probably a foot away from where I was taking my bath.

Despite my better judgment, I kept trying to make it work. I tried so, so hard, but he just spiraled downward further.

As I looked through my bank transactions one day, I got sick to my stomach. I counted up everything he’d been doing for the past month; he’d siphoned 2000 out of my paychecks and used it to go buy drugs. There’s more than that 2000- I was too sickened to continue to look.

The last night that I was with him, he had agreed to pick my kids up from school because I was had worked a 12 hour day, on my feet, pregnant. I get home and my house had been RANSACKED. Purses, sunglasses, watches, glasses cases, were all gone. That’s what he was doing all day as I worked. All of the things he stole were either gifts, amazing finds in an antique store where they didn’t realize the item was designer and priced it low, or something I saved up for for a long time. And I’ll never get those things back. He even stole my 10 year old daughter’s saved up cash out my wallet while I was either asleep or in the bathroom or something.

Yes, I was pregnant again. I lost the baby last week and had surgery on Friday to remove the baby, which was about 14 weeks along.

Now that the new husband has moved out, he’s acting absolutely disgusting to me. He’d put our gas bill in his name because he said he would take care of all the bills. I can’t tell you how many times he’s threatened to turn our gas off. He’s not even having to pay the damn bill, I am. He’s only doing this to be mean. And I had to co-sign for him to buy me my engagement ring. Now that we’re splitting up, he’s trying to destroy my credit by not giving me the log-in information for me to set up automatic payments on my account. He’s deliberately trying to destroy me in any way that he can. Can he not understand that he was abusive? That my children were scared of him? That we want our lives back? Why is he withholding things that we need to move on?

I’m sure you guys can see why I haven’t had time to post in a while.

I’m up to my ears in to-do lists to try and get my life back on track, but it is a beast. I’m overwhelmed and frustrated. I feel like I just got hit by the abusive husband truck and am having to figure out everything on my own. I have familial support but at the same time, most, if not all, of what I need to do, is on my own.

I’m just depressed. God, I’d felt so trapped for so long. While I’d be getting ready for work, he’d sit to where his face was a few inches from mine and scream at me as I was trying to put on makeup for work. And if he wasn’t screaming, he was dead asleep. It was one extreme or another.

Then it progressed to him screaming at me while we were waiting to see the OB-GYN. The front desk staff even informed our doctor what was happening because they were getting scared for me.

I would say, “Please, stop, you’re making a scene,” as merely a whisper.

He would come back with, “You’re the one making a scene, if you would just stop.”

Then I stopped replying to him. I tried to move chairs to get away from him and he blocked it so that I couldn’t get up and kept getting louder and louder and louder.

That visit ended with him saying through gritted teeth, to where the entire lobby full of people could hear, “And wipe that scowl off your face.”

Kelly