This is Part 5 in an ongoing series about surviving a relationship that slowly became dangerous, and quietly building a way out. If you’re new here, you can start from the beginning — Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. If you’ve been here from the start, welcome back.
“You should have just left him. How can you still be there?”
“I would have left right after it happened.”
“You’re crazy for still being there.”
“That’s no way to live. You need to get out.”
And then there’s the well-meaning optimist who thinks it’s a simple fix you haven’t tried hard enough to find.
“You should work things out. Get him into therapy. Focus on the baby.”
Leaving an abusive relationship as a mother is never a simple choice. I was focusing on the baby. I have been focusing on the baby. I stayed for the baby.
But there are too many invisible layers for people to take the time to acknowledge. It’s an easy answer, they say. Just leave. Simple. Clean. Nothing else matters.
Things like this are rarely simple and they are far from clean.
Your reactions always have real consequences.
Better to think clearly about what needs to happen — and what the consequences will likely look like — with clear eyes. Better to consider the variables and how they will affect your child before you move.
I didn’t care if he hurt me again. I could take it. I have, many times before. Physical pain didn’t scare me the way it scares others.
What I cared about was how my decisions would affect my child.
I wanted to play the long game.
I wanted to protect my child in every way I could.
I needed time to figure out what that looked like — without panicking.
When you panic, when you act in haste, that is when people make the most costly mistakes. Then you pay for them. And so does your child.
Unless your life is in immediate danger — unless you can see that threat coming — take a breath. Try to see from different angles before you move. If you could die, run. You cannot protect your child if you are not alive.
Someone I admire greatly once said:
You’re going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do, and everything you don’t do. You don’t get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you’re going to take. That’s it.
Where could I go, exactly?
Our living situation is complicated. We are intertwined — financially, practically, in ways that don’t untangle cleanly overnight.
I also have a family member who depends on me. I cannot simply walk away without my decisions rippling into their stability too.
The day I decided I needed to get out, I knew immediately: this was not going to be simple, and it was not going to be clean.
The math nobody sees from the outside:
If I left without a plan, I would be jeopardizing not just my own stability but my dependent family member’s home as well. A new place costs money I don’t have. I need to keep this living situation stable — for my child, for my family member, and for myself — long enough to build something real to leave to.
If I simply ran — where would that leave me in a custody case? With no documented history? No evidence of his patterns? A lawyer might tell me I’m looking at 50/50. And 50/50 is not good enough.
Because I know what happens when I’m not there. I know what he does when he thinks no one is watching. He ignores my child’s bids for connection. He doesn’t comfort them when they cry. He handles the basics — fed, dry diaper — the way a teenage babysitter does when she’d rather be anywhere else, scrolling her phone while the baby climbs furniture they could fall from.
Once, I noticed on the baby monitor that my child had slipped out the back door while he sat oblivious, glued to his phone — and when I got outside, my child was already at the edge of an uncovered pool. The question that stays with me is what would have happened if I hadn’t been watching.
I am fighting. I am leaving. It is simply not visible to him yet.
I don’t want it to be visible to him. I have no idea what he would do if he knew. What I do know is that large amounts of unsupervised time with my child — without a legal structure in place to protect them — is not something I am willing to accept.
So I stayed. Strategically. Eyes open.
What staying actually was:
I decided I would do whatever I could to stay long enough to be prepared. Not to lie — I didn’t need to lie. I just needed to document. To give a court the clearest possible picture of who he really is as a parent, and what my child’s daily life actually looks like.
I needed money for a good custody lawyer. So I started saving.
I started building — quietly, invisibly, one small step at a time.
People who haven’t been through something this significant often see leaving as a simple choice, a clean choice.
But you know like I know — no matter what we do, we are going to pay a price. We get to choose the price we pay, to a significant degree. We get to choose our poison.
Pick the one that will hurt your child less over the long term.
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