Two Years Ago, and All My Life
This is the story behind all the references to “personal difficulties” that have taken me away from writing the past couple years. I will explain at the end why I feel it is necessary to share this publicly.
Two years ago, I had just gotten out of jail. I was essentially homeless, and living in a hotel with my mom who came from New Mexico to help me.
I had never had any interaction with criminal courts before, or with police outside of speeding tickets. I didn’t even have any friends with criminal records. I was completely disoriented; I didn’t understand how I had been charged with multiple violent felonies.
A few days earlier my wife had been drunk and said another man’s name in the middle of the night. We had just moved to Indiana. My kids and I were at a new parish, but she insisted on driving an hour back to our old chapel to sing with her choir, and frequently went out for lunch with him or other men after mass. When she passed out, I looked at her phone, and found she had been texting him dirty pictures of herself hours earlier when I was reading Goodnight Goodnight Construction Site to our toddler.
I woke her up, thinking that she would realize she had to tell the truth now that I had proof. She continued to deny it. She assaulted me, leaping at me and trying to wrestle me to the ground to get the phone back. I told her I wouldn’t give her the phone until she admitted what she had been doing, and she continued to yell that it wasn’t true even though I had already seen it with my own eyes.
I decided to leave, believing if she sat alone for a minute she would calm down and realize there was no way around telling the truth. I managed to get away and drove off in my work van. I parked a few blocks away to look at the pictures again, and more pictures and messages between them going back almost a year, to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. I came back about 10 minutes later. She continued to deny the affair.
Then the police came. They pointed guns at me and handcuffed me while I lay in the dirt. They separated me and questioned me. I told them about the pictures and that she had attacked me. I was taken to the town jail.
I didn’t understand I was being charged with a serious crime. I thought she had called to report I took her phone, and that they had decided to be cautious and separate us when they saw us arguing in the driveway. I thought in the morning they would say, “we talked to your wife, and she explained what happened,” and send me home. Instead, I was moved to the county jail.
They took my fingerprints, had me change into a prison uniform, and put me in a cell where I slept on concrete slabs with a bunch of other men.
Even then, I didn’t understand I was being charged with a serious crime. I thought my wife didn’t realize I was in county jail. I thought she went to work thinking I had run off in anger, and didn’t understand I had been taken to jail. I thought she had decided to leave me there for a day because she was scared or upset, and would call the next day to explain what had happened. I thought if she knew I wasn’t mad at her, if I could say I forgave her and she didn’t need to be afraid, she would call the police and tell them the truth.
The next day I was finally given papers with my charges. She was doubling down on claims of battery. I thought she must have said something to the police that was misinterpreted, but now I could see she was intentionally claiming I beat her up.
Desperate for anyone to talk to, I made an appointment with the jail psychologist. I told her my wife had had affairs in the past, but I always forgave. I told her she had refused to get out of bed for years to take care of the kids, and I had moved the family to Indiana so I could become a stay home dad, but that she immediately started disappearing late into the night without answering her phone the moment she had her own car. I told her I was desperate to say I was sorry for being angry, because I believed everything could be okay if I forgave her again.
I expected the therapist to have some sympathy that I, now a criminal, was showing contrition. Instead, she told me that it sounded like I had been taken advantage of for years by someone who didn’t care about me, and that it would be dangerous to try to trust her again. That was the first time I had ever told anyone the truth about my wife, and the first step in seeing that my own isolated perception of the situation was far off from the reality.
On the third day I was released on recognizance bond. I had just moved to a new state and barely knew anyone. I had nowhere to go. I didn’t have my wallet or any access to my money or my possessions, other than my phone which had been in my pocket when I was arrested. My mom made a reservation at a hotel for me, and I found someone to pick me up from jail.
I learned my wife had called my family and told everyone I beat her up. It was more than an exaggerated description of us wrestling over the phone. She was fabricating stories of violence, details I knew for certain had not happened and didn’t completely make sense with the layout of our house. I questioned my own memories. I wondered if I had really done something awful. But even if I interpreted my actions in the worst light, I still knew neither of us had hit each other, and that I hadn’t even touched her except in response to her lunging at me and grabbing me.
A few days later divorce papers slipped under the door of the hotel room. I wasn’t allowed to see our 5 kids. It became clear that she had never really cared for me, that she had not made any sacrifice for me or our family the way I had for her. She had cheated on me when we first met, when we were engaged, and as newlyweds. Even a few years prior I had had to pull her off some random guy at a bar when she got drunk on her birthday. The only time she was not cheating on me was when she was a stay home mom and couldn’t get out of the house much, but then I had to live with coming home every day having my kids say “mom didn’t get out of bed again.”
It became clear she didn’t care for my kids any more than she had cared for me. Before we moved, I had to get permission to go in to work late so I could get my kids up and dressed, after too many times finding babies and toddlers still in the same dirty diapers they woke up in when I got home. My older kids said they thought mom had a job because she would tell them “I’m working” when she laid in bed on her phone all day, but her only job was to take care of them. She had no concern about whether or not it would be traumatic for them to suddenly lose contact with their father who had been their main caretaker for years, and tried to convince a judge to not even let me talk to them on the phone. She had no concern about whether it was traumatic to suddenly have another man living in the house, or to find him half-dressed in the bathroom with mom in the middle of the night.
I discovered other women were jealous of how well I had treated my wife and how devoted I was to the family. When she stayed in bed all day, I had gotten up early to give my kids their homeschool assignments, worked all day, came home and made dinner, did the dishes, went over the school work with the kids, and put them to bed. I would bring her coffee in bed every morning before work to encourage her to get up. I would use most of my days off to get us caught up on laundry and house cleaning. I did all of her laundry and all the kids laundry for years, while she complained and said I was cruel if I suggested she make dinner once a week or do laundry once a month to show she was making an effort . I worked 10 hour days and didn’t have enough time to keep order in the home. When I got back from work the floor would be a sea of toys mixed with discarded food, dirty diapers, and cat feces. Not just discarded food from the kids, but from their mother. I worried that if anyone saw our home my kids would be taken away. I later learned that my mom had worried about this too. Eventually I quit my full-time job and moved the family to Indiana, believing this was the only way to solve the problem.
I learned multiple friends had cut off contact with us or intentionally kept their distance because they were uncomfortable with my wife. I learned friends and family had talked privately about the problem, but no one had ever brought it up with me.
It was consoling to learn so many people had seen more than they said, but I still had criminal charges to deal with. There was no real evidence other than a medical report from the following day where they recorded some bruises and scraped knees, I assume from falling on the driveway chasing after my van when I left with her phone.
I provided text messages in which she discussed having a blood clotting disorder and having always had large bruises on her body her entire life. Even in the video she made as evidence she mentioned having already had most of the bruises. I showed messages where a few weeks earlier she had been laughing with me about how a new doctor had commented on her bruises.
I provided messages showing she had extreme delusions relating to abuse. About 5 years prior, when she stopped getting out of bed and caring for the kids, she joined a Facebook group that ex-members described as a cult based around spurious claims of witchcraft and abuse. A few years before I was arrested, she had helped the woman at the center of this group submit images of motor cycle accidents to court, claiming they were pictures of her back after abuse. My wife had had bruises ever since I met her at 18, but when she joined this cult she started texting me pictures of the marks while I was at work, claiming Amish wizards had sent demons to attack her. She claimed they kidnapped her and abused her in her dreams. She texted me pictures of marks on my kids’ bodies and claimed demons were attacking them too. She told me she was too tired to get out of bed during the day because she had spent the entire night “bilocating” to rescue girls from human trafficking in South America and Mexico. She made me burn a squirrel that drowned in our pool because she thought Amish wizards had killed it with magic and our home would be cursed if we threw it away. She would make me bless my van with holy water in the middle of the night because someone in the cult had a vision that I would die in a car accident if I didn’t get the demons away from my vehicle. She would claim to have spent all day on the phone with the FBI using Google maps to identify a house where someone had seen the Amish practice human sacrifice in a dream. She would accuse me of being insensitive to abused women if I asked her to take care of the children or help me with anything at all. She would tell me that other women in the group would be kidnapped, tortured, and raped by Amish wizards if she didn’t stay on the phone with them all day.
I provided messages in which she admitted to getting drunk and hitting me in the middle of the night multiple times over the course of several years. At the same time that she was obsessed with rescuing women from fake claims of abuse by Amish wizards, she was actually abusing her husband.
It took time to settle because the case was moved around between several prosecutors, but over the course of the next 15 months the charges were dropped from felony battery to misdemeanor battery, to considering dismissing the case completely, to finally asking me to sign a plea for misdemeanor disorderly conduct. I did not consider it an act of justice to ask me to plea to anything as I have always said I was fleeing assault by someone who had admitted to assaulting me in the past, and because the only physical evidence was bruises that she admitted to already having. But in terms of my conscience, I decided I could truthfully admit to the vague charge of “tumultuous behavior” as I had been upset and yelling. Confessing to the crime of yelling at my wife for having an affair seemed better than taking another 6 months or more for a trial.
I have no need to draw a crowd of online strangers who will support me as a victim, nor to defend myself against anyone who reads this and decides I am a liar.
I feel a need to tell this story because I kept too much hidden in the past. I didn’t tell anyone she cheated on me when we were first dating, when we were engaged, or as newlyweds. Only a handful of friends who partied with her at that time knew, but none of my friends and none of my family, even after 14 years of marriage. I didn’t tell anyone when she became delusional and stopped caring for the kids. I just worked twice as hard to make up the difference hoping it would get better eventually. I didn’t tell anyone when she would get drunk and hit me. I didn’t even understand it as abuse at the time. I thought, “she’s drunk, she doesn’t understand what she’s doing,” and blamed myself for being upset with her. Whatever we fought about privately, I always felt that it was my duty to paint her in a good light and avoid criticizing her to other people. Even now, the point isn’t to trash her, but for me to feel I’m finally allowed to talk about my life. No one needs to know any of this to read my stories and poems, but I’ve found I have a mental block moving forward in parts of my life, or being comfortable promoting my writing, when I feel I am still hiding things I hid for far too long.
It’s easy looking back to say that I should have started making a plan to document what was happening and protect myself, but I always convinced myself that things would eventually become normal if I worked harder and recommitted myself after every difficulty. At this point I am grateful that God has found a way to remove me from a bad situation I wasn’t willing to get away from on my own.