I am just winging it

Leaving, Eggshells, and the Lies Women Learn to Call Normal

The day I finally decided to leave my husband did not begin with a cinematic soundtrack. It began the way most days had begun by that point, with me waking up on the couch in a house that had not felt peaceful in a very long time.

By mid-morning I was on the phone with a woman I was doing advocacy work with, discussing serious matters in the competent tone people use when they are trying very hard to sound like their personal life is not quietly on fire. Then one of my daughters called. I said goodbye, answered, and heard the words no mother particularly enjoys as an opening line “Mum, we heard about the fight you and Dad had last night.”

She was not wrong. We had had a fight, although “fight” almost sounds too normal for it. It had started, as many terrible domestic moments do, over something so small it would be funny if it were not so bleak. In this case his work dates and the calendar in his phone.

By then I had already stopped doing everything for him. I was emotionally gone, which turned out to be the easy part. Physically leaving was more complicated when I had nowhere else to go and he would not leave. So rather than continuing my long and distinguished career as the unpaid administrative assistant to a grown man with anger problems, I had decided to show him how to put his own appointments into his own phone.

This was apparently an outrageous act of betrayal. My helpful demonstration was received as evidence that I was trying to leave him. I was. He already knew that. By that stage, loud arguments were such a regular part of the household atmosphere that the whole house seemed to brace itself when he came home. We all lived on eggshells. The remarkable thing was not that there had been another explosion. The remarkable thing was how normal it had started to seem.

This one had involved things being thrown at me, things being thrown across the room, and the glass front of my $3000 oven being smashed, which was, frankly, one of the few things in the house actually worth anything. More importantly, one of the objects thrown had narrowly missed the child standing in the kitchen. Neither he nor I realised that at the time. He because he was out of control, and me because I was in that strange, heightened state where your whole body is on alert, but your brain is still trying to manage the room.

It was only when I noticed my child crying that the real horror of it landed. And then, as women in these situations so often do, I moved straight into fix-it mode. Not leave-the-marriage mode. Not call-the-police mode. Fix-it mode. The female domestic speciality of behaving as though if you stay calm enough, speak softly enough, and start tidying with sufficient purpose, everyone else might agree to join you in pretending that violence had not just erupted in the kitchen.

So there I was, cleaning up shattered glass, with one child sobbing, everyone else silent, and my husband suddenly quiet in the way men often are after they have detonated a room and left everybody else to deal with the smoke. Somewhere in the middle of that, my child called her older sisters. That phone call was what led to the one I received the next morning.

“Mum, you need to leave,” my daughter said. “If that happens again, we will not blame him. We will blame you. You are the one who has to do something. If you stay, and someone gets hurt, that is on you.”

It is a deeply unpleasant experience to have your children explain your own life to you. That statement, as awful as it was to hear, gave me permission to do what I had wanted to do for a very long time. Leave.

Not that wanting to leave and being able to leave are remotely the same thing. I had nowhere to go. And when I eventually found somewhere, it involved living with a single man, which was not a development I found especially appealing for myself, my two younger children, or my already explosive husband.

I had also spent years being told that breaking up the family was the worst thing I could possibly do. According to him, if I left, I would be just like his mother a woman he professed to hate while simultaneously defending, idealising, and projecting onto me with exhausting regularity.

So when my daughter told me that if I stayed and someone got hurt, they would blame me, I felt relief as much as shame. Because she was right. And because for the first time in a long time, the moral question became simple.

Leaving was no longer the thing that would break the family. Staying was.

Of course, once I finally had some clarity and direction, I felt better. Not calm, exactly. Not happy. But better. I was still scared, but fear with a plan underneath it is much easier to carry than fear with nowhere to go. For the first time in a very long time, I felt as though I was standing on something solid.

The children, of course, knew about the fight the night before. So when they came home from school that afternoon, I told them we were moving out and going to my parents’ house. To my surprise, though perhaps it should not have been a surprise at all, both of them seemed relieved.

One of them said, “Why should we leave? Why can’t he?”

“He won’t,” I said. “So we will.”

Then came another of the day’s deeply unpleasant truths. “I love him, Mum,” my child said, “but he is a baby in a man’s body.”

It was, sadly, one of the truest statements made that day, and there had already been a few. It also broke my heart. I could not imagine ever thinking about my own father that way. But that is one of the crueler realities of living with a man who cannot regulate himself, eventually, even the children stop seeing a father and start seeing a burden.

We spent that night sleeping in the top half of my parents’ house. No furniture, no proper setup, not even reliable internet. Physically, it was uncomfortable in almost every way. And yet it was also one of the most relaxing nights I had had in a very long time, simply because nobody was walking on eggshells.