Saved from a lifetime of abuse

“Oh yeah, and fuck off, it's not your decision to make and be judge and jury until you have to make that same decision.”

My story saved me from a lifetime of anger and abuse from a former partner.

I was in high school, a senior and had started a romantic relationship with a person I saw as my best male friend. He made me laugh a lot which has always been important to me. I had an appointment to start on birth control but we became intimate before I could start on the pill.

At some point something in our relationship changed. He was no longer good natured and funny. He became jealous and controlling. He wanted to know where I was at all times, even if I was just with my family. He wanted to control the way I dressed if I wasn't going to be with him. Looking back, I'm sure it was his own insecurities... he never thought he was good looking enough for me because he had a facial scar from a large birthmark being removed. He also came from a broken home and his dad was a charming alcoholic who could go into a jealous rage so he didn't have a good example of how a man should behave.

I made up all the excuses I could for why he had changed so much and tried to reassure him of my love and devotion to him. Then in the summer before he was going off to college on an ROTC scholarship, we found out that I was pregnant.

I don't remember exactly when the violence started, before or after my abortion, but back to that... He had confided in his mother about our situation-my situation and how we weren't sure how we wanted to proceed. His mother came to me, along with my boyfriend and told me all the reasons why I should seek an abortion. She herself had gotten pregnant in high school with him. She was all set to be her class valedictorian but back then, you couldn't be pregnant and stand on that stage. His dad had a basketball scholarship at one of the community colleges in town but had to give that up in order to bring in money for his new family so he eventually became a teamster and drove trucks for a living. Both of their futures gone because of the choice they made. She kept saying she didn't want both of our futures to be changed. She kept speaking of our futures, mine and her son's and how they would be changed forever if we kept the baby. She helped me to see that there was no shame in being selfish. Then they paid for the abortion at Planned Parenthood and my older sister went with me.

Then, as if nothing happened, we went on with our lives. I stayed with him for another 4 years. In those 4 years, I remember huge blowup fights, sometimes in front of our college roommates, sometimes alone where he would get 2 inches from my face and scream into it with such rage, sometimes telling me I was too fat, and then telling me I was getting too skinny after I would go on a diet and workout binge. I could never get it right for him.

I remember him pinning my neck to the counter, bent over backward while he yelled and berated me. Once, jumping out of his moving car because he was screaming in my face, rolling into the bushes and hiding for hours while he drove around looking for me. I wanted to punish him with worry for what he was doing to me. Then I had to walk back to his house to ask him to drive me home since I didn't have a car or a phone back then to call someone else to come and get me. I remember driving from Pullman to Coeur d'Alene in the dead of winter in my old rust bucket '66 Mustang whose heater hose had fallen off so it was blowing icy cold air onto my feet the whole way clad only in Keds. Only to get to my grandparent's house to have the phone ring 5 minutes after arriving with him demanding that I get back in my car and come back down to Pullman and that I would be in even more trouble now for bringing my family into our argument. And I did! I got back in just after my grandmother had warmed my feet up and begged me not to go back. He had only given me a 2.5 hour window to come back. By this time, I had no self esteem, no self worth to tell him to fuck off. He had broken me down to nothing and my spirit was depleted. I remember throat punching him on accident when we were in a physical altercation. When he dropped to the ground with his hands around his neck gasping for air, I ran terrified to my cousin’s apartment on campus because I thought, "This time, he IS going to kill me."

I believe whole heartedly that if I had decided to have his child, I would never be free of him. He would have never let me go if we had had that baby together and my family would not have let me put my baby up for adoption. I believe I would not be alive today to tell my story. To all the people who don't believe in reproductive freedom, I say let them walk the miles in every woman's shoes who have had to make such a difficult decision. Oh yeah, and fuck off, it's not your decision to make and be judge and jury until you have to make that same decision. Only including that last part because I never got to say that to him...