by Sabrina Fritts
I was born an Aquarius during the age of Aquarius. What do you do with a free-spirited confident little girl? Apparently, you baptize and enroll them in Catholic School and thus began my relationship into co-dependency.
I was 17 the first time my boyfriend struck me. His mom begged me to go home. We never spoke of it again; I definitely didn’t tell my mom and I was far too embarrassed and ashamed to tell my friends. I began to internalize the reasons it happened.
That relationship resulted in my becoming a single-mom at the age of nineteen. Thankfully, with the support of my parents, I was able to provide a decent life for my baby.
However, working two jobs didn’t afford much opportunity for self-development and a few years later, in order to meet societal and familial pressure to provide a nuclear family for my daughter, I married a man who I had previously filed a domestic violence charge against.
While I created a picture-perfect home, career, and family, what was hidden inside the newly vinyl-sided exterior of our suburban home was my need to shop and drink in order to numb my emotions and attempt to fill a deep emptiness inside.
When my drinking became problematic, I turned to my primary care physician for help. I was unhappily married – left out the abuse part, drinking too much, and depressed. His answer? Prozac!
Well, it’s not really a good idea to give someone who is struggling with alcohol an antidepressant. I started to fantasize about death. No, not my own. My husband’s.
I at least had enough cognitive awareness to recognize that as fool-proof a plan as I had, a divorce would be better. That’s when I decided to go to AA. I knew that if I ever found a way to leave him, I needed to make sure there wasn’t anything he could use against me in an attempt for full custody of our son. I found sobriety through a sponsor and attended one meeting a week, as that was all that he was available to watch the kids. That was enough.
Two years into sobriety, after my grandfather passed away, I finally found the courage to leave. It was perfect timing, as the brand-new wall-to-wall carpet in our tri-level home had just been installed. The remodeling was complete and it was time to invest in myself.
I had answers for every reason he used for why we can’t separate. I knew he was unwilling to move out because “his VA certificate” was on the mortgage. I lined up a previous townhome we rented. When I first contacted my former landlady, the unit was not available, but two days later the current tenants got an out-of-state job offer! The nearby townhome kept my daughter in her current school and the swimming pool twenty feet from the back patio provided free entertainment all summer long.
I was one of the fortunate ones, I didn’t know that there was help available for someone in my situation. While I cleared out this pattern in my personal life, I was surprised to find myself twenty years later in a toxic professional relationship with psychological, emotional, and financial abuse.
That’s when I decided it was time to act on my inner nudging and start volunteering for PeaceWorks. I felt the best way for me to heal was to help others. I’m thrilled to be part of an organization dedicated to raising community awareness and I believe that starts with educating teenagers on healthy versus unhealthy relationship dynamics. Who knows how things may have turned out if I had a trusted adult to turn to when I was struck by my boyfriend the first time? By instilling awareness and a sense of self-esteem we can help reduce relationship violence early on.