Why It Took Me So Long to Leave My Marriage

It was scary enough for me to leave. What about for a woman with less means?

I remember the big question as to why I didn’t just leave earlier. “Just serve him divorce papers,” my friend said when she finally left her own husband. I was letting her stay at our house during the process, and I’d just told her how unhappy I was. Just serve him divorce papers. She said it like she’d say anything. Pass the salt.

But how could I just leave? I had two children with my husband. He was my sons’ father. I also didn’t have a stable job, which meant no stable income.

Just serve him divorce papers. How?

My friend had just upped and left her husband. A few days earlier, she’d packed her bags, gathered up her daughter while her husband was at work, then disappeared. Her husband’s missed phone calls and unread messages now clogged her phone. He didn’t know she was staying with me. She filed a restraining order against him. It wasn’t an abusive marriage. She just wanted out.

My friend and her husband ended up settling out of court. He offered her $50,000 to finalize the divorce with the agreement that he’d have visitation rights every other weekend and several days during the week. He also agreed to give her $1000 a month in child support. He let her stay in their house.

Her situation wasn’t even as bad as mine was.

Just serve him divorce papers. Really? Just divorce my husband? But what about the kids? What about their future? What about mine?

Some women have this privilege. They can jump without looking, trusting there’ll be a safety net to catch their fall.

I didn’t have a safety net. I had no idea how I’d fall if I jumped. On my butt? On my back? On my head? Would I survive? I didn’t trust everything would be okay. What if it wasn’t?

Life is easier for women these days. There’s more equality in the workplace. Many more women have college educations than ever before. Many women have graduate degrees. This is great. There’s also a system in place to help those women in need.

Regardless, is it ever easy to leave your husband, especially when you have kids together?

Like many women I was the main caregiver, so I would be left in that role after my divorce. It’s harder to excel career-wise when you’re juggling climbing the corporate ladder with caring for children. A father can give child support but what about time? What about the time it takes to promote oneself in the workplace?

There would be no $50,000 settlement if I left. My husband was broke. We were broke. In the years since the 2008 financial crisis, he’d forfeited on the loans of each of the ten investment properties he used to own. With the loss of the properties’ equity, he could no longer afford to pay the mortgages. There was no reason to keep holding onto the properties when they were worth nothing, though he’d tried for a while. The mortgages bled us dry. We filed for bankruptcy.

After that, my husband’s behavior became erratic. Two years went by. By the time I was actually seriously considering leaving him, he believed aliens lived under the ground in secret tunnels in New Mexico. The moon was hollow, placed into space by those same aliens. I can’t remember why he said the aliens had created a hollow moon. How the aliens had gotten the moon into space where they did — who knew? I can’t remember what “data” he offered. He always backed up his claims with lots of “evidence.” He had two Masters in Physics from an Ivy League university, but he’d turned his back on Newtonian Laws. He now believed the aliens had come to our planet on space ships that defied the physical laws of gravity.

Just serve him divorce papers. Really?

I couldn’t just leave. How would I manage? I told myself to hold on. At least my husband was no longer talking about 9–11 truth. He was no longer coming to tell me that each new shooting massacre that took place in our country was a “false flag,” orchestrated by the government with the sole purpose of swaying the nation to get behind gun control. The government wanted the entire country to give up our right to arms. The government wanted to control us. If we waived our Second Amendment right, we couldn’t defend ourselves against our government. We had to be able to defend ourselves. The government was made up of members of the Satanist Illuminati. The government had carried out the 9–11 attacks against our own country to get us into war. War was a money machine. I didn’t disagree with him there. I just didn’t believe that the towers had collapsed because bombs had blown up inside them, planted there by the government.

I never knew for sure but I believe the stress and trauma of losing his small empire contributed to my husband’s mental breakdown. I do know that his family took him to a doctor. He wouldn’t go when I asked. The psychiatrist diagnosed him with schizophrenia. He wouldn’t take his meds. He refused the diagnosis. His family took him to a different doctor. Same diagnosis, but he still wouldn’t take his meds.

Our savings account was diminishing.

Just serve him divorce papers.

No.

The year before I finally left my husband, I was in therapy. I remember telling my therapist that I believed I was an impulsive person. I had always been made to feel that way by my conservative family. I was the one who had run off to live in Europe in my early thirties. I was the one who had taken so long to settle down.

My therapist grinned. “Impulsive? You? You’re not impulsive at all. You’ve been talking about leaving your husband for a year now and you still haven’t done it.”

He explained that instead I was someone who planned and plotted before I made any move. When I’d gone off to live in Europe, it had only felt impulsive. I’d had thousands of dollars saved up to buffer any fall. I didn’t have children yet. If I wasn’t successful in making my way in Europe, I could just come home. No one depended on me. Any difficulty that befell me would only affect me. My mother was still alive then, and I knew if times got bad, I could just go home.

I’d had a safety net. I could afford to be “impulsive.” Once I had children, I couldn’t.

Fear paralyzed me for good reason. If I left, I’d have to do everything on my own. I couldn’t count on my ex taking our boys every other weekend, nor did I want him to in his state.

I hadn’t worked in years. I was a homemaker, trying to be the perfect mother. Dinner on the table every night. Volunteering in the classroom. Homework help. Full-time love.

Now I had to figure out how to keep myself and my two children afloat in an expensive city like Los Angeles. I was terrified of the unknown — of everything that could happen. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t budge. I couldn’t leave.

This, and I have a college education. I have entrepreneurial inclinations. I have a family to fall back on. What about women who for whatever reason don’t? What about women who have been literally beaten down by their husbands in abusive marriages? What about women with more children, less money and even less of a safety net? If it was hard for me to leave my marriage, what about women without my advantages? It would be next to impossible to survive and sometimes it is.

My boyfriend lives in a loft condo on Skid Row in Los Angeles. Gates guard the complex, fit with security guards, where mostly white people lounge by the pool on the weekends while mostly black people live in filthy tents on the street outside. I’m not saying that the sight of my fellow human beings living in such conditions doesn’t still affect me but it’s not as shocking as when I first began to drive through Skid Row to see my boyfriend. However the other day I did see something that reminded me of how difficult this city is for women alone with children. I saw a woman on Skid Row, a baby in her arms, dragging a suitcase behind her, a little girl struggling to keep up. That adult humans must live in such conditions is horrific but that children must too is unspeakable.

I finally did leave my husband. I planned all I could but in the end it did feel like jumping into the abyss. I still had to ask my father to co-sign the lease on my new apartment because the bankruptcy had destroyed my credit. But I had a safety net even if it felt like I didn’t. My fears were unfounded. I won’t say it was a soft landing. It was hard and it hurt. But I survived. I had the means to dust myself off, stand back up again, and to thrive. My children are now flourishing. I’m one of the lucky ones.