How I Escaped

On January 7, 2020, I finally escaped my abusive marriage – or more accurately, I left the house we’d built together, and never came back. Here is the story of that day.

By July of 2019, I knew that I had to leave my abusive marriage. I also knew that I had to plan my departure carefully, so that I wouldn’t be trapped, coerced, or manipulated into staying, as I had in December 2016.

We actually talked about divorce at the beginning of July, after a heated argument that started over something trivial: my accidentally stepping on some tiny plants that I was helping her plant. After the usual accusations that I was careless, not listening, not caring, etc., I walked away, which led to even more accusations and anger. In shock once again, I walked up to a mutual friend’s house and told him I was thinking about divorce. When I returned home I started talking with her about this. We actually came up a kind of verbal agreement about how we’d split assets.

But somehow, we reconciled and I pretended to be happy once again. I forget exactly how this happened, but undoubtedly it must have involved my making numerous apologies.

Despite the temporary calm, I still knew I had to leave, but I had to do it without revealing my plans. I knew from previous threats that if she knew what I was planning, she’d lock me out of the house or otherwise make my life miserable.

So I did what Patricia Evans counsels abused women to do. I made a stash of a small amount of spending money in a new bank. I got myself a cheap flip-phone. I got myself a credit card. I got a PO box for all the mail associated with these new things. I told some trusted friends that I was going to need their help on the day of the move, including a place to stay temporarily.

I did all of this in secret, which was not easy, since my every move was being watched. I had to be the first one to check the mailbox each day, to intercept mail from the credit card company, which required a physical address. I had to activate the phone by walking up the hill behind the house, because we had no cell service at the house. I had to make all other phone calls on my weekly visits to town for my volunteer library work.

The most difficult part of the planning was figuring out how to get my grand piano out of the house safely. I could depend on my two friends for moving my other possessions, but the thousand-pound piano was a huge problem. In the end, I failed to get the piano out of the house in time, and lost access to the piano for eight months, but that’s another story for another time.

I knew I had to do the move when my wife was away from the house. This was easier to do in winter, because she often left for the day to go skiing. So I waited until winter was well underway. The wait also allowed me to ensure that we successfully completed our craft show season, which ended a week before Christimas, and to finish some winterizing tasks, such as repainting the house and getting a few cords of wood cut, split, and under cover.

Since I would only know at most one day in advance when it was safe to move, I alerted my friends to stand by around New Year’s Day, because there was now a good snowpack, and I could count on my wife going skiing some time in the next week or so. In the meantime, I tried to pack as much stuff as I could in secret, and stashed a few boxes in the basement. But I knew that I couldn’t pack the bulk of my possessions until the day of the move, after my wife had left home. So I made sure that I had enough boxes lying in wait in the basement.

Finally the day arrived, and my wife left to go skiing. I called my friends and told them to arrive in an hour. There was a slight possibility that my wife would come home after lunch, instead of staying on the ski slopes all day, if the conditions were poor. So I aimed for getting out of the house by noon. I started packing my clothes, books, and other possessions frantically. When my friends arrived, we loaded my boxes and a small amount of furniture into their cars. I said goodbye to my piano by playing Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau. But we managed to hit my noon target time for leaving.

In my haste to leave, I forgot to pack a few items, like a file folder that had important papers (such as my passport and birth certificate), and some books that I had owned since my early 20s. I may never get these things back.

That day I stored many of my possessions in the basement of the house I’d bought before I met my wife. I still owned the house, but it was rented out at the time. But I made a huge mistake by not taking with me the spare key to the house. Two weeks later, my wife must have found the key, because she got into the house and stole most of the things I’d stored in the basement, including thousands of dollars of my property that I’d been storing in the basement for years. But that’s another story for another time.

That same day, after I’d done the move, I transferred considerably less than half of our shared liquid assets to my new bank account. I did this to ensure that she had more than I, and more than enough to survive on. She did not appreciate this act of generosity, but instead criticized it harshly, and lied about it to her friends and her lawyer, but more on this another time.

When I left home, I didn’t have a car, since we’d sold my personal car the previous year to buy a van for my wife’s craft business. So a few days later, while I was staying at a friend’s house, I bought a used car (and also hired a lawyer to start the divorce process). That gave me the freedom to move around on my own. A week after I’d left home, I was living in a rooming house with seven other people. Over the next eight months, I moved a total of five times, before finally ending up back in the house I’d bought before I met my wife. But that’s another story for another time.

The moral of this story is that if you’re leaving an abusive relationship, you must not make your intent known to your abuser, and you must have an escape plan established so that you can leave safely on short notice.