No one Knew I Was in an Abusive Marriage. Including Me.

Why my family are not to blame

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There were no bruises. He never hit me. And he was proud of the fact. He only said it to me once – I’ve never hit you. He was pleased with himself. And I knew straight away he’d considered it.

He preferred subtler methods of control. Baby-trapping, for starters. He’d told me he was infertile, after treatment for testicular cancer. No problem, I said; I wasn’t planning on children. I had zero maternal instincts and I wanted to write. Nothing would mess that up like the pram in the hall. My plan was six-months-on, six-months off, because as a programmer,¹ I could earn enough in half a year to write in the other half. No children was perfect. I’d have novels, not children. But he had other plans.

Getting pregnant was a shock. He framed it as a miracle. Not infertile after all! And of course, you don’t abort a miracle. Plus, when a foetus embeds in your womb, mind-altering drugs are released. Hormones are powerful chemicals. A few weeks of those babies, and yep, I felt maternal. I was frightened, though. The words I used, when asked, were ‘of being subsumed’. He assured me I was being ridiculous. It turned out I was accurate.

Our first son was born six weeks prematurely. There were reasons. I’d been working through the night trying to save his company (and our house) after he went into business with our ‘Best Man’, who was, unbeknown to me, a secret alcoholic, writing trashy, buggy code. Six months pregnant, with my programming contract expired (and not renewable, given my state), I learned C++ from scratch to try and save his software company by fixing the garbage our ‘Best man’ had left behind. My husband lay on the sofa with the curtains drawn, watching movies, saying it was beyond him to fix, while the mortgage demands turned red.

We had a final deadline for the system, too, and as it neared, I worked through the night, with minimal rest. I dropped my antenatal swimming class; no time for self-care. My husband brought me the odd cheese sandwich at my desk. I delivered the system physically, driving to Redhill alone, now seven and half months pregnant, on no sleep at all the night before, slapping myself to stay awake. Where was he? Why the hell didn’t he drive me, at least? I’ve always said the abuse didn’t start until the baby was born but writing this, it’s clear that wasn’t true. This too, was abuse. But no one could see it. Including me.

Did I tell my mum about this dangerous drive on one of our phone calls? Did I tell her I’d been up all night, and nodding off at the wheel, close to driving myself and her grandchild into a ditch? Probably not. Probably I just gave her the heroic “I saved the company” version. I wanted her to think I was doing well, after years of being a worry to her. I was presenting a picture of happiness and stability so she might respect me more, not think me so broken. Look at me, Mum. I saved the house. Paid off the mortgage arrears. All so I wouldn’t have to give birth to our firstborn in a tent at the bottom of his sister’s garden, my recurring picture of Hell.

The day after that drive to Redhill, my waters broke. Six weeks premature, our son went straight into the Baby Care Unit. Needled, ventilated, and soon, jaundice-yellow, splayed like a frog pinned out for dissection under UV lights. A first-time mum, I didn’t know then about kangaroo care. They wouldn’t let me touch him for 48 hours. I sat watching him through the distorting plastic of the incubator, with the local radio station piping Jason Donovan’s “Any Dream Will Do” through the unit, pushing me to gooey tears. I know, how embarrassing.

I pumped colostrum on their milking machine, named ‘Daisy’. My dad, about to move to Hong Kong, came to visit to say hello and goodbye to his grandson, and got embarrassed that I burst into tears. In the Unit’s parent lounge, I bonded with a couple with another 34-weeker. Their child died.

Our baby got close to dying twice. My husband brought in a printed-out fax from the insurance company I’d made the system for, asking for a few final tweaks. Much as I didn’t want to leave my premature baby’s side, I discharged myself to go home and do the coding, then came back to the hospital to pump more milk.

Finally, five weeks after he was born, and before he was officially due, our six-pound son (having regained his birth weight) was stable enough to come home with us. And my husband shifted into Stage 2.

It began with a question. I was breastfeeding this tiny scrap you could hold on your shoulder with just his little bum cupped in the palm of your hand, when my husband said,

“If there was a fire, and you could only save one of us, which one would you save?”

I said, “[My son’s name]. He’s a tiny, helpless baby, and you’re a six-foot adult with working legs. And I hope you would do the same.”

This was the wrong answer. My husband was upset by it.

“I would save you,” he said. “Because you’re unique. We can always have another baby.”

This was his cue to start the first bout of the first-grade punishment, The Silent Treatment. For several weeks, he completely refused to speak to me. I’d speak, and he’d pretend he didn’t hear. I’d ask for help with the baby, and he’d ignore me. It was the school-level torture we used to call Sending to Coventry.

When I asked my mother’s advice she said it was normal for men to be jealous of their children. She thought it would pass.

It didn’t. The abuse that no one could see as abuse was now in full swing and would not let up until I left some seven years later.

He persuaded me that we should move to the country, and that’s where we were living when our second child arrived. Now I was isolated. The house was outside the village; no pavements, so you had to drive everywhere, reducing any chance of making neighbourly connections. It was screened from the road by a 20-foot Leylandii hedge that touched the powerlines. Privacy was how it was sold to me; prison was what it became. It wasn’t long before I was thinking a parody of the Alien tagline.

In the countryside, no one can hear you scream.

All week he worked away, leaving me to cope with the children alone. First two, soon three. Plus three-quarters of an acre of a smallholding left entirely in my hands. It was a very different deal to the one we agreed when I was pregnant; that we would each of us work half the week, and do half the childcare. Now, all my dreams and ambitions were crushed into the corset-tight cage of Country Housewife.

The role itself was abuse to a woman like me. But of course, there was more, none of which I recognised because it didn’t cause bruises or broken bones. Jealous accusations. Denigration. Criticism and cruelty. I bent myself out of shape to try and please him, until I was twisted like a pretzel, but it was never enough. I was never enough. He hooked into my childhood vulnerabilities until I felt so hopeless and trapped that I wanted to die.

To the outside world, though – including my family – none of this showed. If I was a mess, that was who I had always been. He was the rock, the down-to-earth one, and my saviour. He was jolly and cheery to them, a great host, a professional. A successful businessman in suit and tie. Patiently handling their flaky, unstable loved one.

He was never cruel to me when they were present. And I didn’t know how to explain why I wanted to leave. He presented a different person to them than he was with me. I could only say I was miserable. And to them it must have seemed that was who I was anyway; they remembered me at nine, at fifteen, at twenty. How could it be anything to do with him?

This was the context for the things they said and did that looked, on the surface, to be wrong. When my mum came down the weekend after I left him, I assumed she was coming to help me out with my three distressed boys, in my unfurnished rental. Instead, as soon as the kids were in bed, she left me alone to go to the pub with him, consoling him, helping him plot how to get me back, staying out till closing time.

She thought she was doing the best for me. She thought I was acting against my own interests. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time.

And still I couldn’t name it as abuse, because there was no physical violence. I never had to lie about walking into doors. He looked plausible. I looked crazy. When I said this respectable man was issuing death threats, it looked like I was suffering from some kind of psychosis. What evidence did I have? Just my word. When my word was worth nothing.

Then, it was hard to forgive. Now it is easy. The buffer of time, and two decades of healing have helped me see what my family saw: nothing. Just Ros being wobbly again. Just Ros acting crazy. Just Ros exploding her life because she can’t cope with motherhood. Or marriage. Or living in the country. Or living. Or something.

Why write all these things? Why dredge up the past? Not to point the finger of blame. As I wrote last week, I take full responsibility for all the powerful things that have helped me grow. My abusive first marriage was what it took for me to find I had value after all, and to start to realise that value.

But had I read something like this first, perhaps I would have realised it sooner. Perhaps I could have spotted the winking lights of recognition, and found a way to stop, to take a breath, and not walk down the aisle. There are, after all, other, less damaging ways of growing.

These relationships are happening to thousands of women, right now. And so many of these women can’t see they’re in abusive relationships. Like the one who posted in Reddit two days ago, asking Am I Overreacting? She pre-prepared food that she could safely eat after her major intestinal surgery. Two weeks post-op, she goes to her freezer and finds all her sugar-free, gluten-free, low-carb meals have disappeared. Her husband says their 11-year-old ate them. Then says that he did, for ‘variety’, even though she had prepped his favourite meals for him in addition to hers. He knows very well these meals are her medical necessity. That she is too exhausted now to replace them. She has to ask strangers, two weeks post-op, Am I Over-Reacting? Oh, darling. The man is literally trying to destroy you.

How hard it will be for her to escape. She’s already chronically sick from being with him. Auto-immune diseases are a common result of being trapped with these ‘invisible’ abusers. As coercive control expert Emma Katz lays out in her vital piece, He Hurts Her Body in a Thousand Ways Without Laying a Hand on Her. Where is her support network? Perhaps, like mine was, like I was, like the woman herself, they are blind. So let’s start seeing the signs from the very beginning. Save as many women as we can from finding themselves trapped with a man like that.

When I finally got out, people asked, Were there no red flags? Yes, but I didn’t understand what they meant. No one discussed coercive control. That phrase and others that would come into play long after I left him — love-bombing, baby-trapping — didn’t exist. But yes, there were signs before our wedding day. They were oddities. Flickering shadows that conflicted with the bulk of his persona. Confusing dark wings that passed quickly and coldly over the landscape of our apparent happiness.

The first was an enormous lie.

But that, I shall save for next week.

Want more like this? There is always:

1. COBOL and JCL initially, later the 4GL (4th generation language) called FOCUS, if you’re wondering. But most languages can be picked up pretty quickly. My first programming experience was at school on punched cards (sent to the mainframe 20 miles away) and later punched tape and even later 5.25 inch floppy drives on a kit-built computer, using ASSEMBLER and BASIC. Thanks, Mr Gray. You changed my life.