I was now completely on my own, renting a room from a women in a nearby town. I was still working and starting college when I got home one day and saw a girl and her boyfriend in the kitchen. The women I was renting from had a daughter and her boyfriend was Brett. Brett and Venus had been dating for a while and were living together. That night the phone rang and it was Brett calling to ask me out for coffee. I was so lonely after breaking up with Steve that it was so great to be asked out so I went. He was so cute looking and we sat at Perkins having fries and pop for hours. Another good point was that he drove a tow truck which I loved being in. He dropped me off that night and we had a great time together. When I went inside to the house Venus’s mother had told me that Brett and Venus had been broken up for over a month but that Brett couldn’t kick her out of the apartment, because she wouldn’t let her daughter come and live with her. I thought wow this is great maybe him and I can date and she agreed that it might be nice; he was a good guy. Well, Brett and I started dating and things were crazy because his ex, Venus, just constantly called him and I, paged him, and just for the most part went crazy. She would constantly call me at my house and scream at him, her mother, and myself. It was horrible and she just hated that he moved in with me! The thing is that she admitted that they weren’t together for a while but I guess with them living together she thought that maybe they would work it out sooner or later. Now that I look back I see that I wasn’t right going out with him or having him move in with me while they were living together, in a relationship with each other or not, it still wasn’t right. Brett and I were great together! We had a ton of fun; drove tow trucks together, and just had some great sex. After we were together for a while he asked me to marry him and I was stupid and said yes even though him and I both knew that I wasn’t in love with him. After all that had gone on I was still very much in love with Steve.
The day came and I found out I was pregnant! Now he really wanted to marry me and I was so scared that I tracked my mom down and ran to her in Arizona. I didn’t know what to do and I guess that maybe having a relationship with her would help me to decide what I was going to do about everything.
In Arizona things weren’t good. My mother wanted to keep me there so bad that she actually had the nerve to lock me in a room not letting me eat for days. One day when she left I broke the window and climbed out at 3 months pregnant. I walked a little over 3 miles in sweats with temperatures a little over 100 degrees. I got to a laundry mat and needed help because I couldn’t walk anymore, I was starving, boiling hot, sick, and pregnant. This women there helped me and got me to the welfare agency and they helped me and got me on a bus the next morning. I had to leave all of my stuff there at my mother’s house but I got to be free again.
The bus pulled back into NY at around 7 am and Brett was there waiting for me. At this point I was so sick that I couldn’t even get off the bus and Brett had to come carry me off the bus and put me into the car. I thought of him as a savior for that. I still wasn’t going to marry him at this point but after him rescuing me I did want to be with him. I didn’t doubt that anymore. The only thing that I knew now was that I had to tell my father about the baby and ask him to be around.
Now up until this point I hadn’t talked to my family in almost 3 years and I wanted them to be around for this child so I ran to my father. When I told him I was pregnant his response to me was that if I didn’t marry Brett I would forever be banished from the family. Well the next day I married him. At this point I still wasn’t in love with him at all. He would always tell me that he loved me and I wouldn’t ever say anything back other than to smile. I couldn’t tell him that I did because I was still in love with Steve. Yes after all of that time I still loved my first love. He was still the greatest portion of my heart.
The day after I married Brett the abuse started. We had a minor disagreement and he kicked me in the belly, I was a little over 6 months pregnant. He cried and I forgave him. From that moment nothing would ever be the same. The beatings began and never really ended except for brief days here and there. At this point I felt I was in way to deep to get out so I stayed and then on September 22nd he pushed me and my water broke. I had our daughter the next day and it got so much worse after she came along.
I remember when she was about 4 months old and he picked her up and shook her at me telling me that if I didn’t do what he wanted he would hurt her and I almost died. I just continued to be the ever-changing wife to try and make him happy. I always had the house spotless, laundry clean, and dinner ready no matter what time he came home, which some nights wasn’t until 4 am or later. I just kept moving until I found out I was pregnant again. My daughter was now turning 1. Well I was so scared because I still didn’t love him and I so much wanted to get out. One day I was home, my daughter was in bed sleeping, and I went into the bathroom. I felt this huge pain and fell to the floor. I was severely hemorrhaging on the floor now covered in blood and urine. I called my husband and he refused to come help me. After a while of lying there on the floor bleeding his mother called and I told her what was going on and she came. I was in the hospital for 2 days and had my daughter there with me almost the full time. When I got home they had me on home IV with nurses in and out all of the time because somehow I had also gotten a severe infection and so I was basically bed ridden. I know that it sounds so strange but I never really fell in love with this man until about 7 months before he left. Time passed and he was constantly hateful to my daughter and myself, being mentally, physically, verbally abusive every day. I stayed!
The abuse kept going on and went to the point where none of either family would come around because he had beaten me in front of his 11 and 13-year-old brothers as well as in front of my 9-year-old sister. It was so embarrassing and yet I stayed. The family kept telling me that I should just leave, and should just go to court. They didn’t understand that for some reason I was way to afraid to do it on my own. How much I hated it sometimes because he would pull the fuses out of the car so I couldn’t go anywhere and he would beat the hell out of me if I talked to him about going back to college or work. I felt so stuck in my own life that I wanted to die. The meaner he got the more I tried to make him happy thinking that I could make it all better, somehow.
We then got pregnant again with my son and I hate to say it but never once while I was pregnant did I want to have another baby with this man. I thought that I would never get away now. I wouldn’t ever be able to do it on my own with 2 kids and I knew at that point that if I ever was going to do it on my own he wouldn’t get these kids. The day I had my son I remember calling my husband over 15 times from the hospital crying. The doctors couldn’t find our sons heartbeat and decided they would do a C-section. My husband refused to come. Well my family called him like crazy and screamed at him until he finally got so mad he came to the hospital to be with me. A few hours after having our son he left. He came back with our daughter and asked me to watch her. I then basically for the next week while in recovery watched her and tried to take care of our newborn son while stuck in a hospital bed. When I came home it was the same thing except for at home he didn’t come home until they were both asleep because he didn’t want to deal with them at all. I spent almost every day up until then crying to him, and begging him to be there for his family. Around the time my son turned six months old he got really sick. He was in the hospital for a little over a month and still my husband was nowhere to be found. He wouldn’t leave work to save anyone’s life. He worked over 80 hours a week most weeks. He was bringing in over $75,000 a year and our bills weren’t even a small portion of that yet he couldn’t stop working. Around the time our son got out of the hospital I found out that I had cancer. I remember the day I found it, it was a Thursday afternoon, and I called him. He laughed in my face about it and in turn I told him I would never get treatment because I would rather die of the cancer than spend another day with him. Everything just kept going the way that it was for a long time until November of 2000. I finally decided that I would leave I couldn’t take it anymore. He was killing all of us. I packed up the kids, myself and was walking out the door when he begged and pleaded with me. I honestly think this is where I started to fall in love with him. For the first time since the day we got married he talked to me and was completely open. We spent over 8 hours talking about everything and at the end he looked at me and said he was still so much in love with me and he was finally going to try. I agreed to stay and he started to change. He wanted to move so in January we left our home and moved into a house in the country. Things were going really well. He was coming home and finally agreed to let me work. We started spending time together alone and with the kids. For such a brief moment there I saw the marriage I had always wanted and fell so much in love with him. Everyone thought I was so stupid when I moved out to the country with him. They all told me that he was only moving us all out there so that he could kill us and no one would ever know what went on really. I completely refused to believe that and lived there with him. As March rolled around our son started to get sick. He was going into the doctors and they couldn’t find anything wrong with him. Well then on the 28th of March I went into the hospital because I started hemorrhaging at work. The cancer had caused some problems and I stayed in the hospital for the day. That weekend I was back at work. I got home from work that Saturday and my house was filled with people I didn’t know. There was a women, her husband and their 6 kids. She refused to even look at me and her husband didn’t say a darn thing either. Well I had no clue what to do but I was feeling so very miserable in my own house that I went into the bedroom to change and stuff and ended up falling asleep on the bed. Of course that night I got really put threw the ringer for that. I called the next morning and said how sorry I was to have done that. She didn’t forgive me but her husband did. At this point I still didn’t really know who the heck they were but soon would be finding all of this out. Well from here it all gets really interesting and complicated.