11

NO MORE APOLOGIES

Stuart began lashing out more and more in the presence of Sarah and Brendan, as if they weren’t in the room. This upset me more than anything he had done to me. Even if I believed I was responsible for his anger and deserved the treatment he dished out, I knew they didn’t.

Stuart and I still lived in the same house, but we were like strangers. I was moving away from him physically and emotionally. His violence towards me had killed the love I had for him. You can’t reconcile fear with love. The person I once loved and wanted to spend my life with was no more.

For Sarah, Brendan and me, the normal day only began when Stuart left for work each morning. I’d sigh with relief, knowing I could relax my guard for a few hours and not worry about his presence in the home.

Whenever he was around, Stuart needed to control every aspect of every moment of my life. I relinquished all my rights as an equal partner in our marriage through fear. Could we have gone on forever living this insane existence? I don’t think so. While he was there, I was constantly preoccupied with keeping the peace and working out an escape route. In the end, I couldn’t afford the luxury of trying to solve the problem. There wasn’t anything to solve. It was becoming a matter of life and death.

It’s impossible for me to remember the incidents that triggered Stuart’s anger, because they never made any sense. There was no rhyme or reason or pattern or cause. He never once offered an explanation for his sudden change of mood, but I’ll attempt an example.

Heaven knows, I would never risk his wrath, but if he perceived some misdemeanour on my part – say, that I was a little slow getting out of the house – he’d start: ‘Why do you do this?’

‘Do what?’

‘Always take your time.’

‘But I don’t. In fact, I’m always on time. I never keep you waiting.’

‘Then why did you do it this time?’

‘I couldn’t find my bag.’

‘Why didn’t you think about that earlier?’

‘I don’t know. I’m sorry – it won’t happen again.’

‘But why did you do it? You always do things like this.’

‘I don’t know. I won’t do it again.’

‘No, I want to know why you did it.’

‘I didn’t do it on purpose.’

‘Then why did you do it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘That isn’t a good explanation. What’s wrong with you?’

‘Nothing. I said I was sorry.’

‘Why do you do things like this?’

On and on it would go till my head felt like exploding. It was never anything worth arguing about, never anything serious. In his eyes, everything I did and said was wrong. There was never a right answer. Once he got going, I wasn’t allowed to terminate the conversation or walk away.

I dared not let my facial expression reflect my thoughts. If I sighed, rolled my eyes or answered back, he’d raise his hand in a threatening manner. Any negative reaction on my part caused more trouble than was worth.

When I hear or read stories of controlling personalities, the picture that comes to me is of being forced to listen to someone else’s diatribe. Someone has you in their grip, their space, their orbit. You’re captive for those minutes or hours, because you know what the consequences will be if you walk away. If I got cheeky or brave or escaped to another room, I always paid the price. Stuart’s rules had to be obeyed.

One night I finally decided that I could take no more. Stuart was horrible to be with all the time and our life in Gloucester was mis-erable. There were no happy, peaceful periods any more. I dreaded his return from work each evening.

On this last night, Stuart decided to comb Oscar, our big, clumsy, innocent Old English sheepdog. Oscar had a lot of hair, and it sometimes became matted. Stuart grew angrier and angrier as he went on, and didn’t seem to care that Oscar was yelping in pain. I couldn’t intervene. Sarah, Brendan and I just sat and waited until it was over.

After I put Sarah and Brendan to bed, I sat down on the lounge. Neil Diamond was on the television singing songs from his Hot August Night album. I looked at the screen for an hour or so, the familiar tunes floating around me, trying to construct a single thought from the mess in my head. I wasn’t intending to find a solution and didn’t even feel capable of doing so, but one slowly dawned on me. Towards the end of the evening, I felt calm and certain. My only way out was to leave Gloucester and go back to Newcastle with the children. I had no choice. I had to leave.

Until that night, I’d never seriously contemplated leaving my marriage, but now I knew there was no going back. Something in my mind had tipped over. I knew I had no money, no job and nowhere to go, other than back to Mum and Dad and Nanna in Mayfield. The kids would have to be taken out of school; our life in Gloucester was over. The marriage was over. At least the children and I would be safe. I’d run out of options. There were no choices in the end, except to escape.

The most precious people in my life were my children. I was sure my life would end if any harm came to them, but towards the end of my marriage, I often had to contemplate that terrible possibility. I was frightened by what I’d come to believe Stuart could do to us. The eternal sense of waiting for something to end had become unbearable for all three of us. How many more months or years could Sarah and Brendan endure before the damage became irreversible? Hadn’t they already endured too much?

Keeping the peace, staying calm, protecting my children, worrying about which words to use, planning escape routes, imagining better times, vacillating between optimism and despair in the space of an hour – this had become the merry-go-round of my conscious thoughts. Fearing for the lives of my children was beginning to paralyse me.

Nothing is more traumatic than to know that you and your children are at risk in your own home. A home should be a place where you feel safe, protected and loved. But I could no longer guarantee my children’s safety. I had to make a life somewhere for Sarah and Brendan, even if it meant living in poverty in a one-room flat. Anything would be better than our life in Gloucester. Overnight I’d given up believing. There was no future for the three of us with Stuart. The day before, I’d held out hope; today it was gone. It was as simple and difficult as that.

A sense of relief hovered around me. Sarah, Brendan and I would somehow find happiness, but for the time being sanity, safety and peace would do.

The next morning, after Stuart left for work, I packed a few clothes and left a note on the kitchen table. I couldn’t tell him face-to-face that I was leaving him. I believe he would have killed me on the spot. I was twenty-six years old, about to set out on a life as a single mother with two young children. Although I was very thin and emotionally drained, I drove away with real hope in my heart.

The note I left wasn’t angry, but it was definitely a final goodbye. I remember writing that I was sorry it had come to this, but I was tired of all the apologies. I didn’t want any more apologies. I wanted the behaviour and the violence to end, and I’d come to the conclusion that this wouldn’t happen. I couldn’t take any more of the life we were living. Our life together was over for good.

In family law, this is referred to as unilaterally leaving one’s partner. I often think about how the courts would deal with someone like me today. Under the present court system, I would most likely be ordered to return Sarah and Brendan to Gloucester because they were entitled to a relationship with their father. The 2006 Family Law Act is based on the assumption that the best interests of children are met by ensuring that both parents have a meaningful involvement in their lives, and the courts are very strict about relocating children away from their fathers. Even if a court accepted that I’d been subjected to years of violence, it would be bound to rule that the children must have a relationship with the abuser. I’ve heard it so often in court. It isn’t the court’s role to punish bad parenting or bad behaviour. The fact that I was the primary carer would count for nothing.

Where there is violence – or ‘conduct’ as it is called in many judgments – it rarely meets the high threshold provided for in the Act. It would have been my word against Stuart’s. How could I have convinced a court that he wasn’t a good father? He was a respected local doctor, and all the violence had taken place behind closed doors where no-one could see. I hadn’t told my friends about it, let alone made a formal complaint.

What were Sarah and Brendan’s best interests in this situation? I doubt the question is ever really asked in cases of domestic violence. I cringe at what has become of those three meaningless words – ‘children’s best interest’. It’s not about their best interest at all. It’s about evidence, and I had none.

In the 1970s and 1980s, family law offered a degree of protection. Attention was paid to children’s safety during contact, and their wishes and needs were taken into account. Today, though, their right to know and be cared for by both parents outweighs considerations of safety. ‘He loves them and they love him’ is the constant refrain. But what of the situation where a parent is capable of hurting those he loves?

Today, I’d be expected to sit down calmly with my husband and tell him of my plans to leave so that we could negotiate and discuss future arrangement for our children. Together, we’d make an appointment at a Family Relationship Centre to see a mediator, who’d insist on talking about our future, not our past. Don’t the people who make and administer these laws understand the consequences?

The dilemma for many parents now is far more serious than it was for me then. They face the terrible choice of staying in an abusive relationship to protect their children or risking a shared-care arrangement where a violent, controlling parent has unsupervised access. It’s the choice of no choice.

When they got into the car for that final trip out of Gloucester, Sarah was five and Brendan was three. I could only pray they’d recover from the madness and grow up to be normal, well-adjusted adults.

After I’d packed the car with bare essentials, Sarah, Brendan and I stopped off briefly to say goodbye to Bill and Ella. It was a painful goodbye, as I couldn’t go into any detail about my reasons for leaving. Bill was fighting a losing battle with leukaemia, and they were still recovering from the loss of their baby. As I drove away, I watched them wave through my rear-vision mirror. I knew we’d never again eat bacon and eggs in their sun-filled kitchen in winter, or sit around their big red cedar dining table and share a meal of prime beef and farm-grown vegetables, laughing over a bottle of red wine.

We waved till we turned on to the bitumen of the highway. My heart was heavy and light at the same time. I was sad that all that had been so promising on our wedding day was no more, but felt light because a great weight had been lifted. As we drove away along the winding mountain road to the Pacific Highway and on to Newcastle, I felt for the first time in many years, without any niggling doubt, that I’d made the right decision. On we drove, away from the madness, to the shelter of the little home in Mayfield with Mum and Dad and Nanna.

It was early summer in 1976, and our marriage, which lasted six years, was well and truly over.

The government had set up shop-front drop-in centres around the country for people in crisis. Shortly after leaving Gloucester, I visited one of these centres. I couldn’t stop crying when a young psychologist said to me, ‘How can we make you feel OK about your decision?’ It was the first time anyone had suggested I could or should feel good. It was a terrible but necessary decision, and I didn’t expect such an understanding response from a stranger. That one comment was enough to help me through the weeks.

Sarah, Brendan and I slept in one room in three single beds, and we loved the tension-free, uncomplicated lifestyle of my parents’ house in Mayfield. But if I thought that leaving Stuart was the end of the menace, I was wrong.