4 years ago, someone else saved my life – everything changed in an instant. I remember hearing her scream to stop. I remember her saying she had the police on the phone. I remember the rage, the insanity of the situation. I froze. I could not move. It was as though everything was happening around me. Moving at warp speed and frozen like a photo at the same moment. It was like a scene in a movie really, you know one of those TV movies that you were a little too scared to watch as a teenager yet you still watched.

This wasn’t a scene from a movie. This was really life, my life, and tragically I let myself get to this point. By this point in the marriage, I knew better than to drink when he was drinking too much. By this time, I knew the signs all too well leading up to his tea kettle blowing it’s top. By this time, I knew it was a precarious and delicate dance to not have the fuse blow. By this time, I knew how to keep myself safe most of the time. By this time, I knew too much, I knew I needed to leave and yet I stayed.

The gory details of all of the times that I survived become unimportant in the greater story. They are moments in time. Split seconds where different decisions could have been made. The amount of times that my life has been saved in this lifetime is infinite.

Today I am here to tell my story, because someone else, a beautiful woman named Carmen, shouted at the top of her lungs that what he was doing was not ok. I am here today by the grace of God. I forgive you for myself. I forgive myself for not being strong enough to leave you before. I forgive myself for knowing how you treated me was wrong and staying anyway. By the grace of God, I am alive as Carmen saw you put your hands around my neck and say that you would kill me.

And yet that day somehow, I still protected you. By Phoenix law, the Police were required to issue an emergency order of protection aka a restraining order. I knew that order would cost you your career. I knew that it would risk putting me in more danger as the dance of anger and rage had grown so much worse in Arizona. I also knew in that moment that there was no other option but to divorce you. I was setting the framework to get out as safely as I could.

I chose my battles in the mediation and mistakenly did not hire an attorney to review the mediation documents to protect me against your last measure of abuse. My eternal optimism that you tried so hard to squash so many times ultimately left me open to you hurting me one last time. I believed that if I left you with the money that I was rightfully entitled, which at a minimum was 50% of your 401k and spousal support until or if I remarried given that we were married for over 13.5 years, then you would go onto heal yourself to be the decent human being that I believed you could be with healing.

Instead, you decided to not have the grace to give me a bit more time to heal myself by allowing me more time to refinance the house. It was never about the money to you, it was about the control as was referenced in the multi-page out of turn manifesto that your attorney saw fit to file with the court. You wanted me to feel like the shit on the bottom of your shoe to the bitter end and I wanted you to go out in to the world and heal yourself to become a decent human being. I forgive you for not being healed enough to be kind to the person that you hurt most in the world. I forgive the person that hurt you so much that you saw fit to nearly kill the person you were supposed to love most in the world. I forgive myself for staying beyond the point of no return.

May you use the money that I gifted you to effect positive change for people less fortunate than yourself. Give it all away. It will never make you as happy as you think it will make you. Feed the homeless. Offer a woman in a dire situation the resources to find a safe place to stay. Tread lightly for the rest of your days.