The Person I Don’t Want to Be

I always said I wasn’t one of “those” people. People who, when mistreated, don’t stand up and walk away. I always felt I was stronger than that. I am stubbornly independent. So much so, that to fall into a battered woman category would be next to impossible.

As it turns out, my stubbornness, an inability to fail, has made me just that – a battered woman. I love my fiancée. I will always love him. But I’m 8 months pregnant with our child, and everything I fought so hard to fix, all of our issues, are suddenly non-negotiable. It should have always been that way, but it wasn’t. He is a mean drunk. He loves his buddies and his parties, but like clockwork, he will get mad at me. I stand up for myself, even ignore warnings to just leave him alone, and I end up with a bruised rib, a black eye, a big bald patch where my hair was, or with a feeling like, because I didn’t just let it go, or because I smacked him for his behavior. I believed that I deserved it, I started it. On some level part of me still does. I know he’s twice my size, I know he’s got no right to hit me, I know that just because it doesn’t happen all the time, doesn’t make it any more excusable.

I’ve toyed with the idea of leaving, because I won’t have my child living in a home where his mother is not safe, or he/she is not safe, but I’m torn. I feel that I owe my fiancée the benefit of the doubt, a chance to be the man I want him to be. I feel like I don’t have the right to take his child away over something that happened before. It’s almost like I need a trigger. But what if that trigger is my baby?

We’re at a point where we are treading water. He’s away, fighting for his country, doing something I could never do, and he’s there, loving me. He has no idea that while he puts his life on the line, I dream of being happy, and that he’s not in those dreams. What right do I have to wait until he leaves to start thinking about getting out?

If I truly confessed what he’s done, emotionally and physically, to someone, it would make me accountable to an action. I’d have to do something. I don’t have anyone I feel can hear what I need to say, without thinking less of me, or losing respect for me. I guess it’s pride. And on some level, I really do think he will change now that he has a child, and if I don’t provoke him. Logic and heart don’t agree.

I have become the woman I feel sorry for. The woman that if I met her on the street, I would help her get out. Why is it so difficult for me to leave when I feel so strongly on the subject when it’s someone else?