This is part of an ongoing series. Start with Part 1.
I had a call scheduled with the home nurse. Routine — a check-in for new moms, the kind of thing they do to make sure you're surviving, answer questions, give advice. I went down to my car to take it. For privacy. I had told him about it multiple times.
A few minutes in, the passenger door ripped open.
He grabbed the phone out of my hand and went on a tirade. Who the fuck are you talking to. Get upstairs and stop being a shit mother. Your daughter is crying and hungry.
I looked at him, shocked. What is your problem? I'm talking to the nurse. I told you about it multiple times.
He handed the phone back. Went inside.
The nurse was silent for a moment.
Are you okay? That is not okay for him to speak to you like that. You're a new mom trying to do the best you can. Is that normal?
I was trying not to cry. I told her yeah, pretty much.
The texts came after.
You went out there to avoid feeding her. Grow up.
Going out there to wait for mommy to come save you? Get real.
She had been crying for ten minutes, he said. While I was on a scheduled call I had told him about. In my own car. In front of my own building.
A few days later he was in a mood again.
I had said something like gross, look at the umbilical cord — the way it was drying and falling off. He started berating me. Said it was because of the cloth diapers. He had opinions about the cloth diapers — which he had never bought, never washed, never used, because he paid for nothing — and yet, here he was with opinions.
I was changing her diaper. He was in the bathroom.
Then he charged into the room screaming that I was hurting her. The umbilical cord was falling off the way umbilical cords do, naturally, on their own timeline. He decided I had done something wrong.
I was standing at the changing table with my newborn daughter in front of me when he shoved me away from her.
He slammed me into the wall. Art prints I had hanging came down.
I screamed at him to leave.
He eventually left.
She was 12 days old.
It was over two weeks before he sent a single text asking about her.
And for weeks after that he said: you told me to leave.
And I said: you shoved me into a wall while our daughter was on the changing table.
You kicked me out.
You grabbed me and slammed me into a wall.
On April 8th: You kicked me out and told me to leave.
On April 13th: I've told a few people her name. All their responses were I didn't know you liked black girls. You f**ed her. Royally. Dumbass. Use this as evidence against me in court if you want, I don't care.*
Then: If you keep claiming I physically abused you and assaulted you I will take you to court. I'm not going to have my future ruined by you just because of false accusations and your feelings being hurt.
That was April 13th. His daughter was one month old.
Then came the racist memes. Memes making fun of single moms. Then silence. Then current events, small talk, the mundane back-and-forth of two people pretending the last year hadn't happened.
Then the same old shit.
There are things that happened in those months that I'm not ready to put on the page. Things that came back to me in pieces later. Things I told myself I didn't remember — partly because I was ashamed, partly because I wanted to see if he'd ever admit to them on his own.
He never did.
In September 2023 my company celebrated their twentieth anniversary. It was a remote team — I had never met any of my coworkers in person. This was the event for that. Dinner, a boat trip, a brewery. Partners were invited.
He was supposed to come.
He said he had to work. That work was more important. And then when I asked if he would watch her while I went alone — his daughter, who he had helped create and largely refused to care for — he said:
"I'm not babysitting to make your life easier."
My mom came to watch her.
At the event I sat next to a coworker I'd never met in person before. His wife had had a baby one month before me. We were the only two there without our partners. We talked the most. We left the earliest.
For months after that he accused me of cheating with him. This man I had met exactly once, whose wife had just had a baby, who I had spoken to because we were the only two people in the room without someone beside us.
The accusation became a fixture. Something he could pick up and use whenever he needed it.
The rest of that fall is a blur.
The same disappearing act. The same verbal assaults. The same circular arguments about cheating, about Angie, about all the other women — the ones I had found on his phone, the ones he kept finding ways to explain away or deny. The same cycle that had been running since before she was born, just now with a baby in the middle of it.
I don't remember the specific fights. I remember the feeling of them. The way my body would brace before a conversation even started. The way I had learned to read his moods like weather.
But something was also happening in the quiet.
Between his disappearing acts I was going down Reddit wormholes — abuse, narcissism, cheating. I found Lundy Bancroft. Why Does He Do That. I read it. I cried. It was so clarifying. I was finally recognizing the pattern underneath all the excuses — his mother, his father, being bullied, all of it. The reasons he offered for who he was. None of them were reasons. They were just more deflection.
I started seeing things more clearly. I started biting back. I'd send him screenshots from the book. I'd tell him he was abusive, a narcissist. That I deserved better.
I was starting to enjoy the peace when he was gone. I noticed the way his voice grated on me. The way he performed intelligence. The way he always thought he was the smartest person in any room.
I was finding myself again.
The day after Thanksgiving, he showed back up.
Part 14 — coming next.
If you've ever been told that leaving was your idea when it wasn't — you are not alone.
Rewriting history is its own kind of violence. It leaves no marks. That's the point.