The Rebuild

My husband had never allowed me to work. I had been with him since I was 17 years old. I had no experience, and no idea how to get a job. All I had known was how to be a house wife, and mother. I was lucky that I got a job as a server, even though the pay was not good at all, it was a job, and I could bring money into my home. The first year was so hard. I missed so many things with my children. There was the court battle to give me and the children a restraining order, and my husbands charges that the state had filled. There was a change in the district attorney at the last minute and let him plea bargain and walk away with only 15 months of probation. Once he plead they gave me my restraining order. I had to explain all of this to my employer. I was working so many hours and missing so many things, but not making ends meet. I finally got a little raise at work. I managed to get out of the trailer that I was living in, and into a house. I have had many bumps along the way. I do not have an easy life, or by most standards a good one, but I am working on that. I started school online, and have been trying to save every penny that I can. After two years my husband decided to grant me a divorce, but he now wants visitation with the children. Now there is another court battle underway. He has all the money in the world to pay lawyers to fight for him. I hope that no judge would subject my children to that man's temper, but you never know. I have done everything in my power to protect and heal them from that man. Now I have to face everyday with the fear of him back in our lives. At least two nights a week, my son wakes up screaming about his father. The twins are to young to remember him, because they were only a year old last time they saw him. My oldest son now has problems with his emotions, and when and how to show them. I feel horrible for staying as long as I did, with as many things as he did to me and to my children, but I have to look at it as "I got away and saved all of our lives". I still have the fear everyday, that he will show up and do what he said he would do. Once you have lived that life for as long as I had, you believe the things that they say they will do (well the bad ones).  I am strong, and a fighter, but he still scares me. I know that I will prove him wrong about me. He said that I would never be anything, be fat and unwanted, never do more then work in fast food, and that I could never get away from him or keep the kids from him.