Leaving a marriage, losing my children, and learning that strength is not as simple as staying or going

I’ve asked myself the question many times: did I leave my 24-year marriage because I was too strong, or because I was too weak?

Was I too strong a woman to put up with the disrespect and abuse any longer?
Or was I too weak to carry the burden anymore?
Did I stand up… or did I buckle?

I truly don’t know the answer to that question.

If I could have stayed, I feel like I would have. And I say that only because the price I have paid for leaving has been so high. I chose to move away from my hometown of 24 years because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was always looking over my shoulder. Always on high alert for some unseen threat.

I lost my home, my financial security, moved away from my friends.

By far the highest price I have paid is that my children blame me and barely speak to me.

Not because I cheated on their father. I didn’t. He did.
Not because I vented to them or bad-mouthed him. I didn’t. He did.
Not because I was verbally or emotionally abusive. I wasn’t. He was.

They blame me because I stayed silent. Both in the marriage and in the divorce I tried my best to protect them from the truth. To leave them out of it. And in my silence, they swallowed their father’s narrative hook, line, and sinker.

His version of reality casts him as the innocent victim. And I have to admit, it’s a compelling narrative. People rarely question it, especially because he wove an element of religious tyranny and abuse into the story. Let’s face it: people hate religion and love a good “religious abuse of power” storyline.

According to him, I had no reason or grounds to leave. He was a good husband and father who worked hard to financially support his non-working wife and children. When he decided he no longer wanted to attend church with me, I supposedly schemed to get out of the marriage by making up a story about feeling suicidal so I could leave him. The elders supported me only because “they liked me better” and were prejudiced against him for no longer wanting to be part of the church.

Now, I’m fully aware that religious abuse of power is a real thing. There are manipulative people who will do anything to win in the court of public opinion.

That is not me.

From the very beginning, I decided I would not talk publicly about my situation, except with a very small circle of trusted friends. I would not bad-mouth him to our children. I would let my actions and my reputation speak for me.

Did I carry out that decision to perfection? Probably not, but I certainly tried.

If I could have carried the load of his toxic behavior any longer, I would have.
First, because I loved him. Crazy as that sounds now.
Second, because I did not want to destroy my children’s family, their home, or their sense of reality.

But I reached a point where I knew that if I stayed, it was going to kill me. If not physically, then spiritually and emotionally. I was becoming a shell of a human being. I was severely depressed, experiencing crippling anxiety, and self harming to cope with the pain and frustration.

It’s not a coincidence that when he told me he no longer wanted to attend church with me, the marriage began to unravel. On the surface, the timing might seem to validate his claim. But I did not leave because of my religious beliefs. If anything, I stayed as long as I did because of them.

When he told me he no longer wanted to attend church, I knew what he was really saying:
I will not be told what to do.
I will not be told how to act.
I will not be told how to be a husband or a provider. I will not be told how to treat my own wife.

And not only would he continue as he was, he would remove any barrier that might slow him down from becoming worse. More selfish. More abusive. More neglectful.

I told him that if he didn’t want to continue spiritually, that was his choice, but then I needed him to attend couples counseling with me. I knew that without the hope that he might one day listen to spiritual guidance, I couldn’t continue. Maybe if he wouldn’t listen to God, he would listen to a professional.

He fought it and agreed only when it became clear that it was counseling or nothing.

Even then, every week he would declare he was done with therapy, only to break down days later when things didn’t go his way. I watched him perform for the therapist, saying what he thought he was supposed to say. It didn’t last. After several months, the mask slipped, and he showed the therapist exactly who he was.

The therapist hung up on him! That was our last session.

(It was during COVID. We were on Zoom.)

Him telling me he no longer wanted to attend church wasn’t the cause of the collapse. It was simply the final brick pulled from a relationship already hanging by a thread worn dangerously thin.

So was I too weak to stay?

Is that why my children are so angry with me? Because I wasn’t strong enough to hold our fragile family together on the back of an abuser? Because I fell apart and blew up our family to save myself?

Or was I too strong?

Too strong to keep turning the other cheek in the face of complete disrespect.
Too strong to allow myself to be treated like a possession, with no needs or desires of any importance?
Too strong to continue in this charade of a relationship knowing he didn’t deserve me, and that I didn’t deserve to be constantly devalued, criticized, called lazy, or made to feel stupid and incompetent.

Maybe the answer is that I was both.

People often judge women who stay in abusive relationships as weak. They have no idea the strength it takes to survive in an environment like that, trying to do what feels right. Right with God. Right by their children. Putting the abuser’s needs and feelings ahead of their own.

It’s a no-win situation.

It takes incredible strength to stay.
And it takes incredible strength to walk away.

I spend every day, and I truly mean every day, feeling deeply grateful that I am no longer in that relationship, while also grieving everything I had to lose in order to break free.