On April 2nd, 2023 I sent the text message that would change my life forever..."Call 911"

It is difficult to truly describe the events leading up to that fateful morning in a way that captures the reality of our lives during that time. After 4 years of escalating violence I finally broke, though truthfully, I had been broken much longer. What I once described as my fairytale had quickly become my nightmare, intensified by the extreme isolation of the pandemic. My life had become a vicious cycle of verbal, physical and sexual abuse.

I have vivid flashbacks of nights spent wedging myself between our couch and the wall at night, praying he wouldnt find me in his drunken rage. The cold feeling in the pit of my stomach when I heard the slamming door and heavy steps coming down the stairs, where I was forced to sleep on the living room floor with my infant son. I remember the moment when blinking through tears I made out the vision of my daughter woken from her sleep only to see her mother's head split open and the wound gushing blood all over the floor. The fear in her eyes as the man she lovingly called "Dad" hovered over me, forcing me to beg for mercy. I remember the mornings I went to wake my son for school only to find him huddled on the floor by his door, where he had fallen asleep listening through the crack to the intense screams across the hall. The smashed TVs and phones, doors slammed right off their hinges, this became the soundtrack of our lives. Every meal became a war zone, every holiday a minefield we delicately navigated while waiting for the next moment he would explode. We lived in fear and moved through our lives like ghosts - I had accepted that one day this man would kill me.