Still Standing

Hope for abused women navigating contentious divorce and custody battles

This is for the women leaving abusive marriages, the ones trying to hold onto their sanity while fighting for custody and keeping a happy face on for kids who are casualties of decisions they never made.

I see you. This is not what you signed up for. You never agreed to be a part-time parent. You never agreed to share your husband with a drug addict named Tiffany. You never dreamed that “till death do us part” actually meant “until I get bored and decide the grass is greener elsewhere. Screw you and the vows we made.”

Now you’re trapped in a private kind of hell you’re not even really allowed to talk about.

The bills still have to be paid, only now on a single income because he casually decided he was done contributing. The kids still need dinner, bedtime stories, and the reassurance that home is a safe place. Life keeps demanding that you show up, even as every part of you wants to curl into a dark corner and disappear.

Meanwhile, your mind is caught in an exhausting cycle of cognitive dissonance, trying to reconcile the person you thought you knew with the staggering depths of callousness and contempt that somehow lived just beneath the surface all along. Every day is spent convincing yourself that it’s really over, while playing an endless game of whack-a-mole with the hope that refuses to die, the hope that whispers maybe today he’ll wake up, maybe today he’ll remember who he was, maybe today he’ll choose empathy over cruelty. Maybe today you’ll get your miracle.

But tomorrow comes, and so does another fresh wound.

You begin to realize that the hardest part isn’t just grieving the relationship you lost. It’s grieving the person you thought you loved, while slowly accepting that the version of him you believed in may never have existed at all.

You have to manage all this while figuring out how to pay an attorney to convince a stranger in a courtroom that you deserve to keep your kids, because you’re the one who actually loves them. You’re the one who knows their shoe sizes and their social security numbers and the names of their favorite episode of Blippi.

You followed the script. You played by the rules. You said “forever” and actually meant it, only to find yourself betrayed and abandoned by the one person you should have been able to trust most.

Here’s what I want you to know.

It gets better. Time and space and new rhythms and a physical reprieve from daily trauma are good for the soul. The sting of betrayal and infidelity fades, and one day you realize you don’t actually miss feeling as worthless as you were invited to feel on a regular basis. You don’t miss walking on eggshells. You don’t miss the lies or the gaslighting. You don’t miss holding your breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It never gets easy, though. If you get full custody, it won’t be easy, because your children will still feel the void. If you get partial custody, it won’t be easy, because your child will be yo-yoed back and forth between two houses that don’t agree on anything. If you get no custody, well. That one’s self-explanatory.

Part of why it never gets easy in the context of abuse is that abuse is a gift that keeps on giving. None of it will make sense at first, because you aren’t fluent yet in narcissism or extreme selfishness. You can’t fathom the heights and depths of contempt that will follow you long after you gave him the freedom he swore he wanted. Here’s what you don’t understand yet: he has a conscience he’s working overtime to kill, and the only way to kill it is to keep convincing himself he was justified. That means convincing himself you’re the villain. That you’re evil incarnate. That he had no other choice.

Everything else revolves around that one unrelenting objective, including your children.

Your children will be used as pawns in a massive game of chess, and you’re allowed to think that’s evil, because it is. Every parenting decision becomes strategy, designed to undermine the stability you’re working to build.

Raising your kid in the church? Don’t be surprised if she comes home having watched YouTube videos about why Christianity is stupid. Give her a Happy Meal once in a while, and brace for the disgust and the doubt he will carefully plant in her already vulnerable mind: “Why would your mother feed you this poison?”

Everything is subversion designed to instill a lack of confidence in your parenting, in your guidance, in her ability to trust you. It’s not an accident; it’s a playbook.

And then there’s the gag order. The court will expect you to say nothing but sunshine about the other parent, and this may be the hardest part of all.

Of course, it’s terrible parenting to sit around bashing your child’s other parent. Kids aren’t meant to carry that burden. But there’s also a difference between using your child as a therapist and honestly helping them make sense of what they observe. Nobody hands you a manual for where that line is. You learn it by feel, usually after getting it wrong a few times.

It won’t always be obvious what you’re allowed to say when your daughter comes home asking about the revolving door of women at her dad’s house. Or when you’re talking about what to look for in a spouse and she suddenly asks, “What about someone like my dad?” You won’t always have the right answer in the moment. That’s okay.

Over time, you’ll get really good at restraint and curiosity. Instead of rushing to answer, you’ll answer her questions with questions of your own: “What is it that you admire about your dad that you want in a husband?” “Think about the marriages you’ve seen that seem the happiest and most loving. What do they have in common?” “How do you want your future husband to speak to you? What would you do if he used his words to hurt you?”

None of this is a reason to give up. It’s a reason to get ready. Here are a few tips that helped me in my own journey through the mess. I offer them through an unapologetically Christian perspective because the love of Jesus is truly the only thing that got me through to where I am today, happily remarried to a great man with a kind and loving heart who treats me like royalty:

1. Join a church that knows how to roll their sleeves up, lay hands on, and pray, a church that knows how to wash feet and isn’t afraid to wash yours. And let them do it. Let the body of Christ hold up your weary arms. Someday you may find you’re returning the favor for someone else.
   
   I don’t care if you feel like a complete attention-seeking idiot answering every altar call after every Sunday sermon. Lean into it. Lean into Jesus, and fall into His open arms. I’ll never forget standing in church one Sunday morning, tears cascading down my face as we got to the part of the song that repeated “Your love never fails, never gives up, never runs out on me.” It’s just so unspeakably true. Invite Him to show you how true it is.
   
   “A bruised reed He will not break.” He is near to the brokenhearted.
   

2. Seek a qualified therapist if you can find one, one who shares your belief system and can offer consistent, objective support and an outlet for all your feelings, even the ugly furious ones. In the famous words of Shrek, this stuff is “better out than in,” and you really do owe it to your children to make sure that when it comes out (as it inevitably will), it’s not being funneled in their direction. If you can’t afford a therapist, consider a support group like “Celebrate Recovery,” which has chapters all over the country and can offer such meaningful, consistent support and the regular reminder that you are not alone and you deserve to be cared for.
   

3. Intentionally carve out time to force yourself to behold or create beauty. There are any number of ways this can look. Nature walks, a knitting circle, a painting class, doodling on the margins of your Bible while you listen to worship music after your kids have gone to bed. Write a poem. Record a song. Cultivate something lovely, and immerse yourself in it. There is some truth to the notion that we become what we behold. If all we create space for in our (albeit busy) lives is chaos and hurt, we are going to inadvertently sabotage the hope that can anchor us through the storm.
   

4. Whenever Satan attacks you, make him pay for the assault. I remember so many vivid examples of this during my own divorce. I learned to develop spiritual eyes through which to interpret my circumstances. Obviously, don’t be a total weirdo with a persecution complex about this. If you miss a court date, that’s not evidence of the enemy attacking you. That’s evidence of you failing to prioritize correctly. You can fix that problem without a ton of intercessory prayer. But the other stuff? The unbidden text messages from your husband’s mistress taunting you? The judge that seems completely blind to the obvious danger signs in your 400 pages of carefully documented evidence?
   
   Kick Satan in the teeth. Rebuke the enemy with your words. Pray for God to poison the well of this sin and make it fruitless and empty. Pray for salvation over three people you dislike, and pray for them by name. Blast your worship music. Sing about the power of Jesus even when you cannot personally feel it. Declare that you will live to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living, and thank God that He has already promised to give you beauty for the ashes you now hold in your hands. And intentionally put on the garment of praise to dispel the spirit of heaviness.
   

5. Let your kids see you cry, but don’t let them see you drown. There’s a version of strength that performs “I’m fine” so well your children learn to distrust their own eyes when they watch you unravel later. And there’s a version of strength that says, “Mom’s having a hard day, and Mom is also going to be okay.” Let them see the second one. It teaches them more about resilience than a decade of pretending ever could. I’ve never subscribed to the “never cry in front of your kids” philosophy. Kids need embodied humans for parents. They don’t need robots.
   

6. You will not feel like the hero of this story most days. Most days you will feel like the woman still standing in the wreckage, blinking, wondering how she got here. That’s fine. You don’t have to feel like the hero. You just have to keep showing up like one.

I once came across a meme that said, "One day your kids will be old enough to see which parent was the problem." That was a tremendous encouragement to me. It reminded me that my job wasn't to control what my children believed about their father. It was to make sure I was giving them every reason to trust me by refusing to become the problematic parent myself.

I’m not fully through the storm yet. Co-parenting is still very much a part of my story, and I won’t even pretend to have done it anywhere close to perfectly. What I can tell you is that God is pretty faithful to plug the gaps as you lay them before His feet.

If today all you can do is keep showing up, then keep showing up. Love your children. Tell the truth. Stay close to Jesus. Choose beauty when you can. Cry and then praise when you can’t. The story isn’t over yet. One day you’ll wake up and realize you survived what once convinced you your life was over. And by God’s grace, your children just might learn what courage looks like because they watched it in you.

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