You Shouldn't Have to Walk on Eggshells in Your Own Home

Last week I was putzing around the kitchen while my husband tinkered with a new rail for his AK nearby when I had something of an epiphany: Though my t-shirt was clinging a bit more tightly to my fluffy midsection than I would prefer, I was not the least bit self-conscious about it.

I felt no urgency to rush to the bedroom to find a sweatshirt to tie around my waist to camouflage the pudge. No anxious inclination to walk around the house sucking in my gut or crossing my arms strategically around my stomach to deflect attention away from it. No nervous anticipatory jokes about how I really need to get back to the gym. Nothing but pure, 100% freedom to exist contentedly in my own imperfect skin in the comfort of my own home and under the banner of the loving acceptance of a good man who cherishes me just the way I am—love handles and all.

It hasn’t always been this way for me. Like way too many women I know, I used to live under constant scrutiny. I was “thunderchunk” when I weighed too much and “the crypt keeper” when I got too skinny. When pregnant, my (now ex) husband passive aggressively joked that he might have to start carting me around in a wheelbarrow. He had mastered the art of passing insults off as jokes. They always stung, but I was never allowed to be hurt.

Of course the criticism wasn’t limited to my weight. Sometimes it was my clothes: “Why don’t you dress sexier? Don’t you care about the way you represent me?” or “Why don’t you wear more stilettos? You know I prefer them. Are you just giving up now that we’re married?”

I was pregnant at the time, with a pinched sciatic nerve and a displaced center of gravity, so stilettos just didn’t make the top of my list of priorities, but I really wanted to be a good wife. I wanted to prove I was willing to put in the work. I wanted him to still think I was pretty, so I remember sneaking out of the office on one of my 30 minute breaks, driving to TJ Maxx, picking out a pair of heels, and resolving to wear them at least once a week to prove that I was at least trying.

Back then I didn’t realize that my efforts were futility, that I was competing against the impossible beauty standards of the sultry women in the porn he consumed on a regular basis. His external hard drive went to work with him; I had no idea what I was up against or just how deep that problem went. I only knew that when he looked at me, all I could see was contempt and disdain and disappointment, and I had no idea where I had gone wrong.

Once, in anticipation of date night, I had gone out and bought a new sweater to try to look pretty for him. By the time the night was over, the police had documented the tear he had left in the sleeve and the mark he had left on my neck.

I was locked tightly into co-dependency. I didn’t know how to leave. My Presbyterian roots didn’t necessarily help in this capacity; I didn’t even fully know that I SHOULD leave. My gut instincts were at war with the religious script I had drilled into my head: “God hates divorce” and “You made your bed, so lie in it.”

I was keenly aware that it was my own lack of wisdom that had led me to this marriage, so I dug my heels in and resolved to just work harder to redeem it. Besides, who else would want me now? I had two kids by two different men. He reminded me of this, too: No one else would want me. And I believed the lie.

The eggshell walking extended to the way I cooked and cleaned and spoke and even parented. God forbid a toddler should cry for too long or demand any attention that took my eyes off my spouse. Any misstep in any of these categories could result in a violent outburst, so I worked overtime to prevent that from happening. But I always managed to do something wrong. Either I folded the laundry incorrectly or the ground beef wasn’t broken into small enough pieces for maximum browning or my work hours were too demanding, and I needed to work less while magically earning more.

I lived in a constant pressure cooker of competing deadlines and toddler demands and sex appeal quotas, and honest to goodness, I genuinely do not know how I survived that season without ending up in a psych ward. I was just never going to be enough.

So when he packed his bags and announced that he was engaged to another woman shortly after our daughter was born, though devastated, I finally started to understand that maybe the problem wasn’t just me. His new fiance’s name was Lacey, and she was pretty enough for a meth addict. She sent me gloating photos of herself holding my newborn in a Playboy onesie. She taunted me in vivid sexual detail about the things she was planning to do with my husband.

And still I stayed.

It would take me another six years to get healthy enough to pull the plug. Six more years of broken promises. Six more years of being devastated every time I discovered evidence of other women. Six more years of unearthing his online alter egos and the degrading manuscripts he wrote about me. Six more years of violent outbursts and headbutting and trapping me in the house and breaking my things. Six more years of ultimatums and lists of all the things that I would have to change before he would consider reconciliation. Six more years of changing therapists every time the current one told the truth about his behavior. Six more years of of living off the table scraps he condescended to throw me just to keep me hanging on long enough to kick me one more time.

I find myself recoiling in disgust at the version of myself that allowed this cycle of dysfunction to continue wreaking havoc for as long as I did. These aren’t fun memories to write, but I offer them as tribute in hopes that others reading it won’t get stuck in the vicious whirlpool of co-dependent self-sabotage and enabling that I did.

As Christians, we live in this weird intersection of “Why did you take so long to leave?” and “Marriage is for life; save the marriage at all costs,” and if you’re already an emotional train wreck, you learn to doubt your own instincts, so it can often feel safer to defer to someone else’s. For those of us in faith communities, the “someone else” is usually the local church.

So when I write invectives about chauvinistic church counsel brainwashing broken women into staying locked in abuse, it’s because I have first-hand knowledge of the layers of cognitive dissonance that can function as fertile soil for these dangerous directives to flourish. When a woman who is already codependent and desperate reaches out for help finding true north only to be directed straight toward hell, tremendous damage is done to her ability to trust in God’s heart for her well-being.

For as often as I shine the spotlight on the awful way too many churches handle abuse in marriage, it was ultimately a really good pastor who told me it was time to walk away from mine. The part of me that had been indoctrinated into accepting abuse as God’s will for me needed to hear a pastor rebuke that lie. It made all the difference. Good churches that protect and esteem women are out there. I want to help women find them.

And I want anyone reading this tremendous overshare of a blog who knows what it’s like to walk on eggshells in her own home to know that it doesn’t have to be that way. This is not God’s best for you. You can live at peace in your own skin and your own home.

During the darkest of those days, I clung to Scripture, often praying it out loud as a mantra: “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”

I can see it now. I’m living it. I pray that anyone still bound in abuse will begin to crave it, too. He’s a God who’s faithful to restore the years that the locusts have eaten.

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