The days that followed my “hell day” were difficult. Though the sun came up in the sky each morning, the sun was not shining in my heart. Each day felt like an endless night, dark and heavy with the light of the day far beyond my reach.
There were so many questions that went around and around in my head. What would happen to my children? How would this change them? What abusive things had they seen and experienced? Would they ever have happiness and joy in life? What was I going to do now? How was I going to manage life? How was I going to juggle the normal expenses? I hadn’t been working outside of the home for a while. I had done some odd jobs from home and we had saved for a down payment on a house, purchasing a small home in a great neighborhood. Would I be able to stay in our home? Where would I get money to pay the bills? If I worked, how could I care for my children? I had always wanted to be a stay at home mom, but I knew that wasn’t going to be possible. I had gone to college, but never finished my degree. How would I make a living? More importantly, what were my sweet children left with? I knew that counseling would be necessary to help them work through the things that had been acted upon them. Their small souls were not meant to experience such awful things at the hands of their own father. What would that do to them?
During the first days, Phil was not in custody because he had “turned himself in” after being caught, so he was allowed to be out “on his own recognizance”. By the second day he had not contacted anyone. There were no cell phones then, I had no way to make contact with someone that just seemed to have disappeared. His parents didn’t know where he was, no one had seen him and I’m sure his parents were starting to worry. I wanted to find him, to talk to him and ask him many questions. Obviously his life had just changed forever as well, and the reality of the devastation he caused had not fully sunk in. So I was curious where he had gone and was concerned that he was all right.
I was eager to put my world right again. Deciding that I needed to do something about all this mess we were in, I went against my parents’ recommendation and went to my home for a while. I pulled the bills together, personal records and made a temporary plan to take care of things. Phil had an office away from our home where he worked. In my concern for him, I decided to drive to his office and see if he was there. His car was parked in front of the office when I arrived. I thought that was a good sign and I was sure he was there. I parked and went to the door, my stomach churning. I knocked, but there was no answer. I waited and knocked again, still no answer. I bent over to look in the mail drop to see if I could see him inside, hoping to find him asleep. My view was limited through the small space, but I couldn’t see any indication that he was there. I called out to him through the door and still no answer. I started to panic. What if he was in there, dead? What if he had become so depressed and despondent that he had taken his own life? The panic in my heart escalated. Not knowing what to do, I got back into my car and decided to drive to a family member’s home that was close by. I’m not sure how I stayed focused enough to drive. When I got to the home, I walked to the front door and knocked. My brother-in-law answered the door and I blurted out that I had gone to Phil’s office, he wasn’t there and I thought he had killed himself. Then I collapsed in his arms, tears streaming.
My sister brought me into the house while my brother-in-law exited. I didn’t realize he was going to Phil’s office to see if he could find him. He found Phil walking back to his office from a convenience store. When Phil saw him, Phil tried to run away. But my brother-in-law chased Phil until he caught up with him and put Phil in his car to bring him to their home. While this drama was taking place, my sister was calling my parents and a family counselor she was acquainted with. I was shaking, feeling like I was going into shock again. After a short time, the man who would become my future counselor showed up at her home. Mark was kind and would be a wonderful counselor in the year to come, but I wasn’t in any condition to talk to him at this point. My father also arrived. My brother-in-law returned and Phil was with him. I was so relieved to see that Phil was alive, but I also was not blind to the fact that Phil was a different man in my eyes than he was the last time I had seen him. My father, sister, brother-in-law and Mark spoke quietly together in the kitchen while Phil and I went into another room to talk alone.
We sat there, not knowing what to say. I felt two conflicting emotions – on the one hand, I was so happy that the man I called my husband was alive. On the other hand, I didn’t even know who this man was – his actions made him a stranger to me. I needed to talk to Phil, to understand what had happened. This was the first time I had seen him since he left me the note two days before. So much had happened in those two days and there was an emotional distance now between the two of us, wider than before. We sat in silence for a few moments, Phil was crying and I remember just looking at him in unbelief. I don’t really remember the conversation that followed, but I do remember that he said he was sorry for what he’d done. He knew he had made a mess of our lives, and was into his own emotions about the problems he had created. He was so wrapped up in his self-inflicted pain that he did not even attempt to reach out to me. I know he was embarrassed, ashamed, all the things he should have been, but he did not include me in this very emotional moment. No hug, no consoling me – characteristics that I would later learn to be part of his narcissistic personality. This became a pattern in his behavior in the months to come. I now realized this had been a pattern between us that he had created a long time ago.
Phil had the look of a soul racked in eternal torment. His behavior was depraved and he knew it, but he said he couldn’t stop it. Phil had given in to the demons and they had taken over. In my youth I had been taught that if you give in to temptation, then the next time you were tempted with the same thing or something worse, it would be much harder to resist, maybe impossible to resist. I saw the truth of this in Phil. This wasn’t the Phil that I thought I knew. I felt as if I’d never known this man.
Phil and I had been married for several years. We were not in the newlywed stage where we didn’t know each other very well. But from the moment we married, I felt a distance between us. We had been friends at first, and then things had switched quickly and become a courtship. Phil had never been very warm or intimately emotional with me, and I thought it was just his way. I could tell at times that he tried to be a good husband to me, but there always seemed to be something standing between us that I couldn’t explain. I believed that over time in our marriage that we would become closer, but during the months prior to his confession, the distance between us was becoming wider. He was less engaged when we would communicate and I had believed it was because he was under a lot of stress trying to finish his advanced degree. He was very intelligent and had easily earned straight A’s all through school. He was likeable, had friends that considered him a great guy and in college when we met, he had a female following of women who wanted to date him. He was talented and known in the community. The man I saw that night was not the man that I thought I knew.
Over the next few days, life was a blur. I was falling apart. The truth was more than I could bear.