What was going through my mind was this: I can’t tell anyone about this. If I did, I was certain I would be blamed for everything that had happened. It would make me look like an even worse mother — the woman who didn’t leave the country sooner, who didn’t get her children out of harm’s way. And if they didn’t blame me, then they simply wouldn’t believe me. In that case, they would think there was something wrong with me. That fear — of being dismissed, judged, or seen as unstable — kept me silent at a time when I needed help the most.

My mind was already in turmoil because of the flashbacks I was having from before my ex‑husband left the country. I still get them to this day. Some moments leave an imprint so deep that no amount of time or distance can soften them. They return without warning, sharp and vivid, as if the past has reached forward and pulled me back into it.

One memory in particular kept resurfacing: the pistol. I kept asking myself why he had to smuggle a gun across the border in the first place, why his friend — a man in U.S. Special Forces — had given it to him. It was a GLOCK 9mm Browning, always loaded, always within reach. He handled it recklessly, as if the weight of it steadied him even as it terrified everyone around him. I didn’t understand it then, and I still don’t fully understand it now. All I knew was that the presence of that weapon changed the dynamics within our family forever.

In Mexico, we were finally settled. The children went to school, learned Spanish, made friends, and built a life that was theirs. For a time, they were happy. They slipped into a routine with ease — coming home from school, running down to the plaza to play with friends, heading to art classes, or joining the local baseball games. Three boys and one girl, my youngest, who kept me busy in the best way. Their energy, their laughter, their small dramas and triumphs filled the days. And I liked it. It distracted me from the realities of living with a man whose behaviour had become increasingly abusive.

At the time they were 13, 10, 8, and 5 years old — four children trying to build a childhood in a place that offered them both joy and stability outside the home. They were resilient, adaptable, and eager to belong. And for a while, they did. Just that love for my children just never goes away, it’s the only thing driving me forward now. I love them with all my heart and soul, I just have to keep writing, keep writing keep writing keeping writing, I keep telling myself. This may be the only way that I will truly be reunited with my children again.

It is such a struggle, but back to the story I must go…

Behind the surface of our new life, everything was deteriorating.

Their father’s attention shifted toward drugs, alcohol, and behaviour that crossed boundaries I never agreed to. At times he involved other people and pressured me to participate, or would disappear with men for encounters that left me feeling trapped inside situations I didn’t want and didn’t consent to.

There were days when he behaved like a child I had to manage — impulsive, reckless, demanding. And then there were the other days, the darker ones, when he became calculating and predatory, using substances to blur lines and manipulate circumstances until resistance felt impossible. The confusion of it all was its own kind of violence. I never knew which version of him I would face.

Afterwards, I would feel repulsed, humiliated, and deeply alone. I didn’t have the language then to understand that what was happening wasn’t about desire or intimacy — it was about power, control, and the slow erosion of my sense of self.

Over time, his moods became increasingly erratic, swinging so sharply that it was no longer safe for the children or me to be around him. The volatility was constant, unpredictable, and exhausting.

When he was intoxicated or high, the danger sharpened. His judgment slipped away, and the pistol became an extension of that loss — something he waved around recklessly, threatening harm or threatening himself. He discharged it more than once. The sound alone was enough to send the children and me into a kind of silent, practiced terror.

We learned to disappear when the atmosphere shifted. It didn’t take words. It didn’t even take a look. The children felt it first — the tightening in the air, the change in his footsteps, the way the house seemed to tilt. They would go still, eyes wide, waiting for my cue. And the moment I said, “Let’s go,” they moved.

They never argued. They never asked why. They just slipped on their shoes with quick, quiet hands and followed me out the door, their fingers gripping mine as if the plaza down the road was the only place the ground held steady. We would sit there for hours, the children pressed close, watching the birds or tracing patterns in the dust while we waited for the storm inside him to pass.

Outside, the sunlight was hiding behind the clouds. The plaza always felt safe — the centre of town, with its gardens, the children’s park, the space to bike or rollerblade, and other children always nearby. Mine would drift toward the swings and the seesaw, feet dangling, watching the other children absorbed in their own small worlds.

“Do we have to go back?” my youngest daughter asked, her voice barely above the laughter around us.

I wanted to tell her no. I wanted to tell all of them no. But the truth was more complicated than any answer they were old enough to hear.

So I said the only thing I could. “Not yet.”

And that afternoon, watching them move with such quiet certainty, I understood something I had been trying not to see.

They weren’t just surviving him.

They were surviving with me.

And that was the moment — more than the pistol, more than the threats, more than the chaos — when I knew something had to change.

Drugs had become his world, not mine. He needed them the way other people need air — a line to start the morning, a beer to steady the afternoon, something stronger to carry him through the night. Sometimes I joined him, sometimes I didn’t. I could never get to the level he lived at. I didn’t want to. But when you live beside someone like that, you get pulled into their orbit whether you mean to or not.

The difference came later, after he left the country. The moment the door closed behind him, something in the house shifted. The air felt clearer. My body felt lighter. It was as if my mind had discovered something new — clarity. No more stress, no more abuse, no more manipulation shaping how I moved through the day. And without even thinking about it, I stopped. No drugs. No alcohol. Not even the temptation. I had the children, and that was enough. Responsibility has a way of sobering you faster than any detox ever could.

But that part of the story — the part where I stopped — was never the version that made it into the official narrative. It was easier for people to believe that if I had used drugs with him, I must have kept using them after him. Easier to flatten the complexity into something simple and damning. Easier to ignore the evidence of my life.

Because the evidence was right there, every morning.

I was always the first one out of bed. I always had been. Long before the chaos, long before Mexico, long before the gun. I would wake before the sun, make my coffee, breathe in the quiet, and start the day. By the time the children wandered into the kitchen, their breakfasts were ready, their lunches packed, their uniforms laid out. In Mexico, we were always out the door before their father had even surfaced.

The children knew the rhythm. They trusted it. They trusted me. That routine rarely changed, except for the time I fell into a deep depression and needed bedrest for two weeks. Even then, they were my driving force — the reason I got up, the reason I kept moving, the reason I found my way back into my life again.

When we moved from the countryside to the seaside in Mexico, they were excited for their first day at the new school. Their father was up early for once — a rare moment of enthusiasm — but it didn’t last. The car accident happened before we even reached the gates. The car impounded, the day ruined, the children confused and disappointed. Another mess created by him, another day I had to salvage.

But they settled in eventually. They made friends. They learned Spanish. They laughed again. They were happy — genuinely happy — in a way that told the truth more clearly than any adult testimony ever could.

And when the time came for them to return to their father, they didn’t want to go. They said it simply, without hesitation. Children don’t lie about where they feel safe. Their honesty was the one thing in my life that hadn’t been distorted by fear or confusion.

For a long time, I believed they didn’t see what I saw. I thought I had shielded them from the worst of it — the volatility, the danger, the moments when the atmosphere in the house shifted so sharply it felt like the walls themselves were holding their breath. I told myself they were too young to understand, too innocent to recognise the signs.

But now I’m not so sure.

Looking back, I can’t tell how much they sensed when things became too dangerous for us to stay in Mexico. I never asked them. I carried the weight of it alone, convinced that protecting them meant keeping everything quiet while I tried to think my way out of a situation that had no safe exit. The silence became its own kind of prison. I have never felt so trapped in my life — not physically, but emotionally, mentally, in every direction that mattered.

In the end, the choice wasn’t a choice at all. I was forced into a position no parent should ever face: exposing my children to a man whose behaviour had become unpredictable and unsafe, whose mental instability was not going to change no matter how many chances life gave him. The system recognised him as a father. My experience recognised him as a threat. And between those two realities, I had to decide which danger was survivable.

What I didn’t realise then — what I see more clearly now — is that the children were navigating those same realities in their own quiet way. They didn’t have the words for it, but they had the instincts. They had the fear. They had the clarity that only children possess: an unfiltered sense of who made them feel safe and who didn’t.

And in that moment, I felt a kind of guilt I didn’t know how to name — the fear that I was about to abandon my own children, that I was failing them in the very act of trying to protect them. It’s a feeling I’ve carried ever since, even though I can see now that the truth was far more complicated than the guilt I placed on myself.

I hope one day they understand that I never gave up on them, even though, through their eyes, it must have looked like I did. I love my children unconditionally, and if there had been any other way to protect them, I would have taken it. I would have taken every other way.

But I am truly sorry for everything they had to endure. They never deserved any of it.

Just know that I love them so much, and I hope that one day they may come to understand what happened — and find it in their hearts to forgive me.

I feel like I abandoned them.

And I feel like I couldn’t protect them.

I’m sorry.