This is quoted from a post on Facebook and it's brilliant. Please be very careful before advising any woman leaves an alcoholic or man with abusive tendencies. Courts can't protect children from abuse they can't see or there is no evidence of.
My mum stayed with my closet alcoholic of a father. If she had left him, he would have been entitled to regular access. He was abusive after drinking but nobody knew. I am so relieved she stayed with him to protect us from his abuse. She left him the moment we did.
"My mother didn’t stay in an abusive relationship because she was unintelligent, weak or trauma bonded. My mother stayed because she believed she could protect her child from the inside better than she could from the outside. My mother chose her position from a place of personal agency, powerful purpose and conscious sacrifice, and she fully accepted her decision without regard for her own happiness and freedom.
Some folks won’t understand that. Some folks will believe that she wasn’t thinking correctly. Some folks would even say her decision was the wrong decision, and it would have been more beneficial for me if she would have left.
Well, let me put it to you this way…As a child, I questioned my mother’s decision——sometimes in my mind and sometimes aloud. I didn’t understand as a child why…why we couldn’t just run away, why we couldn’t just pack up and leave. I didn’t understand as a child that my mother’s sacrifice was a gift to me——that I didn’t fully understand or appreciate until I became an adult. She gave her life so that I might live——she believed unprotected visits with a raging alcoholic whose indifference towards driving drunk, disappearing for hours or days at a time, putting a bottle of booze over food, leaving me with strangers while he went in search of a drink, and drunken tirades that would turn to beatings if there was no one to protect me…was not going to happen on her watch.
You see, when folks think the only reason an abuse victim stays with an abuser is because either she’s weak or trauma bonded, they don’t know anything about abuse. Folks who think abuse ends when a mother escapes, have never thought about the reality that when and if an abuse victim escapes they very well might have to legally send their child, unprotected, back into the very hell they escaped from——for unsupervised custody visits. Folks who think a mother is crazy for sacrificing her life to protect her children need to transfer that disdain to the family courts that disregard the safety and wellbeing of children on a regularly basis——giving unsupervised visits, 50/50 custody and even full custody to abusers.
One size does not fit all. I’m not telling anybody to stay in an abusive relationship. This is not a recommendation for anybody to subject themselves to being hurt, harmed or killed to protect their children. This is a reminder to some that unless we address the broken and often complicit family court system, there are abuse victims who will be forced to choose between the lessor of the two evils——protecting their child in hell or sending their child, unprotected, to hell for unsupervised custody visits. And a reminder that nobody can judge another persons journey, sacrifice is never easy and those who choose sacrifice are just as much deserving of our support as those who escape.
My mother was born in 1925, and died 4 years ago. Not much has changed for abuse victims. I understand my mother’s “why” today, and I am grateful. But, in honor of my mother, I will not rest until no mother has to choose between staying in hell to protect her child and sending her child back into hell, unprotected, for unscrupulous, unsupervised court ordered visitations. We cannot disconnect the victim’s safety and wellbeing from the safety and wellbeing of the children post-separation."