Leaving Wasn’t the End
He leaned forward to hand me the check, and I leaned back instinctively. I didn’t want him in my foyer or in my personal space. I didn’t want my old life to touch my new one.
I took the check and set it on top of the shoe rack. My back tightened. My stomach turned. I felt gross, like I needed to shower the second he left.
This was the dance we did every week.
It wasn’t always a check. Sometimes it was school papers. Sometimes it was a form that needed my signature. But every Sunday at 5 p.m., he stood in my foyer and my body remembered exactly who he was.
People talk about leaving an abusive partner as if it draws a clean line between what you endured and what comes next. As if freedom begins the moment you walk out the door.
Sometimes that’s true. But when you co-parent with your abuser, the line never holds. It feels like you keep drawing it in the sand while the wind keeps blowing. Sometimes you look back and wonder if there was ever a line at all.
In my life, this looked like weekly custody exchanges in my foyer while my eyes tracked his every move. My body was tense before he even said hello.
It looked like hugging my son extra tightly before he’d leave for the week and hoping nothing he witnessed at his father’s house would settle into his mind and leave invisible scars. Or pulling him in closely when he came home, relieved he was safe with me again.
It also looked like deep exhales before answering my abuser’s calls or texts. His name appeared on my phone’s call lists alongside my husband and friends, as if he were anything other than a forced part of my life.
Our custody agreement was 50/50, so while I managed to get myself out of a bad situation, it didn’t mean I was free.
For years, I asked myself what kind of mother agrees to give an abusive man half of her child’s life. I’ve used that question to berate, shame, and blame myself more times than I can count.
But the honest answer is this: I was tired. Not just physically, but soul-tired. I couldn’t summon the strength needed to fight for more custody because it took everything I had to survive for as long as I did.
I didn’t have another uphill battle in me.
I didn’t have proof of the abuse beyond the times people saw something wasn’t right. The truth was written on my face, but I always said I was fine.
I didn’t have pictures of the bruises. I didn’t have police reports. I didn’t have anything to corroborate my story in court.
I also didn’t have my own money. I didn’t have a family to rely on. I didn’t have any kind of support that made me look more capable than him.
I was starting from scratch, and that’s not exactly a winning strategy in family court.
Sadly, my situation wasn’t at all unique. According to the Resource Center on Domestic Violence: Child Protection and Custody, “Allegations of domestic violence have no demonstrated effect on the rate at which abusers are awarded custody of their children, nor do such allegations affect the rate at which abusers are ordered into supervised visitation. Abusers win unsupervised custody and visitation at the same rate as non-abusers.”
So I agreed to give my abuser 50% of my son’s childhood and tried to convince myself it would be okay.
He’s never hurt him before.
If something happens, I can take him back to court.
Our son deserves the chance to decide who his father is for himself.
But fear doesn’t care what you have to tell yourself to survive. The question of who was helping to shape my son into a man never stopped haunting me.
It was as though I had two main responsibilities: Protect my son from harm and stay alert for anything that reminded me of the man who harmed me. That second task felt especially cruel because my son was not his father. But my nervous system didn’t understand that memory and threat are not the same thing.
It was easier to distinguish the two when my son was young. His little voice, even when angry, was still a child’s. As he became a teenager, yelling when he couldn’t find his car keys, his deeper voice hit my body like a sonic boom. Every part of me became wired and alert as if the danger had returned. Then he’d find his keys, head off to school, and I’d be left standing by the front door, exhaling fully for the first time since the yelling began, and holding the heartbreak of managing the echoes of harm his ordinary boyhood awakened in me.
This meant I was never just co-parenting. I was also scanning, recovering, second-guessing, concealing, and constantly analyzing myself to make sure my fear and my history didn’t become something my son inherited.
Despite my best efforts, some of it slipped through. Sometimes my composure would crack and I’d shut down, overtaken by a fear that I couldn’t explain to him because it wasn’t his to carry.
So I gave him the gentlest explanations I could: I’m having a hard time. It’s been a rough day. I’m just not feeling like myself.
He never pressed the issue because he knew I’d be okay and our conversations would return to the things he was interested in: world history, animal adaptations, his friend group. And he was right. Given time and space, I would always find my way back to some level of normalcy, but the guilt of not showing up for him how I wanted would linger in the back of my mind.
I blamed my ex-husband for these ruptures between me and my son, which felt fair because he created the fear I was still managing. But what I did with the fear was still my responsibility.
I felt like I was constantly trying to sort what belonged to me from what belonged to my ex-husband. The abuse had scrambled that line too.
When my son would complain about the mounting tension between his dad and stepmother, I would trace it backward to see how I could have prevented him from witnessing any of it.
That was part of why I started trying to coach my ex-husband through the arguments he was having with his wife.
I told myself I was doing it for my son. If I could help make things calmer at his father’s house, my son might absorb less damage. That I could keep him safe from a distance.
The calls with my ex-husband would always start the same way. He’d begin with a question about our son: his grades, missing assignments in math, fees for baseball season, an upcoming field trip. But then he’d pivot. He’d describe the latest fight he had with his wife, including the awful things they said, when she stormed off to their bedroom, and the silence that followed.
He’d lay it all out, like a lawyer presenting a case to a judge, and then wait for me to agree with him.
I usually did.
I gave him the advice I once needed myself: Cut your losses and get out. They had arguments from the beginning, so there was no reason to believe things would change.
I told him our son would be better off seeing his dad happy and single instead of miserable and married. I asked if this was the model of love he wanted our son to grow up with. He always said no. But he didn’t want to be twice-divorced, so he would find a reason to stick it out.
Sometimes these calls happened monthly. Sometimes, there were multiple calls a week. Sometimes, he stood in my foyer and gave me the latest update, when I hadn’t asked. Even after getting out of the marriage, he kept finding ways to hand me his emotional baggage and expecting me to carry it.
I didn’t even see it until my therapist pointed it out: Control didn’t disappear when I left; it just changed form. I was still agreeing with my abuser, protecting his secrets, carrying his shame, anticipating his moves, absorbing his blame, and managing his emotions.
I had my physical freedom, but I was far from free. Co-parenting with my abuser meant learning my freedom was never about a clean break. I still had to untangle the survival patterns that once kept me safe but no longer had the right to control my life.
I think that’s why the line in the sand never held. Leaving was only the first boundary. The rest had to be drawn much closer in. Around my mind, my body, my guilt, my fear, and all of the invisible ways survival had taught me to continue making room for my abuser long after I was gone.
About the Author
Megan Margherio is a writer, speaker and trauma-informed embodiment coach whose work explores trauma recovery, estrangement, joy, and the long road back to self-trust. She is the author of Everwoven: A Memoir. A Reckoning.
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