Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

  My husband and I have been together for almost a decade, and we have one son. We met through mutual friends; he is successful, charming, and very well-liked in our circle. I would say that his guy friends almost look up to him, so much so that I’m often told that I’m “lucky” to have “found him.” From the look of things, he has the perfect life and perfect family.

  The thing that nobody knows about our perfect family is that my husband is a monster. He is extremely verbally abusive toward me and, on occasion, our son. He has never been physically abusive, which, I think, is why I’ve put up with it.

  I used to be clueless as to what would send him into a tailspin, but I’ve become better at understanding his triggers. Sometimes, he wakes up in a mood and I can tell he’s just waiting for the slightest bit of provocation to unleash on me. Other times, it’s something I might say or do that upsets him. He gets quiet and brooding and secludes himself. For instance, if the three of us are spending time together and something happens, he will just go and shut himself in our bedroom without explanation. It could be hours or minutes later that he comes out and starts screaming at me.

  I try to let him get it all out without interfering because I know that engaging him will just make things worse. I’ve spent our whole marriage walking on eggshells, afraid that the tiniest provocation will lead to another huge fight. If you were to listen to any conversation between my husband and me, I guarantee you that at least half of what I say is an iteration of “I’m sorry.” I say it constantly, and it has bled into my professional life, too. I have no backbone. My first and only reaction to any situation, even one where there is no fault, is to apologize.

  He is creative with his language. He says all kinds of things—tells me that I’m stupid, that I’ve ruined his life, that I’m a leech sucking the money out of him (I have a full-time job on top of taking care of our son), and that he made a mistake marrying me and having our son. Everything I do for this family doesn’t matter. The only things that matter are his efforts. Even though I make more money than he does, he’s the breadwinner. Even though I’m the primary caretaker for our son, it’s my husband’s contributions that seem to take precedence. I don’t even dare complain about being tired at the end of a long day; he’ll ask dismissively, “Why? What’d you do?”

  I’ve heard “You’re stupid” so many times that I’m starting to believe it. I don’t know why I put up with it—I must be stupid, right? If I don’t apologize for whatever offense he’s perceived, or if I don’t tell him he’s right—basically, if I don’t beg for forgiveness on my knees—it’s a tense and horrible situation for days on end. We’ve spent months sleeping in separate beds—of course, I’m the one who gets banished to the guest room—and not speaking to each other, save for the weekly screaming sessions on his end. I feel like I’m holding my breath, waiting for the next round of punishment. But even when I stand my ground, what am I gaining? Eventually, things have to go back to “normal.” Eventually, I have to be the one to acknowledge some sort of fault for that to happen. In the years that I’ve known him, he has never apologized to me.

  Our son is the captive audience for this behavior—he has heard his father saying these things to his mother. I can’t control when it happens, so it’s impossible to preemptively remove him from the situation. I beg and plead with my husband to stop for our son’s sake, but he doesn’t. Sometimes, when my husband has a screaming bout in the middle of the night, our son wakes up crying and afraid. I don’t know how to protect him.

  In the wake of a fight, when things have calmed down, I have on occasion tried to talk to my husband about his actions. I do it in an attempt to understand why he does what he does. I’ve brought up things that he has said or words that he has used and confronted him with them. His defense is to deny ever saying it. If I insist, he says he doesn’t remember. So then I start to think to myself: Wait, did he actually say that? Am I misremembering? Once, more for my own sanity than anything else, I secretly recorded one of his rants. I confronted him with the recording days later, when we were back on good terms. He completely lost his mind and started yelling at me about how recording him without his permission is illegal (it’s not), and that he’ll sue me and divorce me. The purpose of my actions—to show him how bad he can get when he loses his temper, since he claims to not remember—completely escaped him. It only gave him yet another reason to berate me.

  I’ve spent so much time thinking about what could be wrong with him. He didn’t grow up in a two-parent family, so I doubt he’s just mimicking what he saw as a child. He is not like this with other people—at least not that I notice and not to this extent—so I don’t know if he’s bipolar, or has borderline personality disorder, or is depressed. I think all the hatred is coming from some sort of deep-rooted resentment that he holds against me. There was one “big love” of his life—a woman he knew before me whom he’s mentioned a few times. Things didn’t work out between them—that’s all he’s told me, and I haven’t asked details because I’m not sure I want to know. Is he lashing out at me because she’s the one who got away, because I remind him of the road not taken? He’s always had an inflated sense of self, a really lavish idea of what his life would be. Is he upset that we’ve fallen short, and does he blame me for it? Our son wasn’t a planned pregnancy; we actually had decided against having children. Is this all because he feels that I trapped him into parenthood? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

  But he’s a good father—a great father, when he’s not in a mood. He takes our son out to activities, he’s invested in his happiness and development, and he’s loving. He’s occasionally harder on our son when he misbehaves than I would like, but I always bear the brunt of the abuse.

  The thing that scares me, though, is that after I’ve done damage control, he just goes back to being this normal, nice person with the snap of a finger. He can turn it off, like a switch. I wonder how one person can go from one extreme to another in a matter of seconds. When we’re in the middle of one of these situations and we have to be around friends and family, he’s pleasant as can be. He puts on this act for everyone and pulls me into it. It’s completely psychotic. He speaks to me like he’s a normal, even loving, person. He’s affectionate—hugs me, puts his arm around me. And then, as soon as we’re alone, he’s back to his ways.

  If I refuse to play along, or if someone notices that something is “up,” I know I’m in for even more screaming. He blames me for making our marriage woes public and shaming us in front of friends and family. Of course, even by them I’m automatically perceived as the bad guy; my husband is too good at deceiving everyone into believing that he’s this great guy.

  You can set a clock by him: if a couple of good months have passed, I know he’s due for a release. I feel as if he needs a place to pour all this poison building inside of him, and I’m the most convenient vessel. I can feel it coming—the little hairs on the back of my neck raise when I hear the edge in his voice—the atmosphere in the room just changes, and I know he’s going to take a turn. So I start walking on eggshells, I start watching what I say, I start the placating, the coddling, the sweet talking. I think that might make it worse because he knows what I’m doing—he knows I’m trying to avoid conflict, and so I’m making it harder for him to justify a fight, not that he ever really needs justification. Eventually he’ll find something, anything, and boom, we’re back in hell. Just when I think I’m full, that I can’t take any more of it, I find that I have more space to hold his cruelty.

  I hold on because, as silly and improbable as it sounds, I forget. I forget how bad he gets. During those good months, we’re a “normal” family. If he sees me working on dinner, he’ll come into the kitchen and ask what he can do to help. This is the guy who screams that I am useless, that I never do anything to care for the family, that I haven’t made a home-cooked meal in ages. If I have a long week at work, he will tiptoe out of the room on a Saturday morning and take our kid out so that I get to sleep in. This i
s the same guy who tells me that my job is cake compared to what he does. If my chronic back pain flares up, he chides me that I never follow through on physical therapy, or encourages me to take classes at our gym more often to help with recovery. And I can tell that it’s out of genuine concern. This is what it’s like, our life, a rhythmic swinging between extremes. It’s predictable, yet arbitrary.

  It’s the duplicity that gets me, because it means that he knows he’s being crazy and that he can control it. And I have no control—over what causes it, when it starts, when it ends, what my son will hear. So I feel very helpless, which bleeds into everything in my life. I feel powerless to change my station, powerless to fight for myself, unable to get out of bad situations. When I hear myself complain to friends and family, which I very seldom do and never about anything real that’s happening in my personal life—always about something trivial, or work-related—I become tired of myself. I’m tired of the words that slip out, the feeble complaints of which nothing will come. The same shit, different day, complaining for the sake of complaint because nothing ever changes.

  So, like I said, maybe he is right. I must be stupid and weak. I must deserve this life, this hatred. Because another year goes by, and I am stuck in the same hell. Which is fine. I’ve made my bed. But I don’t even have the strength to change for my son, to get out for him. Is there anything more unforgivable?

  I’m traumatized by my husband and his behavior, and I feel completely trapped in his cycle of manipulation. With him, you either bend or you break. And I’ve bent myself into a different person.

  Terry, thirties

  Charlie and I grew up together. He was my first and best friend. We bonded over the fact that our fathers were not in the picture—Charlie’s refused to have anything to do with him, and I’d only ever met my real dad once or twice. We lived in a small town with nothing much to do except for hunt and fish. One time, we snuck into the dog pound and let out all the dogs. We were just kids, you know. But soon enough, we started getting into real trouble.

  Charlie was a small guy, but he had unbelievable charisma; he was a womanizer and a talker. He could talk anyone into anything. I guess he still felt he had something to prove, though, because he’d always get into fights. Because I was bigger, I’d always end up getting involved to protect him. That’s the type of bond we had—we had each other’s back. Without question. We were closer than brothers.

  I got a football scholarship in college, and my schedule filled up, so for a while it seemed like we might lose touch. He called me up one night and told me to meet him at this Chinese restaurant we used to love. He told me—point blank—that he had already robbed two pharmacies and that he was going to rob an ATM. He had a plan: one of his frat brothers knew the guy who brought the money out of the ATM machine. Charlie had stolen a dirt bike that he’d duct-taped up so that it had no identifying marks. He would punch the ATM guard, take the money, and make a getaway. He told me he needed my help.

  I didn’t have the stomach for these things back then, and it looked like my football career might pick up, so I refused to get involved. I got a call later that summer; he was breathing hard on the other end of the line. “I did it,” he told me. And I knew exactly what he meant. Later, I saw it on TV: $28,000 in cash, stolen. Four suspects; all escaped. Charlie told me that he hid the money in the vents of the frat house and his gun in the toilet tank. He took his share, around nine grand, and spent it partying at the casino. The police eventually arrested him at his grandma’s house. He went away for seven years.

  In the meantime, I started working at a gym, and then my stepdad hired me into the family business. During the same few years, I met the love of my life. The same day I met her, I called my mom and I told her, “Mom, I found the one.”

  We wanted to experience the world before we settled down—to travel, mostly. We had these great plans. But then she went off birth control so that she could get an implant instead, and we got pregnant.

  A baby was not in our plans, but we kept on coming back to the feeling that maybe it was meant to be. Maybe the universe was giving us a sign. So we decided to keep the baby and got married two years after she was born. But then my stepdad died suddenly. My mom was a mess. I inherited the burden of the family businesses, but I knew almost nothing about running a business, and I started struggling.

  The stresses of being a parent and running a big business got to me. I started taking OxyContin. It was stupidly easy to get a hold of, and I only needed to work two doctors. They both knew that I played football in college. I’d just tell them that my knee hurt or my back hurt, and they’d write me a script, no questions asked. No offense, but I just don’t look like a junkie, so they never suspected a thing. And—as it happens in the perfect storm—Charlie got out of prison.

  He’d met a few like-minded people inside, and he was back to his old ways almost immediately. I gave him a small loan of $5,000 so that he could get back on his feet, and I tried to keep my hands clean. I even offered to let him move in with us while he got his bearings. But the drugs started taking their toll on me. Neither my wife nor my mom knew that I was using, and I wasn’t strong enough to stop on my own. Pain pills take all the pain away—physically, mentally, everything. And when you’re going through so much, they’re an outlet. I wanted to stop so many times, but my body wouldn’t let me.

  I started slipping up. I worked the referrals that my dad had left behind at one of the businesses, and I got us a bunch of new contracts. But I made mistakes and cost the company $10,000, which wasn’t a huge deal financially. It was our reputation that took a big hit. Thank God my mother had the good sense to sell all the other businesses. We got into a fight because I wanted to keep them—I was so strung out that I wasn’t seeing the truth.

  Eventually, I lost the one business we hadn’t sold, and my wife found out about my drug problem. We were drinking together one night and got into a physical fight when I told her the truth. She called the cops on me. I went to jail for four days, and I felt like absolute shit about what I’d done. My real dad was an abuser, and I punished myself mentally for turning out like him, the piece-of-shit wife beater my mom told me about. When I got out, I apologized, but it was too late. She’d been unhappy for a long time, and I was high all the time, so I hadn’t seen it. She started divorce proceedings. Before long, I was homeless, and Charlie had my back. I moved in with him and his girlfriend. And that’s when I started to dabble in heroin.

  Charlie and his girl got into a lot of illegal things, and I turned a blind eye while we were living together. At that point, he had become my dealer, too—and so long as I got my fix, I didn’t really care what they were doing. But I saw too much, and I started getting scared. He was dealing with serious people—he met this Mexican dude in prison who was associated with a cartel. The guy moved in with us and started bringing in a bunch of heroin, meth, Molly—anything you could think of, but mostly huge blocks of heroin. They’d keep half of it to deal themselves, and the rest went out to other dealers in the city.

  Once my divorce was settled, I wanted to make sure that I got shared custody of my daughter, so I moved out of the drug den and got my own place. The drugs had transformed me physically—I’d lost a lot of weight, and my face had broken out—but I still looked like I had it together. I’ve been pulled over by cops and had a bunch of drugs on me, but the cops never bothered to check. I just don’t look like the type. So I was living this perfect double life. It was time for me to shape up, though, for my kid’s sake, so I went on methadone and got a job. I focused on my new job and being a dad, but I kept in touch with Charlie. We would get together once a week, hang out in Charlie’s kitchen, look up recipes online, and make dinner. I mean, if you didn’t know about the pounds of drugs all over the house, we were kind of the perfect picture of male friendship. And I was doing well for a while.

  But the job ended up not working out. I was working nights, and it screwed my schedule up with my daughter. I got hired away to
another gig and was making okay money, but I fell off the wagon and got back on heroin. In the meantime, the cartel dealer had become a totally different person—violent, scary, unpredictable—you didn’t want to be around him anymore. He got pulled over and arrested for a traffic violation, but the cops didn’t know he had five grams of heroin in his stomach. He feigned illness, and they took him to a hospital, where he threw the drugs up and hid them in the bathroom ceiling tile. When they took him to jail, he used his phone call to let Charlie know where the drugs were.

  All of his dealings put Charlie on the DEA’s radar, and eventually the law caught up with him. They raided his place and charged him with “conspiracy to commit trafficking,” I think it was. He needed money for his defense attorneys and I needed money to pay off the lawyer after my divorce, so we switched up our game. We came up with this grand scheme of hitting up storage units and stealing from them, bit by bit, so that the owners wouldn’t notice. We’d sell everything online through eBay or Craigslist, and we were making a lot of money. We went high-tech with it—bought drones so that we could see if cops were coming, signal jammers, blankets that muted our body heat in case they were using infrared technology to surveil the area. My hands definitely weren’t clean anymore. And we were doing heroin still; I mean, to do all of this stuff, you definitely have to be on something.

  The storage units were a gold mine. One in particular was worth thousands of dollars. We kept hitting it up over the span of a few months, and we realized that the owner must have been a collector. We saw a license that he’d left in the unit—he was this old guy with white hair. We ended up finding him, actually. He lived in a retirement community, alone. No family. He was probably paying for his housing with what he had in that unit. It was probably his life’s savings. My conscience finally kicked in, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I told Charlie I wanted out. He told me he wanted to hit up this guy’s condo. “That’s probably where he keeps all the really good stuff,” was his theory. Storage units felt impersonal to me, but people’s homes—no, I couldn’t do it. But Charlie went ahead on his own. He got greedy. He didn’t know when to stop.