What I Did & What I Learned
This is a story of domestic violence. I never thought it would be part of my life after I escaped my childhood, but it has come back after nearly 20 years of dormancy.
This is a long story, and I don’t think it’s possible to pare it down anymore. My first draft was twice the length, but I’ve realized that there’s a time and place for everything, and I hope sharing may help others.
What happened may be more common than it feels to me right now. There are 12 million domestic violence cases every year in the United States, and that’s only indicating the reported ones. For comparison, there are 6 million car accidents per year.
However, its ubiquity doesn’t take away from its severity, and I have failed in a way I make no excuses for. But more on that in a bit.
It has been two months since the event on September 8th, and the dust is almost completely settled. There has now been a formal legal sentencing, so I am free to talk about it. I’ve had to come down from major adjustment disorder, and I’ve had a lot of time to think, pray, and cry.
It may be the wisest place to summarize the marriage I’ve had with my wife Tori, then work from there.
Preface
Back in 2014, when I was Greg Stucky, and she was Victoria Lawson, we fell in love through unusual circumstances. At the time:
- I had been through a string of unsuccessful jobs. Given the timing of the 2009-ish crash, my accounting degree had led me to zero successful career prospects, and I had become a strange wanderer. I was organic farming with an abusive manager, and my roommate at the time was an equally abusive ex-Soviet helicopter pilot who didn’t speak any English.
- She was living with her mother after the financial aid for her degree fell through, and she couldn’t complete school. That situation, among other circumstances, had left her feeling quite hopeless with life.
We had developed a friendship because she responded to a Facebook message I sent while particularly lonely. It blossomed over several months into a long-distance, phone-based dialogue about nearly everything deep and philosophical. The ex-Soviet Slava walked in on me to inform me about how he really felt. He proceeded to call me names (among other manners of expression), with the lilting robotic voice of Google Translate muting its severity.
After he left, something awakened deep in Victoria. Without knowing all the details, she expressed to me how it was utterly unfair how Slava treated me, and how my lot in life was generally unfair (I had told her much of my past).
I realized at that moment that this was a worthwhile girl to pursue, even if it went nowhere. My initial desire had been to move on from that role to the Texas oilfields, but I shifted my stance to moving back to California. I informed her of that desire, with my high-enough-functioning autism of the time expressing it as something close to “I really want something more serious, but want to see if our pheromones are even compatible, but your friendship is still worth the trip, and it’s worth the risk to find out.”
It turns out I made the right decision. We went through numerous experiences from that point, including:
- Living in our car together, twice
- A complex wedding experience, which involved us getting married first in a secular courthouse, then a reception and vows in my parents’ backyard, with her parents not showing up for any of it
- Living in a 1981 Skyline Century Nomad fifth-wheel RV with holes in the roof on an empty property
- Pursuing a missionary conference by God’s direction, then misreading God and assuming He wanted us to be cross-cultural missionaries right afterward, which meant sacrificing most of our worldly possessions
- Victoria becoming pregnant, then getting an eclamptic seizure, which gave us our first son through an emergency C-section
- My efforts to pay the bills to permit her decision to be a stay-at-home mom leading to being a truck driver, which created a long-distance relationship for half a year while she took care of our infant Victor
- A complex effort to move out of California to Iowa, with me financially preparing everything I could and her driving in a caravan with my dad
- My formal beginning of my tech career as a lottery technician in Iowa
- Mia being born within the middle of COVID-19, with absolutely zero complications or incidents
- My wife becoming an excellent homemaker through her decorations, and an outstanding stay-at-home mother of both our children, including our shared ambition to homeschool them
Community
Now, I’ll shift to some background about my religious faith.
I claim Christianity as a belief system. I’ve never had a conventional experience with it, since I didn’t come to it like most people do. The short of it is that I deduced that only monotheism works as a logically coherent phenomenology of God, then deduced that Christianity was the only sensible monotheism.
Since I had been raised within a Protestant church, I understood the significance of church community. But, during my childhood, I had adopted a specific flavor of Stoicism at a critical stage. Thus, it was very difficult for me to feel any sense of community with the other Christians attending, and things like worship services and low-information sermons were lost on me through the surplus of sentiment mixed with very little new information.
I was apprehensive toward most social groups through many failed efforts to meaningfully connect with a community, and that sentiment commingled with my wife’s completely unrelated apprehensions. In effect, both of us have been highly qualified, intelligent people who found each other, but with the shared defect of failing in certain aspects of the social skills department.
In 2019, we had started taking baby steps to remedy our lack of community once we reached Iowa, and had found a healthy church community. Unfortunately, after about 8–10 months there, the COVID-19 pandemonium broke out. I was infuriated at their lockdown procedure: they didn’t ask questions and simply closed everything with no clarification when they’d reopen. My obsession with the perfect qualities of Christ’s Millennial Kingdom at the time didn’t help either.
I decided I was done with going to church. That specific point may have been the beginning of the downward slide that led to this.
Broken
It’s worth noting more in-depth the two minds of this marriage.
To start with, in my corner:
- I’m exceedingly passionate, but also exceedingly restrained.
- My ASD means I see things a bit out of spec from everyone else.
- I’m fiercely loyal, but also aggressively minded towards Win/Win conflicts, even when they’re not possible.
- I’m a super nerd, and tend to gravitate toward hobbies that include reading nonfiction, writing, and video games, though I’ll try anything once.
- I work very hard at nearly everything I do, to the point of losing sleep over it.
- In the quest for some sort of parent figure and a severe lack of socialization, my modeling and surrogate father became the computer. Computers are highly precise, efficient, and rule-abiding. They are also without grace or tact, engage in black-and-white thinking, and don’t understand “nearly good enough”.
Tori, on the other hand, is cut differently:
- She’s also exceedingly passionate, but has scars from the past.
- Her specific neurodivergent flavor means she understands how I see things, but also understands how everyone else sees it as well. It contributes to her unbelievable artistic talent, but comes with some challenges.
- She’s also fiercely loyal, but hates conflicts in all forms, even when they’re necessary.
- She’s also a super nerd, and tends to gravitate toward hobbies that include reading almost anything, making every form of art, and visual media, though she’ll try anything once.
- She works very hard at nearly everything she does, to the point of identifying intimately with her work and its results.
Tori had found meaning in my general emotionlessness at the beginning of our marriage. She affectionately called me “her Spock” (referring to Star Trek’s Spock), and found my general transparency and bluntness refreshing compared to the vague communication she had experienced in most of the rest of her life.
As you can see, we have had a solid-enough compatibility for a healthy marriage, but it has been missing a few things that should have been supplemented by a healthy community. We’re no good at seeing the “Kick Me” sign on our back, after all.
Descent
The first casualty of my departure from any significant social group was my perfectly clean criminal record. I self-reported everything to the police in 2021 without a lawyer to get my daughter to the hospital, and they convicted me with the felony of child endangerment. By the beginning of 2022, however, life had returned to normal, and I successfully served my probationary time with absolutely zero incident. In that whole experience, I became a much improved dad.
That felony status, though, was the opening for further work by the devil. A sense of shame had crushed me in that felony status I wasn’t aware I was carrying, which has hampered my belief in myself and sense of identity for years. My heart has been heavy about the criminal sentencing, and I felt like nobody would ever want to hire a felon, so after the event I picked up the next available job I could do as an insurance agent and have been resigned to career mediocrity ever since.
Our family unit had “normalized” again, but something wasn’t right, even though we were both better parents than ever before. While I had persisted in therapy throughout my probation, Tori had a hard time releasing what had happened, and she didn’t seek therapy. I had offered the idea a few times, but she had insisted that “talk therapy” was unhealthy for her. In late 2023, she took a course from a YouTube celebrity called the Crappy Childhood Fairy, and self-diagnosed as having Childhood PTSD.
One of the factors regarding recovering from CPTSD revolves around the “Daily Practice”, which basically shakes down to the following:
- Explicitly write down all your fears and resentments
- Release all of them
Unfortunately, Tori hadn’t been divulging much to anyone she really knew, except maybe one long-distance friend about once every month or two. She was certainly becoming more aware of her fears and resentments, but it appeared to me that her behavior was incorporating more fears and anxieties about things that either didn’t exist or hadn’t existed in years.
Further, she had followed my community connection model, and had become even further asocial, but with the responsibility of having to take care of two small children at home.
On my end, I had lost any “zest” in me to connect with others off-the-clock, and I felt socially drained after doing customer service to the public for insurance policies all day. I wasn’t seeking any non-computer-based hobbies (i.e., writing projects, solo computer games, learning programming, etc.), and my life had become a slow march of tedium. After my probation was over, I stopped seeking continued therapy.
So, our marriage marched onward, day in and day out, with me working, Tori working with the kids, and us saving our money. Both of us had largely lost hope in finding some sort of close connections with others.
Tori had alluded to the need for more connection, but she never put any ideas forward. She didn’t like going to church alone with the children (since she hated the shame she felt when she described why I didn’t want to go), and never requested me to come along to allay those concerns. I didn’t want to go because I figured my social anxiety was better to appease as long as she didn’t care enough to talk about it.
To shift gears again, my father’s health hasn’t been the best, and my mom ghosted him after about 40 years of marriage, without any explanation or means of contact. His health has been tolerable, and Tori and I agreed that it would be beneficial for Victor and Mia to spend time with my dad: grandpa gets to see the grandkids and the kids get to spend time with grandpa.
We made the long-term goal late 2023 to save up for an RV, then to move down from Des Moines to San Antonio to see him. My dad spoke very well of Community Bible Church, and we hoped deeply that it may be our last chance at something like “human interaction” for the two of us.
In the mix of all this, Tori barely went to Frontier Church once or twice a week, and I came once every few weeks. She wasn’t involved in any extracurricular activities, and I didn’t care much for it because it reminded me so much of the “happy church people” who I believed didn’t care much for a deeper dialogue. This limited interaction, in particular, planted the seeds for what would come.
However, we had a wonderful time in Branson, MO last May, with my dad at his timeshare. To the best I understand it, Tori and I had a great time, as well as the kids.
A few months before the event, maybe starting in July or August, fissures had started arising in our marriage:
- I was still sending little notes that expressed gestures of affection to her, but less frequently. She had been sending them back regularly, but stopped entirely.
- Our physical intimacy had been fading for a while.
- I started speaking more harshly with her, generally to the tune of “get to the point, what do you want?”.
- She had stopped making any type of special dinner that explored her creative potential, and didn’t bother with the other small gestures like ironing my shirt or telling me she loved me.
- I had stopped trying to be emotionally available to her, and the home had devolved into large swathes of relative silence and mutual withdrawal into separate technologies.
- She started criticizing me over various small things, and eventually started non-disclosing important information with me.
- About a week before things got severe, we weren’t consistently setting boundaries with the kids anymore. One of us would dictate a consequence, and the other wouldn’t follow through on it.
- The chores had started to not get done: there was constant clutter, nobody had dusted, and the trash and dishes regularly piled up.
Our marriage dialogue had also gotten much more toxic. I have no idea how the statements arose, but we would say severely hurtful things to each other. Looking back, I never meant any of the things I said, and I want to believe the same for her.
Those statements were in the mix of arguments over very dumb things. They always arose in the flow of a basic human conversation, but somehow our resentments got to a place where someone ended up yelling. It became standard practice for me to storm out of the apartment, slamming the door about half the time, and over the weeks Tori was becoming less and less responsive.
In July, we purchased a travel trailer RV and were able to store it away. We were making clear plans to move down with my dad as of November in that RV, and had already set an itinerary and given notice to my boss and apartment.
Unfortunately, that trip was not going to happen.
Destruction
The following events are the fulfillment of our defects of character colliding with each other. To be explicitly clear, that doesn’t excuse what I did in the slightest.
And, naturally, this is my side of the story. I’m trying to be as fair and empathic as possible, but it’s possible I’m missing key details she remembers, and I’m deeply sorry if I’m misrepresenting anything that puts her in a worse light than what ought to be.
On September 6th, Tori and I got into a very, very severe argument over something stupid. But, it led to her basically staying silent and me trying to provoke her to speak. In my complete impatience, I got physical. Looking back, I think Tori was stunned by the experience, but I interpreted her non-responsiveness after the altercation as intentional manipulation.
On September 8th, we had another severe argument over something stupid. This time it was about who was going to go to church. In her continued behavior, which I saw as stonewalling, I utterly lost my patience and got physical with her again, this time going as far as throwing plates on the ground in anger. She called 911, and was sobbing more loudly and uncontrollably than I’ve ever seen her cry.
To avoid my kids having to experience the trauma of seeing their dad taken away by the police, I left the apartment. I went to a parking lot and, for the first time in my life, broke down in uncontrollable tears.
Aftermath
This story diverges with my wife’s completely at this point, so the information I have is more limited.
For the sake of order, I will group the flow of events separately into their corresponding realities.
Aftermath: First Logistics
I went to the church, and apparently Tori had already informed them by the time I got there. The pastor’s wife pulled me aside, and told me to wait for the police. I was surprised by her severe reaction to my presence, and I still remember her speaking to me as if I were about to do something violent.
The police officer showed up and booked me with an assault charge. I spent the night in jail. I was issued a no contact order for Tori the next morning, and I was bailed out that evening.
For the uninitiated, whom I hope will stay that way, a no contact order works a bit like a restraining order, but is by the courts. The spirit of it is to prevent stalking and harassment:
- I am forbidden to talk to or message my wife, which includes social media or through other people.
- Beyond a lawyer representing me being present, I can’t have any conversation with her, nor can I tell someone to tell her something.
- This has no effect on anyone else telling her anything else, nor on her telling me something. It also has no effect on my ability to talk about her.
- The only person who could get in trouble is me.
The period of time between the 8th and 12th was a mad dash. The no contact order meant I was forbidden to go to our apartment again, which had all of our stuff that wasn’t in our storage unit. In all the craziness, I had to take a week off work, got a car, and was able to get the prior-mentioned RV out of storage to an RV park in town.
Aftermath: Family’s Departure
Now, the facts without context here, regarding my wife’s behavior, are far worse than I think she deserves. To that end, I must give some background on some of Tori’s views.
Tori and I have both had anti-authoritarian streaks, though mine have softened over the past few years. We both left California out of a fear of government meddling in how to raise our children. The dialogue we’ve had with some friends surrounding the 2021 event very likely heightened fears about what “family government agencies” like the Department of Human Services can do to families:
- We heard from a shared friend about DHS abductions, where loving and well-meaning parents are separated from their children who want to stay with them because a bureaucratic system checked one box too many on matters that aren’t core to good parenting.
- Further, my news scouring found that there have been specific cases where social workers have served to migrate foster children into sex-trafficking rings.
The reality of this, to be clear, is that it does happen, but that’s the extreme bottom of the bell curve. Most people have a pleasant-enough-but-not-worth-going-through-again experience with the DHS, and they can sometimes do good things for families.
I received an email from a pastor from Frontier Church on the 13th. He basically said that Tori and the kids no longer live in Des Moines, without any specifics beyond that.
Afterward, the information others have volunteered to me has demonstrated that she completely left the apartment as of September 12th, four days or so after the event took place.
- She left almost everything in that apartment, except probably whatever she could put in our Jeep Grand Cherokee.
- She did take her, Mia’s, and Victor’s important documents, but left everything else.
- According to the DHS paperwork I’ve seen in the mail addressed to me, she turned her phone off completely.
- Since the event, she hasn’t accessed any of our shared money.
- She even left our cat Sunny, who Victor, Mia, and Tori have all had more affections for than I have had.
Given the cat’s state when my friends at Des Moines Fellowship showed up, she gave limited instructions to Frontier Church on caring for her, which meant they were surprised that there was a dehydrated and starving cat when they came to see how they could help me with the apartment.
This information has trickled to me very slowly. Every time I’ve learned a new piece of information about the state of things, I’ve descended into another depth of realization, shame, guilt, and sorrow. But I’ll save that for later.
Amending a no contact order is not easy. To remove the address from it, for example:
- A lawyer must submit a motion to amend it.
- Tori had to give a signed document (preferably notarized) stating “I’m not in that apartment anymore and don’t intend to go back to it”.
- Someone else would have to give another signed document (preferably notarized) basically saying the same thing.
- Then, once submitted, the process can move at the speed of government and the NCO can be amended.
A few weeks before September 8th, we had already submitted the notice we were leaving the apartment. This meant that I had the deadline of November 13th to either move everything out, or the apartment would likely throw it all out and send us the bill. However, Des Moines Fellowship has assisted me in ways I couldn’t have imagined would happen, but more on that later.
However, I slowly came to see that my wife made zero contact with absolutely any lawyers or DHS. The DHS opened a case, then closed the case effective October 14th due to no communication with her. They will not do anything else with our situation now.
The NCO stays in effect until the court orders differently, but the default extension of an NCO, in the absence of my wife making any interaction with lawyers, is five years. But, more on that later.
Aftermath: A New Spirituality
After the event, far too many little coincidences have worked in my favor:
- I’ve never bought a car in my life and always trusted my dad’s mechanical skills to assist me, but I needed one quickly. With very little research, I found a 2005 Ford Focus with 99,000 miles on it that had been owned by one guy. It runs amazingly and has no issues.
- Finding an RV park was not easy, since there are only, like, four of them in town. I was able to get a spot close to town, and also have been able to reserve it through the winter months. It may take some work to create a skirting around the underside, and I’m having a heck of a time with the black water tank, but I have a stable place.
- I’ve been given a plea deal that came with a deferred judgment. I’d have potentially lost my insurance license if I was sentenced with that crime, meaning my career would have been thrown into the kind of rollercoaster I used to work with.
There are more below, but that’s just to indicate a few that I can’t place anywhere else.
I never realized it, but I’ve been living under multiple layers of shame, but thought I was simply acting upon a sense of duty. Conformity to a principle, though, isn’t right unless it’s a right principle.
That shame has directed me in ways I never would have imagined. I’ve lived with an inherent harshness and criticism that I had normalized from a young age, and I’ve been exceedingly critical of just about everyone I encounter. I have a natural gift for seeing things precisely, but I used it to slice people up instead of acting in any scope of love. Everyone needs grace, and people are typically doing the best that their willpower can withstand.
In this state, I’ve learned another spiritual truth that will shape the rest of my life. Many aspects of our self-defined morality broadly conform to God’s (e.g., we generally agree that stealing is wrong). But, God prioritizes forgiveness versus competence different than we do. He favors people who endlessly sin and repent, sin and repent, over people who will not forgive someone else’s sin (Matthew 18:21-35, for reference).
The implications of this, to me, are vast. I have condemned the Bride of Christ incessantly over their incompetence. To have the mind of Christ, I should have seen it more as an opportunity for me to express forgiveness and grace. Instead, I fixated on obsessing over ways to fix the Church. I have not been staying in my lane, and it reached its final result with me violating the bride God gave me personally.
This has come clearly to me in the brokenness of not knowing where my wife or children have gone, in the quiet times in between surviving in the absence of the three most meaningful people in my life. No matter how much I’ve tried to live virtuously, it was by my efforts, and I eventually made a split-second decision in desperation and weakness that broke everything.
I’ve lived my entire life under the incessant guideposts of Virtue and Truth, but I never bothered to consult their creator. I have betrayed the trust of my best friend, my beloved Tori, and she has been shattered in a way I can never mend.
I should have trusted God more, and that trust in God should have come through more trust in other people, especially Christians. Instead, I felt I could maintain everything myself, and may have permanently harmed Tori.
I am extremely sorry, but I am legally forbidden to formally apologize to her. I wish I could tell her how I felt. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to her when she emphasized we needed to connect more. I’m deeply sorrowful over the physical harm I caused her, as well as the psychological damage I can only imagine she’s still unraveling.
At the same time, I can’t live in perpetual shame. I know my sins have been forgiven, even if I were to be stupid enough to revisit them again. The consequences of sin will still play out, but God Himself always forgives. I am responsible to change, and that’s all I can occupy myself with.
Only one specific truth holds me together through this, and that has to do with the value of our souls relative to our relationships:
- My marriage agreement with my wife will persist until one of us has an organ that fails without a timely replacement, which technically makes it less time-durable than a tattoo (since it relies on the survival of two people).
- The same goes for my kids, though that one has a transcendent component because the influence I make on them will outlive me, assuming they don’t have a failing organ without a timely replacement before I do.
- Our souls, however, last forever. 10,000 years will only scratch the beginning of eternity, but will leave our petty little 80-but-maybe-90-if-you-eat-your-veggies as a dark blip that’s best left alone. The quality of that life is defined by how well we integrate healthy habits and virtues into our soul’s essence.
And, therefore, I care more about Tori’s soul, Victor’s soul, and Mia’s soul than I do about my marriage or being a dad to them. But, I’ll bring up more on that later.
Aftermath: A New Psychology
I have spent more time crying in nearly the past two months than my entire life combined. Some of the most stubborn components of my Stoicism have been completely removed. The specific series of events and its impact on me has led me to believe this is an answer to someone’s prayers.
In the process, I’ve felt more alive than ever before, and I seem to be able to feel things. Autism doesn’t have a naturally empathic capacity due to learning issues, but by God’s design, this situation has somehow knocked some sort of emotional awareness into me. Music doesn’t sound the same, personal stories have made me tear up when others tell me them, and I now can’t go through most worship music songs without breaking down.
One of the people I’ve sought counsel with was a meditation coach I work with. I have started meditating, which has been another God-established appointment. The skill set of meditation has been vital for me to deal with the utter wave of emotions that now come crashing on me nearly every day. I run across at least one thing every 36 hours that causes my emotions to overload, and I’ve sometimes been so overtaken with tears that I can’t even drive my car.
I now see how emotionally distant I was to Tori. Beyond anything physical, it’s another thing I’m deeply sorry for.
Aftermath: A New Community
God has a unique way of using the permutations of quantum chaos to protect and guide His people. Skimming down to the second listed result on Google, or not noticing a billboard while driving, or forgetting to pay a bill, can all part of God’s direction. The same goes for the odd, notable things we do observe.
In that frame, I knew immediately after getting out of jail that I needed to go to church, and that I’d swallow my opinions and plug deep into the first church He gave me, even if they were hyper-religious lunatic fringepeople.
But, God was a lot nicer to me than that, and the quantum superstates aligned:
- First, I landed at Freedom Brewery that Saturday, September 14th, which happens to be the best coffee shop in Des Moines if it’s before 2 p.m., but that’s not important right now.
- Near closing, a 40-something guy was giving advice about dealing with high school kids to a few 20-somethings. He said that high school kids want to know you’re there to listen to them, and I decided to assert how they just as much need meaning in their formative youth.
- They liked what I said, and therefore felt driven to share a tour of the campus the coffee shop was directly attached to: Freedom for Youth Ministries.
- After the tour, I opened up over my rather new emptiness, so one of them invited me to her church.
I’ve now been going to that church, Des Moines Fellowship, regularly, and it literally answers a host of prayers. I’ve prayed in the past, and gave up, on finding a healthy church that could actually be a church for me, and I know the Frontier Church leadership was praying for me to get that as well.
As a church unit, they’re theologically sound, and even have a leadership structure that aligns more closely with the original church’s model. Beyond my family, they’re the most significant blessing I may have ever had in my life, and God placed them directly in my path at this time.
I’ve also realized why I did not find anything like this before: I was not ready, and would have likely damaged them if I had encountered them before this transpired.
In effect, having the truth is a heavy weapon, and we must have the right attitude in wielding it. I had seen the truth as an always-useful tool that could carve everything into its “right” designation. But, the truth must be expressed in love, or it will destroy any semblance of humanity. If I had gone to this church even four months ago, I may have dissipated the love that God had painstakingly placed in their lives.
I am grateful already for what they have done:
- They gave me more emotional support, all at once, than I’ve ever received beyond one person before in my life.
- I’ve received tremendous support and advice on what to do, in many parts of this situation. Things would be a lot worse if God hadn’t timed their presence here.
- Most recently, they’ve completely helped me pack and move everything out of our apartment, most of it going into our shared storage unit. I offered pizza, but they ignored that and said it’s their joy to bear my burden.
I am also grateful in advance for how God intends to use them in the future. But more on that later.
Aftermath: Severance
As of late October, I found out Tori hasn’t kept regular communication with Frontier Church at all. I have no idea where she is, and I’m completely unable to see my kids.
Currently, nobody I know even knows where my kids are, and an NCO in force means I can’t even safely ask about Tori. If I reach out to contact her, or try to tell someone to speak with her, I have violated the NCO, though in a legal sense my kids have absolutely to do with our situation and are bound up in it by association of being in her custody.
At this point, now that the sentencing is over, all she would need to do is contact the Polk County prosecutor’s office and ask for the NCO to be lifted, and it’d be done.
I’ve sought much counsel on this, and some people I’ve discussed on the matter have wanted to go the legal route to see my kids. I sincerely do not want that, for several reasons:
- Legal systems are designed for the places where human decency breaks down. I find little reason to use a low-trust system when there’s hope for better things. Adding in further legal disputes would make things so much worse than they are right now.
- Until indicated otherwise, my wife is a Christian, and I’m never doing a moral thing when I take her to law for absolutely anything (1 Corinthians 6:1-11). If there is any judgment, it should come from God, but I don’t even want that.
- Given Tori’s prior experience with legal things, I don’t want her to go through any more trouble with it. I’m convinced everything she’s done has been out of raw fear, and I want her to feel safe. Reporting her to the officials or bringing any sort of civil case is absolutely the wrong way to go.
- Both Victor and Mia are fully both our children. The way the law works, the only way I could ever engage in the psychotic world of custody comes through filing for divorce or maybe legal separation. As much as I want to see my kids and at least co-parent, I refuse to cause any more harm to Tori, regardless of what she wishes to do from here.
Current Status
In light of this, I’m getting my life together after what has happened.
To start with, I’ve made four major commitments to more healthily redirect aggression:
- I will never grow my beard out again. It symbolizes the raw state of masculinity, and I must daily remind myself to never again lose my temper and revert to physicality. I’m a child of God, and must act according to that spiritual standard.
- I will never be asocial again, and will always seek connecting with others from now on, even though it makes me anxious and uncomfortable. I know enough that the discomfort will only be temporary for the next year or two, and I’ll soon be socialized more than ever before, especially with my new church community.
- It was God’s timing that I encountered that meditation coach, and I’ve committed to meditating 20 minutes every day to release the unpleasant feelings that have haunted me. I’ve already seen results in being able to witness the presence of God now that my racing thoughts have been somewhat abated.
- At least twice a week, I’ve committed myself to get to the gym or workout in some way. I need a constructive outlet for any remaining stress that socializing and meditation can’t fix.
These past few weeks have been mostly the solidification of the habits, and I aim to carry them with me for the rest of my life.
The sentencing now locks in my practical career future for the next year:
- I have a deferred judgment, which basically means I’ve pled guilty to the crime of domestic assault, but the sentencing will be deferred. If I fulfill my probation, they’ll throw out the judgment. If I do anything criminal during that time, I get the full sentencing of about 5 months.*
- My probation is simple: take an anger management class for 26 weeks, stay out of trouble, and keep honoring the no contact order. I just have some bureaucratic runaround before I formally interact with my probation officer.
- In the absence of my wife interacting whatsoever with the prosecutor, the no contact order will be extended by default for 5 years. Unless she contacts the Polk County prosecutor’s office, I will next be legally allowed to speak with her as of October 31, 2029.
- I have no more risk of losing my insurance license, so I see no rush to change jobs right now, and this next year will be a time for me to continue self-improving, irrespective of what happens with my family.
*Prison systems are wacky. A 2-year sentence will get lopped in half as soon as you’re dropped into the system, then you get about 1.2 days of good behavior for each day you’re good, which would effectively become 5 months of incarceration. This may even go smaller if they grant you parole, which they do in a way that allows the prisons to be eternally overcrowded and generate lobbyist buzz to send more money to prisons, but allows an endless flow of new entrants. It allows the prosecutor to be “tough on crime” with 2 years’ sentencing, and lets the prison collect money for 1 or 2 years or whatever, but then lets “good” people get out easier.
And, until she decides otherwise, I am de facto single.
Possible Conclusion: Reconciliation
In all the emptiness of communication, I fell into a deep despair for a while. But, I’ve finally decided how I will move forward.
In direct defiance of my loss-mitigating Stoic background, I will take the risk on believing the best in her. I wish to earn her trust back, on the terms she wants. I know I don’t deserve her trust again right now, and the “sensible” option would be to call it done, but I will honor what God wants (specifically, 1 Corinthians 7:11b on my end), even if it doesn’t immediately appear to be in the direct interests of our children.
In all this darkness, I can attest to many positives about what our marriage has been:
- As late as September 1st, we have both indicated we love each other, and I know we both love our children. I still love her, and deeply hope she feels the same.
- As far as I know, there was no sexual immorality, on either of our ends.
- We’re both some degree of workaholics or overthinkers, but neither of us are substance abusers, deadbeats, or negligent.
- By God’s grace and our boundary-setting, our children were not part of this. We kept them squarely out of the screaming matches.
- The escalations started occurring over the course of about six months, probably from March to September this year. It didn’t last for longer than that, and we have a well-traveled relationship that goes back to 2015.
- As a family structure, our marriage worked. I was the nerdy administrator/breadwinner, she was the decorous housekeeper/homeschooler, and we were good at it. Among our accomplishments, we have already paid off 2/3 of her student loan, and we’ve received constant compliments that we have well-behaved kids.
- This has never happened like this before, and it will never happen again.
I don’t want things to revert to what they were right before this. She, and the children, deserve better, and I know God behind us can make us both more than conquerors.
My priority is to make her feel safe, above all else, so I don’t want her to do anything she feels is risky. She is my sister in Christ first and foremost, and I have been an awful brother, let alone anything resembling what a loving relationship between Christ and the Church should look like. I still deeply love Tori, irrespective of her motivations or what she does to me in the future. I will hope for all things and believe all things, farther than I ever have before.
I’ve sought much advice on this, and do have an “ideal” for how this could go, assuming she wants it:
- As a separate arrangement from my connection with her, I see my kids regularly, and preferably as soon as possible. Des Moines Fellowship has tried to seek her independently of me, but Frontier Church doesn’t know where she’s at, so there’s no chance of that as of right now.
- She lifts the NCO. I don’t care if it’s in a week, 3 months, or 6 months, but sooner would be better for the family unit’s collective safety, and for the logistics and risk management of our presently split household (e.g., tax filing, insurance, etc.).
- If she needs, we can make a written agreement over what scope of issues we’ll talk about. We’re both honorable enough that I have confidence we’ll both respect the rules we agree upon.
- To the best of my ability, I would also finance whatever is needed to help her and the kids while we’re separate.
- We need more wisdom than we currently have regarding interaction with each other, so we only interact under the umbrella of counseling.
- I’m fully willing to discuss the scope. I envision 3–4 times a week with a combination of pastoral and marital counseling, but I will respect her wishes.
- From there, I have a few hopes on where it could go, but it’d happen as the natural flow of conversation represented itself.
At the same time, I know a marriage requires shared consent, so I respect that aspect as well. I want to do whatever I can to help her heal.
Until I know otherwise, she has full access to everything that is ours, including the storage unit. I’ll continue paying for what I can, including her insurance and student loan (which appears to have a ~$250/month payment coming up as of late November), and I’d be happy to pay for the rest of what she and the kids need. If she wishes to never live with me again, that would break my heart, but I will respect it.
I miss Tori, Victor, and Mia so much right now. Every day, especially when I get off work and on weekends, I’m reminded of them gone from my life. I took all three of them for granted, and I want them back, though I know that will only happen if Tori wishes it, and I don’t presume I deserve it right now. Even if she wants to maintain the disconnection, they will always be the three most important people in my life.
I imagine what I did has likely shattered almost every part of her trust, and I don’t imagine she will heal quickly. Irrespective of whether I deserve it, I still want one more opportunity to treat my wife as my sister in Christ.
I’m also not in any rush. I want a better husband and father for my wife and kids to return to than they’ve ever had before, which takes habituating to my new developments. My hope would be to spend Christmas together, but that’s just under two more months away, and may be too much to wish for.
Anyway, that’s my story. If you’re able to provide it, I desperately wish to hear news, any news, about my kids, and I wish but can’t request for news about Tori, though you’re free to provide that at your discretion.
I can’t recommend you reach out to Tori to ask her side of things (since that would violate the NCO), nor can I tell you to send any support, love, encouragement, prayer, or aid her way, but you are free to act in your discretion about that matter. For what it’s worth, I also could definitely use some encouragement and guidance as well at this time.
What I’m Doing Now
I’m rebuilding what’s left of my life right now, now that the most beautiful woman I’ve known and the two most amazing children we share aren’t in it.
I’m finding meaning as I go, and have been having remarkable success socializing.
Every day I can, I’m trying to get involved in something. As of right now, it includes:
- 3 weekly Bible studies
- A recovery group
- Regular counseling sessions with 3 different sources
- Discipleship with my church
- Assisting with the website of a sober living home
- Sporadic coffee with people here and there
- Complete openness to any new interaction in the Des Moines area
Meanwhile, I’m also clearing out old notes I’ve been saving that go to my essays.