Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of domestic violence.
I spent the days before the custody hearing getting my story straight: Russell broke the bassinet and the photographs and the teapot and the dining-room chair and the glass lamp. He shoved and kicked me. He pointed a gun toward his skull while the baby and I watched; he covered us in broken lightbulbs. He unsheathed a machete to kill my dog; he threatened to snap my neck.
Russell had petitioned for custody of the 4-year-old who’d seen every broken thing and of the 1-and-a-half-year-old he’d never met, who’d been born while I had a protective order. My lawyer said Russell planned to ask for full custody. I wanted visitations supervised. I wanted Russell ordered to a family-violence-intervention program.
I collated anything that might corroborate my testimony: emails and messages, the lapsed protective order, the safety plan written by a social worker, a single picture of glass shards on an infant shoulder. I needed the judge to believe a different story than the one I’d been telling myself for years, in which I’d explained Russell’s fury not as abuse but as symptomatic of PTSD — from childhood trauma and wartime deployment, from losing his best friends in combat and his mother too young.
I was 20 when I met Russell. He was 29, discharged after two deployments, living with friends and a menagerie of exotic pets. Motorcycles in the carport, guns beneath the bed. Russell brewed chamomile tea, brought me bowls of vanilla-bean ice cream as we listened to Alan Watts’s lectures in the glow of a red lightbulb. He told me he’d been homicidal, suicidal, diagnosed as borderline. I wanted to fix it all. I was 22 when Russell moved into my duplex downtown. We fought that first night and we never stopped.
I got loud once on the back steps as he left, and later he said, “Someone hears a white woman screaming, sees me, calls the cops. That’s how you kill a n - - - -.” I knew he was right. I kept our torment private from then on. I protected him better.
The next year, I was pregnant and we left the duplex and rented a log cabin an hour from the city. These were the same woods where I’d lived as a girl: dense pines and poplars downriver from a gun range. My dad’s house was out there, one driveway over, on the other side of a small lake, too far to see or hear us. I could picture the tomatoes Russell and I would grow, a barefoot toddler wild in the woods.
We hung Russell’s longbow on the wall and his machete too, stuffed his assault rifle behind the couch. The .45 was always on his hip or on the nightstand. It was 2015, a year before the election, in the Deep South. That summer, a white man with a .45 had killed nine Black people at a church in Charleston. His manifesto said Black men raped white women. The man running for president said something close to that. Russell said the world wasn’t safe for us, and I believed him.
On his days off, he taught me to clear a building the way he had in Iraq. He showed me how war looked inside a home. I rounded corners muzzle first, the orb of my womb following the barrel. I extinguished every light and waited in the eaves with a round chambered.
Russell adored our baby. He gave baths and bottles, changed diapers, smearing ointment from a yellow tub, always with a song and dance that raptured the child. “Thank you,” he wrote on my first Mother’s Day card. “For my beautiful son. For the job you’re doing as his mother. For being my breath of fresh air when I can’t figure out where mine went or how I lost it. For putting up with me.”
My life with Russell was only as difficult as I expected. My parents had stayed for decades in a marriage that made them miserable. Pop culture taught me that love was hard, relationships were work, and that work belonged to me. I’d built my tolerance for it by watching my mother. “I can’t be your mom right now,” she’d said when I was 17 and my dad was leaving her. “I have to save the marriage.” I understood that now. I would have done the same for Russell.
Maybe I was already doing the same. I measured my motherhood by my forgiving, by my staying. Russell never left a bruise on me. He never broke a bone. He seemed afraid, in pain. When I left, I left quickly, propelled by a fear I wouldn’t name, baby on my lap until I reached the asphalt.
The day Russell covered us in broken light bulbs, I took a picture before I turned onto the two-lane. From the glass on my child’s doughy folds, I made a record. Each time I left, I went to my mom’s or to my dad’s. I never told them I was afraid. I proved my love in silence, in leaving, in coming back.
I worked dinner at the restaurant the night before Christmas Eve. The baby stayed with my mom nearby, ran a fever during my shift and on the long drive home. At the cabin, Russell was upstairs with a friend. I asked him to come down, bring ibuprofen, but he didn’t, and I found the medicine myself and fell asleep with the hot child.
In the morning, Russell wanted to get a tree, make a holiday, move on. I wanted to know why he’d ignored us. I followed him from room to room and he grew bigger and bigger, until that familiar fear, thick and wordless, sent me to the car.
Russell followed me out. “You’re a nasty bitch,” he said. He pried my keys and phone from my hands, threw them into the woods.
“I’m sorry,” he said, when he brought them back.
I told him I was leaving.
Russell went to the trunk for his tools. I put the car in reverse, waiting for him to move. Later, he told lawyers I tried to run him over.
From somewhere behind us, Russell fired the .45, the .45 that had been on his hip for years, the .45 that he’d used to show me how he’d kill himself.
I covered the baby’s ears too late, my hands and thighs quaking, trying to calm my body against my child’s.
Russell fired again.
I locked the doors and rolled up the window.
When he moved from behind the car, I reversed, gravel flying under my fast tires. On the driveway, I dialed his sister. I thought she’d answer. I thought she wouldn’t call the police. “I don’t know how to help him,” I said. “I have to leave. Can you please make sure he’s all right?” I went one driveway over. I knew my dad wasn’t home and I wouldn’t have to explain. Then I drove back around the lake with my dad’s truck so that Russell wouldn’t be stranded without me. I wanted to believe he wouldn’t hurt us. I wanted to prove I’d care for him no matter what.
I pulled the truck up close to the cabin’s steps, barely ten feet from where Russell leaned on the railing. I knew he was on the phone with 911 by how he described my make and model. I assumed he was reporting a kidnapping. Later, I read a transcript of the call. Russell told the dispatcher that he didn’t know where I’d taken the baby, that he believed our child was in danger, that I was reckless.
As I listened from the gravel, Russell told dispatch his guns were locked away. He made it sound as though I’d had no reason to leave. I was a crazy, unstable, untrustworthy woman. I thought about CPS. I didn’t know just how frequently women who report abuse lose their children to the state. But I knew we weren’t safe.
“He shot a gun at us twice!” I yelled. I wanted the dispatcher to hear me, to know why I’d left.
Then I ran, baby strapped and buckled to my ribs, until I was on the other side of the lake, where I called 911 myself, my words heaving into one another with the panic of what I’d done. I should never have phrased it like that, said that Russell fired at us. “He’s not a threat,” I told dispatch. “He wouldn’t do anything stupid. I don’t want the officer to be afraid.” I asked if the police could please come to me first.
In the cabin’s driveway, the sheriff’s deputy stood halfway between us: a man with his guns locked away, a woman with her baby. A woman who’d come back right away, a woman desperate to convince the officer that everything was okay.
Had the deputy administered the Danger Assessment — 20 yes-or-no questions used by first responders — I would have scored at elevated risk of domestic-violence homicide. A woman’s death at the hands of her partner is predictably preceded by the very things I’d had so much trouble measuring. In case after case, the man’s violence escalated over a year; he owned a gun; he threatened her with it; he said he’d kill her or he said he’d kill himself; she left him; he killed her.
In the driveway, the officer said, “If I file a police report, CPS will get involved.” He meant: “If I file a report, you could lose your child.” He asked us if we could work it out.
I nodded, and I let him go.
I didn’t live with Russell again, but I didn’t really leave him either. I still let him come over after work. Sometimes I sent the baby with him during my shifts at the restaurant. Twice, Russell refused to return him, kept our child behind locked doors with me on the other side — in a parking lot, in a hotel hallway. I tried to keep quiet. I didn’t need Russell to remind me to fear CPS, but he did anyway.
Sometimes Russell still wanted to fuck me and sometimes I still wanted him to. We went on like this for most of a year, long enough for me to get pregnant again. Later, my lawyer told me this made my story look weak. I was sure he meant it made me look weak.
The next fall, I kissed someone I worked with, and Russell’s threats escalated. “I feel like he could really kill me,” I wrote to our co-parenting counselor: the first time I put words to that drumbeat fear. Maybe she knew what I didn’t. Homicide — driven by guns and intimate-partner violence — is the leading cause of death for pregnant women, especially for young mothers. She told me to take out a protective order. “Please don’t call CPS,” I said when I sent her a copy. But the counselor was a mandated reporter, just like almost anyone I could have asked for help.
A caseworker from the Department of Family and Child Services looked through my refrigerator, bathroom cabinets, closets. She strip-searched my 1-year-old. She asked if his pigmentation was bruising. She asked why I hadn’t left Russell. She asked why I didn’t name my child on the temporary protective order as well as myself.
“Russell wasn’t violent toward the baby,” I said. Really, I hadn’t named the child on the order because I was scared. I thought Russell might kill me if I tried to keep his child from him. I thought he might kill himself.
“Where was the child when he shoved you and kicked you?” the caseworker asked. She meant the day Russell had taken down the machete to kill my dog. I’d placed the baby on the sofa, bumpered by cushions, before I followed Russell to the back of the cabin.
“The baby was in the other room,” I said. I didn’t know that in some jurisdictions victims could lose their kids even if a child was merely present elsewhere in a home where abuse occurred.
On the front porch, the caseworker discussed with her supervisor whether or not she should remove my toddler from my custody. She left me with a single sheet of paper, handwritten and titled “Safety Plan.” If I did not keep the baby away from Russell while DFCS investigated, I would lose custody. Another caseworker sent me to a forensic psychologist, who administered a parental-fitness examination. Six hundred dollars out of pocket. “We’re just trying to figure out if you’re a protective mother,” they all told me.
At the TPO hearing, my lawyer said Russell wasn’t contesting any of my allegations. He would agree to a voluntary 12-month stay-away order. I was sure Russell and the lawyers saw what I saw: This white judge hadn’t ruled in favor of a Black defendant once. “Russell doesn’t want a record,” my lawyer said, “and you wouldn’t have to testify.” Coiled into the offer was the reminder I didn’t need — it would be worse to testify and not be believed.
CPS held the investigation open for 52 days — just shy of the maximum allowed — before calling to tell me that the case was determined unsubstantiated. There was no evidence of abuse. “This doesn’t mean we don’t believe you,” the caseworker said. “Maybe if you had a police report or emergency-room visit.”
Before the custody hearing two years later, Russell’s attorney wrote to mine: “There is no basis for any safety or fear concerns whatsoever. … This nonsense is a continuation of the systemic efforts by Ms. Short to alienate the children from their father. Her insanity and antisocial behavior are a poison to be remedied, not fostered. … I believe she is mentally infirm.” I sounded just the way Russell had described me to the 911 dispatcher. It had been three years since he fired the gun and the sheriff’s deputy had asked us if we could work it out; two years since CPS closed their investigation; a year since the 12-month stay-away order expired.
In the courtroom, Russell’s lawyer and mine retreated through a heavy door to negotiate custody and visitation. Russell and I sat on opposite sides of the gallery and watched as the judge decided other cases. Divorces, temporary protective orders, parenting plans.
“When was your first child born?” the judge asked a Black Haitian woman named Esther.
She hesitated. “1994 — well, 1991,” she said.
“And the second child was born in 1994?” the judge asked. He was white, old. They’d gone over this twice already.
“Yes,” said Esther, “and then the next was ’97 and then 2001.”
“Okay,” said the judge. “And how many children do you have?”
“Three,” said Esther.
The judge leaned way back in his chair. “See now,” he said, “your story is shifting. You just gave me four dates, but you supposedly have three children.”
“Your honor,” Esther’s lawyer intervened, “one of the children died.”
“I’m just an old southern boy,” the judge said, leaning back again, “and it is real hard for me to translate foreign accents.”
My first lawyer had told me this judge was racist. She also told me that I should dress for church before the hearing: no pants. My second lawyer told me he’d send his white partner to represent me if we went to trial. My third lawyer told me Russell wanted to transfer the case to the county where I was living with my mom, to a more favorable judge. The decision was mine. I imagined taking the stand, describing the worst of Russell. The truth, but not the whole of it. I’d be another white woman dressed for church reciting all the ways I was victimized.
I could admit now the things I hadn’t admitted as I’d gone back to Russell again and again, as I’d convinced that officer in the cabin driveway that everything was okay, as caseworkers had searched my home and stripped my toddler. In mothering Russell, I’d neglected the mothering of my baby. Russell would terrorize our children just as readily as he’d terrorized me. My absence would not soften him any more than my presence had.
I didn’t agree to move the case. For years, I’d protected Russell instead of protecting my child. Now I had to be believed. I calculated that I had the greatest chance of being believed here, in front of this judge. In the courthouse across from the Confederate statue, I wore a dress that covered my collarbone, shoulders, and knees.
Esther’s ex-husband watched as she told the judge how he’d threatened her with a gun.
“Were you scared?” Esther’s lawyer prompted.
“Yes,” she said.
The judge shook his head, leaned way back again. “If you didn’t call the police,” he said, “I just can’t believe you were that scared.”
In a windowless chamber next to the courtroom, my lawyer reminded me that a man had rights to his children. He said Russell would probably be granted overnights no matter what.
“Something bad is going to happen to my kids,” I said.
My lawyer told me more than once that he understood. “There is nothing more powerful than a mother’s bond to her children,” he said.
I wanted to tell him that my terror was not fucking mystical. It did not require a uterus to comprehend. Instead, I said, “if anyone else did the things Russell did, you would never ask me to send my kids to them.”
“The judge will want police reports,” my lawyer said.
I didn’t testify. I signed the consent order the lawyers prepared: no supervision for visits, no family-violence-intervention program. Russell would get weekends, and I’d get child support.
Later, after the first overnight, my 4-year-old crawled into my backseat, opened the doors to a tiny space shuttle, and said, “Mommy, Papa slapped me.”
The final court order instructed me not to say anything that might damage Russell’s relationship with his children. But long before I’d signed it, my therapist had helped me explain to my older child the reasons we lived apart from Russell. “You have to give a child the tools to report abuse,” she’d said.
Now, I pressed the record button on my phone and asked what happened. I’d once thought that testifying and being disbelieved was the worst thing. Now I knew it was worse to make no record at all.
He said they’d stayed at Russell’s new house, everything in boxes other than the bunk bed, Russell in a sleeping bag. The child had wanted milk in the middle of the night. They’d argued. “He slapped my mouth,” the 4-year-old said, bright and clear into the record.
I thought I’d take this back to court, show it to the judge, ask for a new order with those things I’d wanted: supervised visits, a family-violence-intervention program.
But when I called my lawyer, he said it sounded too much like I’d coached my child to report abuse. And anyway, the state where we lived protected a parent’s right to hit their kid, as long as they didn’t leave a mark.
At home, I held my child in my lap the way I’d held him as a baby on the long driveway each time I’d left. “I’m proud of you for telling me what happened,” I said.
I didn’t promise I could make it stop.
All names have been changed.