Remember How This Day Will End

One of the people I was able to confide in at times was my older sister ~ although the isolation I experienced during those four years kept me from telling her everything.

Her best advice to me during those difficult years was "Remember How This Day Will End."  She told me that no matter what plans I had with him for any special occasion, I should always think ahead and remember how this day will end.

Because anything special always ended badly.

He liked to ruin those days that were meant to be special.

There were Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays full of isolation and tension.  Never being able to see my own family at times.  And never being able to bring him, of course.  I never really told my father that we had even gotten back together after I left the Santa Cruz Mountains to get away from him long before we ever moved in together.

I remember one New Year's Eve spent up north at his second home.  He had sent me home on Christmas Day and refused to let me come back up during my vacation week.  I begged to be able to come up for New Years, mostly because I wanted to see the animals.

He was in A.A., and there was a big celebration at the Fellowship.  We went there for the speaker and stayed a little for the music, but he did not want to buy food from the grill that they had right in the center, so we drove back late in the evening to his house where he cooked a lavish meal of steak and vegetables that he charged me $20 to eat.  On our drive back to eat this 10:30 p.m. dinner, we got into an argument about his son who we had seen pulled over on the side of the road by the highway patrol on our route home.  He stopped and talked to the officer and got his son out of whatever was being questioned.  And as we drove off, we fought about a topic unrelated to his son being pulled over, and all of a sudden, he started pounding me in my left arm as he drove recklessly through the foothills.

So there I was ~ being beaten as he drove me home ~ and then being fed a $20 dinner that he cooked himself.  By now it was after 11 p.m., and he said we would go back to the New Year's Eve celebration and ring in the New Year at his fellowship.  Hurt, weary, and confused, I accompanied him back to a place of warmth and welcoming and wondered how I ever got myself into this situation 3 1/2 years earlier and how would I ever get out.  How would I ever get free?  Would the New Year bring freedom with it?

And somehow, it did.  Because he finally left me six months later after revealing to me that he had been having another relationship with another woman in this other town and that he "was done with me."

Sometimes, The New Year really does bring new beginnings.  And I thank God daily that 2005 was a new beginning for me.