The Night Everything Shattered

May 2020 - when everything shattered...

The attack on my son was irrational. When my son asked his father a question, it led to a barrage of verbal attacks. He was reminded once more that he was just a guest in our house. Noticing his father's growing anger, I suggested my son leave before things got worse. As he tried to walk away, his father followed, attempting to grab him, and when he caught his shoulder, I stepped in. In an instant, I was shoved against the kitchen wall. I threw myself back in between them just as my son turned with his fists clenched and I convinced him to go outside. I was shaking, scared and incredulous that the man I had once trusted was attacking our son again. This man who was supposed to protect and love us, the one I'd been making excuses for, trying to keep calm, trying to keep from stepping over the edge, had lost it again.

I fell apart that night. I shattered the moment I stepped onto the porch and saw my son in tears, asking why his father hated him so much. I broke when my husband called my father, saying he was “fixing to beat the shit out of our son.” I broke again when my father arrived and listened as my husband repeated, over and over, that he was done with our boy—that it would be years before he’d even consider speaking to him again. And I broke one last time when my father turned to my son and said, “Get your things—you’re always welcome with me.”

In that moment, something inside me shifted. Watching my son quietly gather his things, his hands trembling, his eyes filled with a pain no child should ever carry—I felt a clarity I hadn’t known before. It was as if the blinders had been ripped away, and I saw our life for what it truly was: not just broken, but poisoned. We weren’t just surviving hard times; we were surviving a man who used anger like a weapon and control like oxygen.

The truth hit me harder than anything he ever said or did—I had been making excuses for cruelty. I had called it stress, a bad day, a short temper. But it wasn’t any of those things. It was abuse. And not just toward me—toward our children, too. I saw the way fear lived in our home like a permanent guest. The way we all held our breath when he was home. The way we all tiptoed around his moods. That night, I finally saw it.

And I hated that it took my son’s tears—his desperate, heart-wrenching question—for me to wake up.

I realized then that protecting my child meant no longer protecting the man who hurt him. That loving my son required more than comforting him after the damage was done—it meant standing between him and the one doing the damage. I had been trying to hold a family together, not realizing the foundation had long since rotted beneath us.

That night, I broke. But in the breaking, I also began to rise. Not with certainty, not with strength yet—but with the first flicker of resolve. I would not let this be his story. Or mine.