3 Women Who Decided Not to Take It Anymore

These are the stories of three women who sought help from Sojourn. They asked that their real names not be published for fear that their husbands might find them and their children. The 24-hour Sojourn hot line number is (310) 392-9896.

This wasn’t the first time Martha had left home, but it was the first time she got help from a battered women’s shelter.

Usually, she would simply leave town to get away from her engineer husband, the son of a doctor, who periodically beats her, each time more severely than the last.

She came to the realization that she doesn’t have to make a break alone.

Martha, a 31-year-old nurse, left again recently with the clothes on her back and her two sons, one of them an infant, after being punched and pushed down the stairs.

“We have a beautiful home, but I don’t care,” she said. “I got away with my sanity.”

There had been a lull in the violence during her pregnancy. But on the night of her six-week checkup after the baby was born, the beatings resumed.

“He hadn’t hit me for almost a year,” Martha said.

Her husband had warned Martha again and again never to tell anyone what happened behind closed doors. So to the outside world she seemed to have a wonderful marriage.

“He’s very charming with a capital C ,” said Martha. “But everything that’s wrapped pretty, ain’t.”

As is common among battered women, Martha was told by her spouse that the beatings were her fault, ostensibly for failing to put the towels “just so,” or fold down the bed a certain way.

She blamed herself too and was ashamed to tell her family, going through periods where she couldn’t eat or sleep and her hair fell out.

“I feel like it was my fault because I married him,” Martha says, hugging herself. Tears well up in her sad eyes. “Why do they have to do that?” she asked.

*

It has been eight months since Elizabeth, 33, walked out of her $500,000 house with her three children. Actually, it was her doctor who persuaded her to leave after treating Elizabeth’s split lip--the last, but hardly the worst, injury that her husband had inflicted on her.

The attractive, outgoing woman said her husband, who works in the film industry, had previously broken her nose by hitting her over the head with a flashlight. She explained bruises on her arms to friends by saying she was anemic.

Elizabeth describes her husband as a control freak. He gave her a to-do list every day and listened in on her phone conversations with workmen, berating her afterward for not following his instructions.

“Everything (in the cupboards) had to be straight,” Elizabeth said. “If there was a rotten piece of lettuce, he’d scream. I never worked so hard to be perfect.”

After staying at Sojourn, Elizabeth moved into an apartment and returned to college.

Despite court orders, Elizabeth has yet to receive a penny in child support--she has begun divorce proceedings--and has relied on family and friends for sustenance. Her husband refuses even to give the children their favorite toys.

Her husband, meanwhile, is allowed monitored visits with the children. During one visit, he taped a letter to their daughter’s thigh asking Elizabeth to come back to him.

“He wants to see his kids, but I guess he doesn’t think they have to eat,” Elizabeth said.

*

Though threatened by her husband with a knife on their honeymoon 17 years ago, Angela said she did not consider herself a battered woman until after she hooked up with Sojourn.

“I thought I had to be hit to be battered,” said Angela, who has attended support groups in the month since she has left home, but has never been a shelter resident.

Angela’s story shows abuse can be in the form of mental anguish.

The honeymoon threat stemmed from a jealous rage: He insisted she was having an affair. “I thought I had done something to make him think that,” said Angela, setting the pattern for a marriage in which she was always to blame.

For hours on end, her husband would tell Angela how incompetent and stupid she was. “He said, ‘I’m just trying to help you so you can change,’ so I would change, and it wouldn’t help,” Angela said, tears rolling down her cheeks.

“I spent my whole life trying not to make him angry,” she said.

It didn’t work. Angela said her husband beat the children and threw things at her. “One minute, he treated me like a goddess. The next minute I put too much soy sauce in the rice, and it’s all over the wall,” she said. “I had to duck to get out of the way.”

After learning that he was beating the children, mainly when she was not home, she threw her husband out of the house. “Sojourn has been very, very helpful to me,” she said. “I don’t need to give my whole life over to someone.”