Ten Years Later (2 page)

At 335 pounds, Amy was not only physically heavy, she felt the weight of the world
on her shoulders as a working mother of two. She separated from her husband in April
2001 and began kickboxing at a local gym in an effort to lose weight.

That same month, she crossed paths with Robert, who was paying a traffic ticket fine
at the county courthouse. Amy would have no way of knowing what a high price she’d
pay for agreeing to have lunch with him in the park. Their relationship progressed
quickly. Within six months of their first date, Robert moved in with Amy and her six-
and three-year-old sons. She was happy to have a family, of sorts, to nurture.

“God put me on earth to be a wife and a mom,” she says. “There’s nothing that brings
me more joy.”

Amy felt self-assured in her new relationship.

“I stopped going to the gym and we ate out a lot. He made me feel secure the way I
looked already, so losing weight wasn’t as much of a necessity at that point. It was,
‘I love you just the way you are, just the way you look; you’re absolutely perfect.’ ”

Over the next few months, Amy’s weight began to grow and her world began to shrink.
She wasn’t troubled by either change.

“I know now looking back it was all a control thing,” she says. “He would call me
ten times a day. I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m going out with my girlfriends this weekend,’ and
he would say, ‘No, I really want to spend time with you.’ Abusers slowly try to close
you off from your friends and family, but you don’t realize it when you’re in it.”

Within a year, Robert’s reactions intensified. He questioned Amy’s every move and
motive.

“The mental and emotional abuse started. I don’t really remember when it transitioned
from ‘I love you. You don’t need to go to your mom’s’ to the name calling and the
checking the caller ID and seeing that my mom called, and being insecure about what
we talked about, or, ‘Why were you on the phone with your mom for twenty-seven minutes?’
He would check the logs and check the caller ID to see who called. Then it got to
the point where he would escalate things and accuse me of talking to another man,”
she says. “He would actually get more mad if he didn’t see any phone calls come in,
because then it was me deleting evidence that I was talking to my mom, or a friend,
or some other guy. He would say, ‘I know you talked to somebody. Who did you talk
to?’ It got to the point where people stopped calling the house because they knew
the repercussions that I would face just based on their two- or three-minute check-in
phone call.”

Marcus and Terrell became leery of the increasingly volatile Robert.

“They would walk away and go in their rooms,” she says. “They would just kind of disappear.”

Eventually, Robert’s war of words gave way to more potent weapons. He began to use
his fists. He fired the first salvo on a drive back from a funeral in Indiana. Robert
and Amy dropped off his brothers in Minneapolis. When Robert got back into the car,
he accused her of sleeping with one of his brothers, even though both had stayed with
an aunt, not in the hotel with Robert and Amy.

“He literally, with a closed fist, punched me three or four times in the face,” she
remembers. “Then there was an ‘I’m sorry.’ A honeymoon stage, like, ‘I’m sorry, I’ll
never do it again.’ That honeymoon period was probably the longest, because it was
the first time he hit me. It was probably two or three months. That was long. After
that, a honeymoon period could last anywhere from two weeks to three days.”

Robert rarely hit Amy in the face or arms, to avoid causing obvious bruising on her
body. She recalls a day when Robert returned from a trip and became enraged when he
found no calls logged on her cell phone. It sparked a particularly brutal beating.

“He hit me on the same leg for two hours. It was like him hitting a punching bag.
Every single time I said, ‘I didn’t talk to anyone,’ he would hit me. He would rest
from hitting me and move on to the name calling, the name calling, the name calling,
and then he would start back in on my leg. It was so bad the next day that when I
got out of bed, when I stepped on the ground, I collapsed onto the floor,” she describes.
“My leg was so swollen that I couldn’t wear pants. My pants didn’t fit on that side,
so I had to wear a skirt.”

I ask her if she ever tried to leave the room during the two hours.

“Ha. No. When he first hit me, I got up off the bed and I said, ‘That hurt. Stop.’
He yelled, ‘Sit the F down.’ The way he said it, I just listened. Because I’m thinking,
If I don’t, it’s just going to be worse. So I’ll just sit down and it won’t be as
bad
. There were three other times during that tirade that I tried to get up,” she says,
“and the second time he screamed at me, and the third time he grabbed me by the back
of the hair, pulled me back onto the bed, and told me not to get up again. A lot of
people ask people in abusive relationships, ‘Why do you put up with it? Why do you
stay?’ And it’s because you can prepare yourself. You can mentally and emotionally
and physically prepare yourself, and you always think that if you don’t go along with
what they’re doing or saying, it’s just going to be worse. So, if you can just calm
them down and pacify them by doing whatever they want, or saying what they want to
hear . . . You’re willing to do anything just to make them stop.”

Amy had four academic degrees, two little boys, and zero self-worth. Despite the abuse,
she stayed with Robert.

“He has done everything from throwing a punch, a kick, he has strangled me, he has
burned me with cigarettes,” she says. “But I
think the worst of everything that he has ever done—and I think a lot of women who
have gone through domestic violence would also say this—is the emotional and mental
abuse. He would get physically tired from beating me, so a beating could last ten
minutes or a half an hour. But the name calling and the words that stung, that could
last three or four hours. The worst thing—beyond the name calling for hours at a time—that
he did all the time was spit in my face. That to me is the most disrespectful.” She
pauses. “I can’t even explain it. I would have rather had him punch me in the face
than spit on me.”

Amy hated herself and her life, which had spun out of control. Her crutch and comfort
was food. If an entire large pizza felt good, a whole ice cream cake for dessert felt
even better. Amy gorged herself in the bathroom with the door shut or loaded up at
the drive-through.

“I ate a lot in my car,” she says, “or I ate a lot when Robert was gone or the kids
were in bed.”

Robert spent several days at a time away from home for work. Amy knew some of his
relatives were involved with drugs but did not think Robert was, until one afternoon
when she forgot her lunch and drove the two miles from work to eat at home. Her sons
were in day care. Even from the garage, she could detect an overwhelming and unfamiliar
smell. Amy walked into the kitchen and saw Robert and two of his relatives sitting
at the breakfast counter.

“I’ll never forget looking at the counter, and there was a sheet of newspaper, and
it had a mound of white powder on it and I knew it was cocaine,” she says. “That was
the smell. They were cooking crack.”

A horrified Amy says she “lost it.”

“First of all, I worked at the public defender’s office, and I had heard and seen
what happens to people who are caught with drugs. Plus, if it’s in my house, they
could take my kids away. I screamed, ‘What are you doing?!’ I ran to the counter and
I picked up the piece of paper and started running across the kitchen and up the stairs.
I was three-hundred-plus pounds. The powder is blowing off the paper. I went running
up the stairs, and he’s running after me, and right when I got to the bathroom, I
did this”—she tilts the imaginary sheet of newspaper downward—“into the toilet. I
did it without thinking of the ramifications. My whole thing was,
If someone finds this, they could take my kids away. I could go to prison
. It was all over the place. I can still see the look on his face.”

One relative followed Robert up to the bathroom and began screaming at her.

“Robert grabbed me by the back of the hair and was beating me on the bathroom floor.”

The other relative bounded up the stairs and told Robert, “That’s enough.”

Amy says she doesn’t know the exact street value of the cocaine she dumped into the
toilet, but she did feel that had his relative not intervened, Robert was enraged
enough to have killed her.

To her knowledge, Robert never again brought drugs into the house. Amy admits to making
poor decisions of her own during the relationship with Robert. She says she did things
with him and for him that were against her principles.

“Honestly, when I was with him, I was an ugly person; he made me an ugly person. I
became a very negative and hateful person, and that’s not who I am. I don’t deny anything
I ever did that I’m not proud of, but I was a product of my environment.”

Things got very ugly. The pattern of violence was reinforced month after month and
year after year. Robert did not abuse Marcus or Terrell; he saved his cruelty for
Amy. She would take the abuse until she reached a breaking point and then leave. She
and the boys would show up repeatedly at her parents’ house. Despite their horror,
Amy says they never turned their backs on her.

“I came home two, three, or four
A.M.
and I had a bloody face, and I was bruised, and my mom took a picture of me and said,
‘This is what he’s doing to you and your family and your kids!’ and I literally didn’t
care,” Amy says, describing her state of mind. “You’re not hearing what they’re saying.
My mom said, ‘You have a choice at this point. It’s gonna be you or your kids.’ At
that point, I was like, ‘F you, Mom, you can’t tell me what to do, I’m grown!’ Two
hours later, Robert is calling me and begging and crying and saying, ‘Baby, I’m sorry,
I promise I’ll get help.’ My mom and I would get in screaming fights. She would beg
me, ‘If you want to go back to that nonsense, leave my grandbabies here.’ I was blessed
to have my parents, as much
as I’m sure they wanted to kill me, because every time I’d knock on their door at
three o’clock in the morning bloodied and bruised, and say that me and my kids needed
a place to stay, two days later, they’d watch me walk out of their house with the
same person who did that to us.”

The pain of watching that pattern runs so deep for Amy’s mom and for Amy’s closest
friend, who also housed Amy several times, that neither wanted to share her memories
of that time. It’s a door they’ve closed and dead-bolted. Imagine the immeasurable
frustration and fear they felt. Amy just kept going back, and taking the kids with
her.

“He would beg and plead, ‘I’ll never do this again. We’ll go to counseling,’ all these
broken promises. And I would go back. Every time. The person that is there is the
person you love and has a great personality. You fell in love with Jekyll, but then
when they abuse you, it’s Hyde. But when they beg for you back, they put forward Jekyll,
who you love and who made you feel special. It’s a never-ending battle of abuse and
the person you love, especially when you are two, three, four hundred pounds,” she
says. “Every time he came back to me he said, ‘No one’s gonna love you like me. No
one’s gonna love you because of the way you look. I’m the only one who’s ever gonna
love you because you’re as fat as you are,’ and I’d be thinking,
You’re right; I’m four hundred pounds
.”

Amy felt hopeless and numb. She had big problems and little faith.

“I was raised in the church. I was confirmed. We went to church every week. But I
turned from God. I was like,
If there really was a God, he would not have me going through this,
” she says. “I threw Bibles in the garbage. I threw crosses and crucifixes in the
garbage, because I was sure there was not a God.”

By the time Marcus and Terrell were seven and four years old,
they were very afraid of Robert. Their mother’s pattern of escaping his wrath became
a routine part of their young lives.

“When we escaped in the middle of the night, Marcus knew to be quiet. Whenever I went
into his room and woke him up at two o’clock in the morning, as a seven-year-old,
he knew he needed to be quiet. He would put on his shoes without question; he knew
that he was going to walk next to me,” she says, “and we would walk into his brother’s
room, and his brother was only four, and I would pick my young son up, and at that
time I was five hundred pounds, so here we were, trying to escape in the middle of
the night.”

Amy starts to cry, thinking about what she was asking of her little boys.

“Marcus would put on his shoes, and he would grab his jacket without making a sound
so we could go wake Terrell. Even at four years old, Terrell would wake up and not
cry. He would just grab his shoes, knowing we were trying to escape that night.”