I Am Right Here 


This's what I started telling my daughter when I lost the agency to keep promises I made her. 


I am a mother to a now four year old. She was three when her father began litigation using my petition for divorce. He filed multiple and rapid emergency and ex parte motions which led to overreach in temporary orders for the court to stop the bleeding. 


Temporary custody was given to him in January, 2026 after I reported and followed pedatric guidelines for her disclosure of physical abuse. A court cited me as fabricating her disclosure. His domestic abuse history and the reason we had moved out of our home into our own apartment in 2024 had and has still never been presented in court. 


The lack of due process is really part of something not super unique. I have tried and tried to explain it and each time I do I seem to only prove to others whatever it is he started saying with fiegned concern while I was still nursing our baby and he had become violent. 


I am tired of pleading for the the simple dignity of my own agency to know what I have lived and what I have learned while actively in a court case which impacts my child. 


I am confused by the silence about a mother separated from a child.


I am aware that my child's father would tell me regularly that he was taking accountability to my family about episodic violence, abuse, cruelty, and endangerment to a child. I am aware, now, that he was in actuality telling them that I was suffering from mental disturbance brought on by postpartum hormones and birth trauma that he had decided I had and decided to diagnose to others. 


I am aware he buried tiny truths in his cover, with extremely admissions of things he did in moments of frustrations over my apparent dellusions. 


All in all, I am aware that an abusive man does what abusive men do; lie, manipulate, and step on the bodies of the people who care for him to retain the image he prefers and the control over his wife. 


I am aware because while lying is human, deception is alien to me and I have to educate myself, speak to people who had been through it themselves, and regain an sense of myself that was not told to me of who I was. 


Deception is pretty alien to the people I love as well, I come by it honestly, and so they who did not have the years of constant terror, fleeing and retuns, knives and broken glass, broken bones of his own. Those not inside that home cannot discern the difference between the true horror of a man violent with an infant to terrorize a mother, from the normal marital disputes he told whith whispered concern about how acutely I reacted. 


Recently I have been giving authoriship of whatever things back to rightful owners. I am not an academic on civil court or post separation abuse. I am a mother with grief I carry all day and all night. It is unrelenting. I speak to other mothers in stores as if my child is right at home and then get stuck staring at a rack of jammies because I have to force myself to move away from them but don't want to. 


I very much want to live. Consideration of hurting myself is and never has been an option. My daughter is far bigger than the grief I have and I want and need to be there when I can hold her again and make her a snack. The bind of living with what feels unbearable while wanting to live so much is dizzying. After ten months I still do a weird thing with my hands and realize I am searching for her face. 


Those are the things I am an expert on. So, I'll hand over authorship on the 'how,' which seems too far a reach for people who have not been here to understand, to those who have dedicated much of their life's work to this exact situation. Because this exact situation is as common and the rates and statistics of domestic violence which by nature of those statistics is right under your nose. 


If not me, then who? If not him, who? Someone needs to be the numbers in the data. I miss my family and friends. I miss my freedom and life. 

I miss my child with a physical pain. 

I am right here. 



Excerpts from Evan Stark, Professor Joan Meier;


"When a partner leaves, the abuser’s control doesn’t dissolve; it undergoes an institutional transformation. Because the abuser no longer has physical proximity inside the home, they adapt by turning outward. They step into public and social spaces, projecting a false, compelling narrative to external institutions - schools, doctors, social groups, and therapists. They replace direct, private coercion with systemic, proxy control, decieving these groups into acting as extensions of their authority."


"The text validates what advocates call the "separation spike." Statistically, the period immediately following separation—spanning up to a year or more—is the most lethal timeframe for a survivor. The abuser experiences a sudden, acute loss of dominance, which shatters their sense of control. This loss frequently triggers an escalation from coercive tactics to extreme physical violence or lethality as a desperate, final attempt to reassert power."


"The civil court system is an inherently hazardous venue for domestic abuse survivors for several structural reasons: