Thinking that relocating to Tucson would help, that things might settle into a more acceptable wrong, I looked forward to the change. Bill had a job as an electrician, work he loves and is quite good at. Though we spent three months in a mini-apartment at a motel, I was comfortable, even while job hunting. Turned out, the cost of living in Tucson was much higher, especially with rent, than in Willcox. Still, I had high hopes. I thought we’d be happy. I was wrong, so wrong, and the cost of that nearly destroyed me.

Bill continued to drink but the violence all but stopped. We moved into a nearby mobile home park, a more rundown place than we wanted, but it was affordable. It was a small, cramped trailer, hardly enough room for two children, a boy and a girl, and two adults but I knew we’d make it work. The first job I had was down the street at a nearby motel. I was the front desk clerk from 3:30pm until 11:30pm. We often had a few drinks at the bar right next door to the mobile home park. Soon, it became a pattern for Bill, already drunk at home, to call me at work and want me to meet him there. A couple of times he wanted me to leave work early and meet him there, claiming some reaction to combat or a memory, or a bad night due to combat—combat he was never in, I later realized.

Ultimately I lost that job. I was accused of stealing towels and money. I am not a thief and I did not steal anything, let alone a cart of towels. Soon after, though, I applied for and was offered two different jobs. The first, part time, was to do housekeeping/clean empty apartments at an apartment complex. The second, full time and paying more, was at a call center. I discussed the options with Bill. The apartment job was Monday through Friday, half a day, for 5.00 an hour. The call center offered forty hours, at 8.25 an hour—he agreed I should take the call center job even though it would not be a regular schedule, and would likely involve nights and weekends as the hours of operation were 24/7. He even agreed that with both of us working full time, he would have to help with household chores, etc. I should have known better. I took the job, and thus began the real fighting, the abuse that continued until the day I left him.

My work hours were all over the clock. Starting a shift at different times, ending it at different times. Sometimes I didn’t arrive home until 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. Then, I’d really get an earful. Even worse, if our daughter might still be up and awake because he was yelling at her about not cleaning house. She was only twelve years old, but rather than pitch in as he’d agreed to do, he raged about things not being done. He wanted laundry washed, the house cleaned, yet all he did was come home, start drinking, and start yelling, throwing temper tantrums. He often stated, several times in a night, every night, that he was not going to work full time, an eight hour day and come home to do housework. In my defense, I told him I, too, worked full time. Why should I do all the housework while he sat around getting drunk? That really angered him. Our daughter, if she was lucky, could sneak off to bed while I handled her father. The screaming matches were incredible! Vicious, nasty name calling. Now, I have been called a b**** in my time but it always hurt to have my own husband refer to me that way.

This pattern continued, even after I discovered I was pregnant again. This was a high risk pregnancy. I was over thirty-five and working full time as well as trying, unsuccessfully it seemed, to keep the household running smoothly. He refused to lift a finger to help me. So I struggled with an inconsistent work schedule and all the household responsibilities. Needless to say, some things didn’t get done. Our daughter began to take over more of the every day things so I could work and sleep—which was never for very long.

The pregnancy grew complicated and more risky. I bled a lot, had several bouts of early labor, bouncing in and out of the hospitals. Still, he maintained that he would not work an eight hour day and come home to do any chores. My daughter tried as much as she could but at twelve, she simply couldn’t manage it all to his satisfaction. He also had a tendency to tell her she had done a good job when he arrived home, but as he got more and more drunk, he would start yelling at her about doing a terrible job. She began to suffer the same psychological abuse he heaped on my head—while I was at work an unaware of this. Now, my daughter remembers things that I do not. Perhaps I’ve simply wiped them out or have only hazy memories. To keep up with his tirades, and react to him, I drank more as well. Alcohol lowers inhibitions and I guess I needed that crutch to defend himself from his verbal, and sometimes physical, attacks.

This high-risk pregnancy became so complicated, especially with all the unexplained bleeding that I saw my doctor nearly every week. I also had arranged with the doctor’s staff to fax paperwork to my supervisor if I stayed home from work. Soon, the doctor put me on a part time schedule and I had the paper work in place for family leave to start as soon as I went to the hospital. I was supposed to stay in bed as much as possible and never lift anything heavier than a piece of paper. These conditions did nothing to sway Bill from his refusal to help with the housework.

I came home from a short shift one night to find a pile of dirty clothes in the kitchen floor that had not been washed. This was a sign of his anger that laundry had not been done. Now, the mobile home park laundry facility was right next to our trailer. He would get home from work about 3:30pm. But he refused, while I was working, to wash a single load of laundry. I told him off but he still reiterated that he would not work and then clean house. Yet he expected me to do so—I called him a hypocrite. He told me if I didn’t like it, I could leave. I just snorted and told him that if I left, he wouldn’t be able to do anything for himself. That raised our fighting to a whole new level for the next several years.

Another of his favorite gripes, usually at the top of his lungs, was sex. He didn’t complain that I didn’t want to, or didn’t do it right. His beef was that with my work schedule, he couldn’t just come home and have sex whenever he pleased. He was a member of the Electrical Union, and complained so much about my work schedule, he yelled that I was a union wife and my employer, a non-union call center, should honor his schedule wishes. It was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. That kind of thing went on every night if I was unlucky enough for him to be awake when I got home.

Our baby was born 6 weeks premature, through emergency surgery since she was in breech position. I went into labor at the hospital during a routine stress test and they managed to stop it but kept me there for a week. Labor started again and my youngest daughter was born. Bill did the dutiful, loving, concerned husband thing, visiting me in the hospital but still had my oldest daughter doing the bulk of the housework, I found out.

The baby spent two weeks in neonatal intensive care. I went back and forth to the hospital every day until she came home. Having just had abdominal surgery, I had to heal and recover. Spent a good portion of my time not able to lift much weight or do a lot until I healed. More and more household chores slid by the wayside. I could barely get enough done to survive. Our finances suffered, but he didn’t care enough to stop spending money on alcohol. He got drunk every night, throwing temper tantrums and refusing to do anything once he’d get home and park his butt in the chair; always screaming at me, telling me to get out, etc. I started to warn him once in a while to be careful what he wished for, he just might get it.

One night, early in the evening but he was already drunk, we all sat in the living room watching tv. Well, the kids were watching tv. I was getting griped at again. I’d had a few drinks myself by then, keeping up with him, I suppose, so I would tremble while he yelled like I used to do. He was also playing with his gun, a Ruger P91 .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol. He always kept the gun loaded no matter what anyone said about it. I kept them out of the children’s reach and taught my oldest daughter to never touch it. She didn’t. I don’t think she liked guns. Anyway, he was playing with the thing, the safety was off, and—I don’t know why, but he put it to the back of the oldest daughter’s head. She was playing with the baby in her little swing. I told him to put the thing away and he grumbled, but put it up. Then he went to bed. While he slept, I stewed over that scene and got really angry. The Wrath of God is nothing compared to mine that night. I woke him and yelled at him, telling him to ‘get out here’ meaning out of the bedroom, to come into the living room. He misunderstood and believed I told him to get out. He dressed, threw money at me, and stormed out the door. I followed, yelling at him for being a drunken idiot and pointing a loaded gun at our daughter’s head. It was quite the screaming match. He did drive off but soon returned and just sat in the truck for a while. I finally let him back in and we all went to bed.

Many will say, ‘why didn’t you leave then? I really don’t have an answer except the standards. I had no place to go, no means of support, and no help. And, even then I loved him. I wanted us to have chance to get back what we’d had before, but I couldn’t do it. I thought I could eventually make him see reason, if he would just stop drinking long enough and we’d be a family again. I didn’t consciously think it in so many words, but the feeling was there.

Over Thanksgiving Holiday, in 2001, everything changed again, eroding hope even more. The next article details the high cost of Wildfire Out of Control.