At sixteen you get tired..

And come to your mother, saying " Momma, I'm sick and tired of Daddy threatening me physically, I know he's never hit me but one of these days when he says "If you don't knock it off I'm going to smack you" I'm going to force him to".  For years, Yancey used threats as THE way to parent his children. IF they didn't do what he wanted, he threatened violence of some sort, and yet, he never aside from the occasional spanking, went after his children. Things were coming to a head. I'd been smacked upside the head, taken a fist to the eye, and back of my head (to this day anyone comes up behind me to stand for longer than I think is necessary, I panic and am waiting to be hit).  I'd been pushed, shoved, bent to pick something up off the ground and the item kicked out of my hands. Once he was mad the dog was swimming in the plastic pool in the summer and tossed her over the deck, injuring her and frightening the poor soul.  When driving, he would drive at unsafe speeds and act like a crazy man when we fought in order to control me. It worked.
He'd threaten suicide on occasion when things did not go his way.  I had never dealt with this before in my life, so I did not know what to do. Counselor after counselor never discussed with him the depression or chalked it up to 'situational' because I was talking about divorce.  Whenever I brought up that word or the abuse, he would freak out, and in dramatic gesticulation put out his hands as if an officer was going to cuff him and scream at me "do it, call the cops, do it I dare you, put me in jail, I'll dig ditches the rest of my life instead of work for the government".  Always a manipulative act to prevent me from protecting myself and the children.
One particularly awful evening, he gifted me with a black eye, then went and got his pistol, sat on our couch and put the gun in his mouth in a dramatic show of force.  It shut me up, stopped me from talking divorce, and all I could think about was two precious girls waking up the next morning to carnage.  When I verbalized this, he put the gun away, but the carnage was going to come anyway years later.  I went to a neighbors who promptly freaked out that I didn't want a gun in the house and could they take it.  I forced him to get rid of all guns in the house after I left him if I was going to return to (in the words of Hinder "Give this trains wreck one more try").
I thought we were safe. He went to "Promise Keepers" and had everyone convinced he was changing. He called me, begging me to come home and have another baby.
I did, we got pregnant. When I was six months pregnant, he attacked me again, pulling me off the bed by my thighs, onto the floor, beating me in the back of the head and another black eye.
When Jared was 9, I finally tuned in to my intuition and began making some serious decisions. My decision to leave and separate and divorce came when he began talking about retirement and spending the next 20 years together. Nothing had changed the first 18, and they were only getting worse, I found myself in horror thinking about staying around to endure another 20 years of abuse.

....*That* Day....following

Unstable rages

I used to be a person who looked at the glass as half full, never close to being empty. But the rages were breaking me down.  He consistently did two things that drove me farther and farther away, verbally lash out with the ugliest words when he got angry, and demand constant attention.  I was called 'cunt' 'whore', consistently told I would never make it in life without him. If we were both in separate rooms anywhere in the house doing anything, he would make as much noise as possible to alert me to his disgust over whatever issue he was focused on at the moment. If I did not answer him immediately, and run to 'find out' what was wrong, I got attacked with the verbal crap. Years later, when I had my son, I finally got a taste from his mother, why this was the case. "Oh, you will do with Jared what I did with my son, it never mattered what he said or how long he took to say it or what he wanted to express or explain to me, I just sat there like a good mother does and listened and nodded my head in approval".
"Oh my blankety blank blank God" I thought. This explained so much!
It took me forever to learn that my 'husband' did not want a wife to partner with, he wanted a Mommy to care for him and dote on every word.  I was getting so very tired of the attention getting behavior.  I made a mental note to stop responding all together when he would raise his voice in another room, the usual signal for me to come running and listen or get lectured, and this simply ramped up the abuse. He would come find me. He would follow me around the house lecturing me, berating me, and start to push me and shove me.  Still I stayed. I was trying. He could be so utterly charming and disarm me in a moment's notice, and the good girl at the time I was (yes, you read that right, I have rebelled, I am no longer a good girl and for good reasons) kept me hanging on.  He will grow up, he will change, it will get better.
The rages were awful. He would just go off and least when expected.  I would be forced to listen to the screaming and yelling and then came the unbearable lectures for hours.  It was A) always my fault, B) what I needed to do to change it, C) what was wrong with me was.....fill in the blank.
A person gets worn down, and begins to believe all these lies.  They begin to feel worthless, invaluable and the gas lighting undermines your belief in all you know and have done. He excelled in this.

More to come....