At the end of the last segment in Marjorie’s story you’ll recalled that she had been arrested for domestic violence, spent the night in jail and came out to find a judge had granted her husband an injunction barring her access to her youngest daughter. Her husband had also closed all the joint bank accounts which mean Marjorie was not only penniless, she and her oldest daughter (from a previous relationship) were now also homeless. Here’s Marjorie:
I had a couple good friends who came to the rescue. We stayed with a friend for a while, and that was going to run out after about a month and a half because she was out of work. I had no money, people were trying to send me money and help me in different ways that they could. I was just trying to wrap my mind around what I was going to do, what my next step was, and it was just hard.
I’m going through the child services, I’m trying to get food stamps so that me and my daughter can eat. I’m just trying to survive, and then I get hit with we can’t stay with my friend anymore. I’m having to go into a shelter.
I tried to get my daughter to go back to the home, because I wanted her to be there to keep an eye on her little sister but she didn’t want to leave me. She said, “Mommy, I can’t be in that house with him knowing what he did to you.”
He basically turned his back on her, too. He raised her as his daughter, and he basically told her that he was going to have her evicted anyway. Because there’s no adoption, nothing legal between the two of them, he’s not really responsible for her even though he helped raise her.
That was heartbreaking for me because then I saw not only what he’d done to me, but how he was treating my child, a child that he said was his own too.
So my oldest daughter and I had to separate and I had to ask friends of mine to let her stay with them because I didn’t want anything disrupting her last year in high school. She has been a top student in school, in the IB program, all of her high school years, and we were waiting to hear back from colleges, so I didn’t want anything interfering with that.
So I’m getting ready to prepare myself to go into a shelter, and that’s when I see God start to really work in my life. I start to see amazing things start to happen to me, to where I didn’t have to go into a shelter, and I moved into this apartment by the beach that I had been dreaming about for I don’t know how long. All these things started happening…
The Divorce Coach Says
I try to place myself in Marjorie’s shoes and feel the emotions, the desperation she must have felt. Remember too, that Marjorie was a SAHM who had been trying to start her own business and had been looking for a part-time job to bring in some income while she got that going. I’m still having trouble comprehending how dramatically her life changed because she told her husband she wanted a divorce.
Photo Credit: Cpt. Obvious