I took my children.
And I left.
I never went back.
So when people say that someone who has never experienced domestic violence cannot understand why a person stays, I want them to understand that sometimes the person reading those comments has lived through exactly that.
I understood.
Maybe that’s why Andy and Nikki’s relationship affected me so deeply.
I could see how complicated it had become.
When Andy and I first separated, I never imagined that we would eventually become the kind of coparents other people envied.
We could sit beside each other at our children’s games.
We could laugh.
We could celebrate birthdays together.
We could help each other when one of the kids needed something.
We weren’t husband and wife anymore, but we were still family.
That mattered to both of us.
And for years, Andy was an incredibly involved father.
That’s the man my children knew.
That’s the man I knew.
Which is why I couldn’t simply look at a headline or an arrest record and decide that it explained his entire life.
There had been incidents in Andy’s past.
Some involved domestic disputes.
Some involved alcohol.
Some involved poor decisions.
I am not pretending those things never happened.
