Our Choices Don’t Just Affect Us!

When a little girl comes to you and tells you that her daddy beats her mama all the time, believe her.

Because it’s not like she doesn’t hear the punches.

It’s not like she doesn’t hear her mother’s head hitting the wall.

It’s not like she doesn’t hear the screaming.

It’s not like she doesn’t hear the crying.

And when her mother gets up the next day and plays it off like nothing happened, that little girl sees that too.

Years later, that same little girl gets into a violent relationship as a teenager because violence is what she grew up seeing. Somewhere along the way, she learned to believe, If you don’t put your hands on me, then you don’t love me.

Because that’s what Mama used to say about Daddy.

It didn’t matter how many times the police were called. It didn’t matter if it happened in public. It didn’t matter if friends or family were around. Eventually, everybody seemed to turn a blind eye because they believed she wasn’t going to leave anyway.

But what nobody seemed to understand was that the children couldn’t leave either.

We had to live there.

We had to hear it.

We had to see it.

We had to carry it.

And years later, we are still carrying pieces of it.

Domestic violence doesn’t just affect the person being abused. It affects the children watching from another room. It affects the family members who feel helpless. It affects the friends who don’t know what to say. It changes the way children understand love, relationships, anger, fear, and safety.

And sometimes, the ending is permanent.

In the end, my father killed my mother, and then he killed himself.

But their deaths didn’t make the trauma disappear. The people left behind still had to live with everything that happened before that day—and everything that came after it.

That is why I need someone experiencing domestic violence to hear me when I say this:

I want you to be strong enough to leave.

I know it’s hard.

I know you may not have any money. I know you may not know where you’re going to sleep. I know abuse can make it difficult to trust anybody. I know leaving can feel terrifying when your whole life has been built around surviving from one day to the next.

But please understand that your choices don’t just affect you.

If you have children, they are learning from what they see. They are learning what love looks like. They are learning what they should tolerate. They are learning what relationships are supposed to feel like.

And I wish my mother could have understood what I was trying to tell her:

If you love me like you say you do, please leave.

I would rather have been homeless with you.

I would rather have slept in an abandoned house with you.

I would rather have struggled beside you while we tried to rebuild our lives than wake up every single day wondering what my father’s anger was going to do to us next.

Because a child should never have to beg a parent to choose safety.

A child should never grow up believing bruises mean love.

And no child should have to spend the rest of their life carrying the consequences of violence they never chose.

Our choices don’t just affect us.

Sometimes, they become the childhood someone else has to recover from.