NAAVoices was not created from certainty, but from lived experience and professional insight. As I migrate earlier work from the original platform, this post has been reviewed and approved for transfer. It remains true to its original context, with only minor clarity edits where needed. Some moments do not require rewriting to remain honest.
Being Alone Was Never the Fear
A friend asked me today whether everything I have been through has made me reluctant to meet someone new.
Her question carried more weight than she probably realised.
Very few people truly understand what I have lived through, or what I am still navigating. When I left him, meeting someone else was not even a consideration. It was never about moving on.
It was about surviving.
The Words Meant to Keep Me Small
I was told, repeatedly, that no one would ever want me, or “dem boys.”
Those words were not random. They were deliberate.
They were designed to keep me small. To make me believe that leaving meant accepting a life no one else would ever want to share.
But the cruelty was not only aimed at me.
He tried to change my children too. He chipped away at the funny, perceptive, gentle children I knew, and tried to reshape them into versions of themselves that were easier to control.
He failed.
But not without cost.
What Leaving Really Looked Like
I left knowing I would need time to process what had been done to me.
What I did not understand was how much I would also need to hold for my children.
They were each carrying trauma in their own way. Different ages. Different responses. Different levels of understanding. All of them trying to make sense of a life that had stopped feeling safe.
In the early weeks, my youngest quickly showed me that the kind, compassionate, quirky child I had always known was still there. That mattered.
But it did not make the days easy.
While we waited for the non-molestation order to be served, things happened that I never imagined I would have to manage.
My eldest went missing from school and was found alone in an alleyway. He began taking tools to school. He hid knives and bats in drawers, under pillows and behind mattresses.
It was terrifying.
Not because he was aggressive, but because he was scared.
A child trying to create safety in a world that had not yet proved it could protect him.
At the time, I could not see how any of it would improve.
The arrest was the first moment real safety began to return.
The Morning Everything Surfaced
The most serious incident involving my children happened before any protective order was in place.
My middle son had developed severe insomnia and had started sleeping at the foot of my bed. Knowing I had not been able to shield them from everything surrounding us is a particular kind of grief.
He was off school because he was exhausted.
He is proud. Over time, he had become emotionally closed off, presenting as if nothing affected him. That change was repeatedly minimised as normal teenage behaviour.
It was not normal.
It was trauma.
It was a child asking for help in the only way he could.
That morning, I went to playgroup while he was still asleep. Since returning home, I had been locking the doors in a way I never used to. Small changes that say more about fear than any diary entry could.
I had forgotten my phone.
When I pulled back onto the drive, the front door was open.
I could hear my son singing in the kitchen. That settled me just enough to get through the door. I went upstairs to use the bathroom, but as I came out, I felt the shift.
The kind your body understands before your mind does.
My eleven-year-old was standing at the bottom of the stairs.
He was holding a large kitchen knife.
He was shaking.
The fear on his face was unmistakable. His tough exterior had completely gone. He screamed from the bottom of the stairs, convinced there was someone in the house.
In that moment, every piece of armour he had built to survive came off.
The First Mental Health Referral
That afternoon, we went to the GP.
For the first time in his life, my son was referred to mental health services.
He disclosed things I had not known. He cried.
I cried too, but quietly, because I needed him to feel that the room was big enough for his feelings before I let mine in.
Watching your child release that much pain is devastating.
But alongside the fear, there was relief.
He was finally speaking.
Finally letting some of it out.
Finally showing the weight he had been carrying alone.
I am deeply proud of all three of my children. They are not damaged. They are not lesser. They are not the problem.
They have lived through more than they ever should have had to, and they are still kind. Still funny. Still thoughtful. Still themselves.
That matters.
“Dem Boys”
The line about “dem boys” was never really about whether someone else would want me.
It was about control.
It was about making me believe that my children made me less worthy. Less desirable. Less able to have a future. It was another way of trying to trap me, using shame where fear was no longer enough.
But he misunderstood something fundamental.
I was not afraid of being alone.
I had already lived in fear for years.
To someone who cannot tolerate being alone, solitude might feel like punishment. To me, after everything I had lived through, it felt closer to safety.
A quiet room.
No walking on eggshells.
No waiting for the next accusation.
No trying to manage someone else’s moods before they harmed everyone around them.
Being alone was not the threat.
Staying was.
What I Know Now
I left knowing life might be solitary for a long time, and I accepted that.
I am not the person I once was. I know that. But my children will never be the reason I am alone. They do not reduce my worth. They do not limit my future.
Any loss of confidence, any fear that I am not good enough, any damage to my sense of self, has nothing to do with them.
It is the residue of prolonged coercion and psychological harm.
It is not a truth about me.
It is evidence of what was done to me.
I failed them once by allowing that person into our lives.
I will not fail them again.
Still Standing
I have survived the most difficult nine months of my life, with and without the understanding of people around me.
I have learned that being alone does not diminish strength.
Sometimes it reveals it.
Our walk today was good. I needed it.
Although when I got home, the blisters on my feet reminded me of one final lesson:
Wear your own socks.
Not a toddler’s.
