Jodi stared at her reflection critically. Every hateful word that her husband had said over the past five years since the birth of their first child played like a bad record in her mind. "Fat. Ugly. Don't take care of yourself. Disgusting. Who would want you?" All of it was there. Haunting her.
She drew in a calming breathe as she applied another light coat of lip gloss. Not this time. She was not going to allow his hateful words to undermine the new her. She had a plan. Maybe it was not the best one. Maybe some people, hell, a lot of people would judge her. But they had not walked a mile in her shoes. They had not felt their self-esteem, their self-worth, their sexuality, their mojo eroded away by years and years of mental abuse.
Abuse that not even therapy had managed to full alleviate. Although the latest round of DBT, dialectal behavior therapy, was helping. It had gotten her this far. It had given her the courage to go to the local community college to update her computer skills. It had given her the strength to get through months of job hunting until she finally landed one in a law firm not too far from her son's school. It was only part-time; just a few hours in the morning after she dropped him at school. She had even managed to keep tat fact a secret from her husband, saving her single dime that she made for the past year. Until at last she enough money in her savings account for a deposit and first month's rent on a tiny one-bedroom apartment that she had found.
So what was stopping her from going? From just leaving the near constant barrage of verbal abuse about the house that was never clean enough, the dinner that was never warm enough and worst of all her sexual prowess that was never satisfying enough for her husband's prodigious appetites for Internet porn stars with plastic tits and Botox smiles.
She and her therapist had spent the past session exploring that very question. Why could she not just pack their bags and leave? The attorney were she worked had already drawn up divorce papers, ready to be served. But still she hesitated. Put it off. She would do it tomorrow, she promised herself as she made dinner each night. Ironed his shirt before bed. And especially as she lay alone in their king size bed knowing that he was downstairs. On the computer. Watching porn and paying for video chats with those women. Younger, slimmer, prettier ones than the once loving wife that awaited him upstairs.
She was actually relieved that he had not pressed the issue of their increasingly rare sex life. The idea of enduring his ten minutes of humping away at her while he thought about those other women, then the comments that he knew would wound her even deeper was simply more than Jodi could bear.
And that was the crux of the matter. His words had eaten away her very soul until she honestly believed that no man would ever want her again. She was not even thirty yet and the idea of a lifetime of being alone seemed even more frightening than years of his verbal abuse.
So she was stuck...and on the verge of losing the ideal apartment she had found. The elderly woman that owned the duplex and lived next door had called a couple of days ago. 'Was she still interested?' She needed to know because otherwise she would place an ad in the local paper. What was Jodi to do? Caught between abuse and fear. Paralyzed and stuck in a vicious cycle that would go on forever. If she allowed it.