My labour and delivery were magical. I was within the right age-range, health requirements, geographic parameters, and availability of service, to be able to access midwife care. We had given thought to ritualizing this little one’s entry into the world with our own birthing ceremony. Baby was born at home in a birthing pool with no-one attending—the midwife on-call didn’t arrive until after, and I had some precious minutes to lay quietly with Baby on my chest before she arrived. This may not be everyone’s idea of an ideal birth scenario, but I was a crunchy-granola kind of mama—the farmer kind, not the hoity-toity kind. I had read the great midwifery books, taken birth-yoga, and had a meditation and prayer practice. At the time, I was fearless.

Despite a blissful pregnancy and delivery, the thing that impacted my perinatal mental health was my baby’s father’s abuse, and the lack of available supports and resources I could access. 

It was after Baby’s (let’s say B’s) arrival that the magnitude of my situation really began to dawn on me. I had pushed it out of my mind during the pregnancy. There were red flags all over the place but seven months pregnant is an inconvenient time to realize that the person you decided to carry an unplanned pregnancy with was not at all who he seemed. If things didn’t work out between us, I wasn’t afraid of him taking off and being left to single-parent on my own. Sure, it would be a lot of work and it wouldn’t be ideal but I took that chance knowingly. It was a different reality that gradually came into focus. I felt like I was living in some kind of twilight zone. 

The father (let’s call him F)  had become more and more controlling, demanding, and authoritarian during the pregnancy. We had spent a reasonable amount of time together, but always in a specific context in which he held authority and esteem. I didn’t know his family or any friends outside of that context. If you’re a good, honest person, you don’t approach the world expecting it to be deceiving you, looking for proof of mal-intent. 

Though some parts of our ill-defined relationship were long-distance, F was with me for the birth. He didn’t help me at all financially aside from covering his own costs. He paid for a few things for the baby and later claimed I owed him a couple hundred bucks for those items. He left town when B was two weeks old (angry with me, as if it was my doing) and as soon as he was out of sight I was so relieved I sat down on the sidewalk and cried. I was two weeks postpartum, alone with a constantly nursing infant and a demanding cloth-diapering regimen and no physical or financial support, but the pressure was off and I could breathe again and just take care of B without also having F’s constant demands and irrational anger to deal with.  

He wasn’t gone for good, though. B’s first year was a blur. F’s abuse was emotional, financial, and eventually physical. He used isolation, intimidation, bullying, manipulation, withholding affection, and lying, which had probably been there more subtly as long as I’d known him, but which escalated during the pregnancy. Once I decided to keep the baby he no longer bothered to soften his entitlement. He owned me. It crescendoed into physical violence, threats toward me and B and animals I loved (some of which he carried out), stalking, and harrassment when he realized I was exiting our always-tenuous relationship. This intensified during the custody process, which had the distinct flavour of F’s anger and retribution. F never seemed to have a lot of money and expressed disdain for people who, in his opinion, value money too highly, but all of a sudden he had no problem finding enough of it to pay for high-end lawyers to send me a small forest’s worth of paper. He compiled spreadsheets. Half lies, half partially-told truths and red herrings, all about me, my behaviour, making me accountable to him. He didn’t want accountability, he wanted obedience. F was the sort of man who gets cold and quiet when he’s angry. I could speculate on his childhood hurts, deep fragility, and possible personality disorders, but that is his work not mine. 

I was busy. I scrambled to access every free or public or cheap resource I could find. Legal, mental health, domestic violence, the library, public prayer rooms that were safe spaces, etc. Believe me when I say, I am grateful for all the help I received and the kind people who welcomed B and me, most of whom had no idea what was going on, but really, the “support” and “resources” that we casually assume must be out there just aren’t. What does exist is paltry and patchwork, hard to access, and insufficient in duration or quality. The people who deliver those programs and services know it, and are also constantly struggling to maintain their organizational funding, nevermind offering more comprehensive services to meet the ever-growing need. Think: if you identify yourself as a person in need, compiling proof of income, statements of your situation, and/or have a doctor’s referral, you can qualify for three sessions of counselling therapy with a 23-year-old social work/psychology student. That sort of thing. It wasn’t all as bad as that, but a lot of it was. And I was a highly motivated person who was hustling to seek it. With buses and B’s changings and feedings it was often a day trip just to make one appointment. I was exhausted from the constant high-alert stress level of dealing with F and the work of just living this weird life that I didn’t recognize. How can this be allowed?

The most helpful “help” I received was from Bryony House. They offered free counselling to women in the community experiencing violence and abuse on a self-referral basis. (A program that no longer exists, I heard, because of budgetary constraints.) I struggled to articulate what was only freshly coming into my consciousness about what I had been going through. I hadn’t said it out loud before, even to myself, and I was desperate to convince my counsellor that even though it all sounded crazy (to me) I wasn’t lying. She calmly made us a cup of tea and told me, “I believe you. We believe women here.”

She was kind but she was no bullshitter. She didn’t say: oh honey, you left an abusive relationship, you did the right thing and of course the courts will support you and everything will get better. No. She said, “you’re in for the fight of your life.” She explained that what F was doing was common in abusive, controlling men. They often use the court system, custody and child support proceedings to further harass and intimidate their partners, and that there’s a name for that, it’s called administrative abuse or institutional abuse—when they weaponize services and institutions with power over you like courts, police, the health care system, even sometimes daycares and schools, to wear you out and wear you down. My heart sank. It wasn’t my fault, but I still had to live through it. 

Another support to me was my family doctor. F insisted on being present for (which in his mind meant “the boss of”) all of the baby’s appointments. (When we saw a specialist at a different clinic one time he demanded to be the one holding B in front of the specialist, even though B was crying for me and getting more and more agitated the longer he refused to give B back. This clinic totally abandoned us and left the room, telling us they would return when we had sorted it out. But I digress.) F’s presence in every room and demanding to see all medical records left me no ability to discuss what was going on at home, stress impacts on B, and the concerns I had about leaving the baby with F. But they would book separate appointments for me so the information wouldn’t need to go in B’s file. On more than one occasion the doctor checked that F had left the building and the parking lot so it would be safe for me and B to leave and go catch the bus. 

I need to mention here something called parental alienation. Courts don’t care if the father uses violence or abuse toward you, they only care if he abuses the child. And if you’re going to claim that, you have to have iron-clad proof, photographs, medical records, witnesses, records of arrest. Otherwise the court assumes the mother is lying to try and manipulate the court into awarding better custody terms. And parental alienation is its corollary—if I didn’t let the father see the baby, or if I hinted in any way to my baby-toddler-child that I didn’t like the father or there was anything wrong with him, including asking asking too many questions about whether Baby was safe and fed in the father’s care, that would be considered parental alienation and used against me in court. Not all judges are persuaded by this line of argument, but they allow it to be heard, and it’s the standard strategy of lawyers representing fathers when the mother expresses concern for the child’s safety. It’s a roll of the dice what judge you get and how they land on these matters.

I was walking a tightrope. That was on fire. While breastfeeding. And trying to meet the necessities of life. Alone. Disassociating from my own grief and anger and complete disorientation at the life I now found myself in because there simply wasn’t room or time for it.  I had isolated myself out of shame and blaming myself for this man’s behaviour toward me. Friends and groups I had belonged to in my previous life drifted away. 

For all that, I loved my baby more than life itself, enough to live, even, and put everything out of my mind to just to try and be present, push a swing, pick a dandelion, splash in puddles. As you do, when your life has fallen apart and you’re trying to protect a little one with your whole heart and you’re scared every decision you make will be wrong, and everything you do or don’t do will be used against you somehow. Especially when your abuser is a charismatic man. I know he is read by others as a confident, charming guy, while I sometimes come off to mutual acquaintances as nervous and standoffish (much like the comfort of a rabbit in a room with a fox). 

What I hope anyone reading this will take away from my experience is:

• yes, women have the right to choose in this country but your choices and your bodily autonomy are no longer your own after you carry a pregnancy to term. 

• the “father’s rights” people have won and continue to advance by claiming they are oppressed and marginalized. Men who abuse their children’s mothers ought not be considered equally able and entitled to parent. Family court needs reform.

• the resources and services we assume must be out there for women at this most vulnerable time, just aren’t. No one is coming. There is nowhere to go. There is a hotline now you can call if you want to talk to a random stranger for 45 minutes who may or may not have any kind of competency with men’s violence against mothers, if you are blessed with 45 minutes of leisure and privacy. There’s the limited-session student counselling option. And for everything else there’s a years-long wait-list and/or a bill. 

This is the first time I’ve shared about this, the first time anyone’s made a space for it.

—Anonymous