Co-parenting with an abuser
What Is Coercive Control?
For years I didn’t have a name for what was happening to me. I only knew that I was afraid in my own home, that I doubted my own memory, and that somehow I always ended up believing it was my fault. The name, I’d learn much later, is coercive control.
It isn’t a single incident. It’s a pattern—calculated, relentless, built to instill fear and confusion and to slowly erode a person’s sense of self. It rarely takes just one form; it moves between physical, emotional, psychological, financial, and legal, over a long stretch of time. It’s now formally recognized as abuse. But while you’re living inside it, it can be so quiet that no one sees it but you—so quiet that you question your own reality, and lose faith in your own thoughts.
I am not a psychologist. I can’t diagnose the kind of person who does this. I can only speak to my own experience—during marriage, after divorce, and while attempting to co-parent with my abuser. That experience spans two decades.
Mine began with love bombing. I was a perfect target: early twenties, carefree, a bit of a black sheep—choosing to pave my own way rather than follow the conventional path my parents expected from me. I was strong and fearless, and far too trusting. So when a man came into my life who matched my carefree spirit and buried me in flattery and promises of a beautiful life, I felt chosen. I lost myself in him quickly. His need to always know where I was and who I was with didn’t concern me. I mistook the control for care. A fiery love, a true love story, I told myself. And so I married Marcus.
The moment I became a mother, everything changed. A protective instinct took over, and my life became about my daughters. Their needs came first. Marcus never rose to meet me there. He kept putting himself first, and eventually our marriage ended. Sixteen years later, that has never changed.
For years, he offered the same justification. “When you board an airplane,” he’d say, “the crew tells you to secure your own oxygen mask before your children’s.” Then he’d turn it into a philosophy of parenting: “If I’m not good, our kids won’t be good.” It was lost on him that I was the full custodial parent and he had every-other-weekend visitation. He used those lines again and again—when he blew off his weekends, when something more “important” came up during his parenting time, when our daughters were sick or had a game, and, most of all, to excuse himself from paying child support.
So what does it actually look like to co-parent with an abuser?
After our divorce, he assaulted me and was arrested. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time it was documented. And still—after the arrest, the charges, the conviction—I was expected to keep an amicable co-parenting relationship with a man who terrified me. To keep my cool when, instead of waiting in his car at exchanges, he came to my door, and sometimes let himself inside. To say nothing when he placed himself directly behind me at our daughters’ games, even though the space was wide open and he could have sat anywhere.
Ten years of this became the defining hell of my life. My mother once told me, “He hates you more than he loves his children.” Those were some of the truest words anyone has ever said to me. Our daughters were collateral damage in his campaign to control and unmake my life.
The incidents ran together after a while—the screaming at exchanges, the fist coming down on the roof of my car while I rushed to buckle our daughters into their car seats, the pleading with him to stop that only made him louder.
The worst moments always seemed to arrive when ordinary life was already hard—when one of our daughters was sick, when I was stretched thin and had little fight left in me.
One morning, at 10 a.m., I opened my front door to a city police officer. At the end of my driveway stood my ex-husband, leaning against his car, smoking, smiling. Inside, our nine-year-old daughter was asleep and feverish, an ear infection setting in. I’d already made her a doctor’s appointment for 11 a.m., three minutes from our house. Marcus lived fifteen minutes away, in the opposite direction. He hadn’t answered my text that she was sick—but at nine, he texted that he was coming for her. I asked him to wait until ten forty-five and take her straight to the appointment. “No. Now,” he said. When I refused to wake her, his answer came fast: “Police it is then.” It was the answer he always reached for when he didn’t get his way.
I explained it all to the officer—the sleeping, sick child, the appointment up the street within the hour, the demand to drag her up and down the highway for nothing in between. “Ma’am,” he said, “if it’s his day and he wants to pick her up now, you have to release her. All we can do is enforce the order.” There was no argument to be had. I had no authority over my own child.
Ninety minutes later he returned her to me. “I have shit to do,” he told me. It was one of many times he weaponized the police against me.
Child support was his greatest grievance. Marcus has always been the kind of man who sees a hundred dollars in his bank account as a hundred dollars to spend—he lives far beyond his means and then he blames the support order for every strain on his life. For years he pressured me to remove it, as if I could simply make it disappear. When that failed, he got clever: he switched his employment status to 1099, which sidestepped wage garnishment and put his weekly payments on the honor system. Then he stopped paying entirely—until enforcement sends a delinquency notice or schedules a contempt hearing, at which point he pays the full balance to avoid jail. Once he paid thousands the morning of the hearing. The court rules only on compliance, never on financial abuse, so he depletes me as long as he can, until consequences force his hand. The longest stretches without payment always come around Christmas, or over the summer when back-to-school shopping looms.
I learned to live without. My daughters and I went years without internet or cable, entertained by a DVD player and a box of Disney movies. Our Friday-night ritual was a trip to the Redbox machine. I taught myself to cut my own hair from a YouTube video. I never had my nails done unless someone gifted me a certificate. Every meal was home-cooked and cheap. We were fine—but it was a life engineered around his refusal.
I was expected to politely co-parent with my abuser for years. I did the best I could. But the truth is that it is impossible—there is no co-parenting with a man like this. Until one day I began documenting everything. And then I found Jennifer’s Law: Connecticut’s expansion of its domestic violence statutes to include coercive control. Through that law, and years of meticulous documentation, I finally secured peace and protection from my abuser.
My memoir is the story of how I fought back—and how Jennifer’s Law saved me.
~ Sophie
