Just Us Girls:

A Memoir of Coercive Control, Motherhood, and Survival

About the Memoir

Just Us Girls: A Memoir of Coercive Control, Motherhood, and Survival is the story of two decades of my life. I began writing it to expose a broken family court system — one that traps mothers in cycles of abuse with no way out. But once I started, I knew I couldn’t begin inside that system, after the divorce. I had to start at the beginning. The decade that came before I ever set foot in a courtroom is what makes the fight that followed so devastating: I should never have had to fight the courts at all. They should have fought beside me — for me, and for my daughters.

The memoir is told in five parts.

Part One: The Trap

Writing the origins of an abusive relationship was the hardest part of this book — and the most necessary. People ask victims how they ended up there, as if the answer is a failing of their own. These early chapters are my answer: how a young woman, full of hope and spirit, is intoxicated by what she believes is love, and how, by the time she understands what’s actually happening, there is no visible way out. In a tall brick building in a rough part of a rough city, the trap was set — and I walked into the cage myself, through marriage and a pregnancy.

Part Two: Losing Sophie

This is my brief three-year marriage, and the years my identity was stripped away. I’d started with a dream of a family — a marriage, children, a home, a better life. Instead I followed my military husband across the country, thousands of miles from everyone I knew. In central California, surrounded by farmland and the constant smell of manure, I was completely isolated: not allowed to work, financially dependent, enduring physical attacks, psychological manipulation, and relentless emotional abuse. Through all of it, I poured into my daughter. She was all I had, and in losing everything else, I grew into being her mother. Then my second daughter was born — and days later, the three of us were discarded. No home, no money, no certain future. But the divorce gave me full custody and permission to finally go home. My husband’s parting message: “Good riddance.”

Part Three: No Escape

After the divorce, the weight of what I’d survived caught up with me — PTSD, night terrors, anxiety — while I carried two children alone, in the particular silence only a single mother knows. I wondered, if the father of my children couldn’t love me, who ever would. But my daughters pulled me forward. I built a life for the three of us from the ground up — just us girls — driven by nothing but the will to be the mother they deserved. And just as life began to feel like an actual life, my ex-husband left the military and moved back to our home state. That is when I was introduced to the family court system, and living inside it became my life: bound by orders that made no sense, abandoned by the agencies meant to protect us, trapped in a cycle of post-separation abuse.

Part Four: Transformation

For years I did what was expected of me — I played nice with the man who had assaulted me. Then I decided to fight back. I went to therapy. I learned to prioritize myself. And I was finally given a name for what I had lived through: coercive control. I learned that to free myself from the pattern, I first had to prove it — so I built a documentation system and kept it faithfully for years, gathering evidence and waiting for the moment I would need it. That moment came with a knock at my door one August morning: my ex-husband had filed for full emergency custody, asking that I be denied any visitation at all — ten years after our divorce, ten years after I had raised our daughters alone. This time, I was ready. What followed was more than a year of custody war — battles I won, battles I lost — but through all of it, I kept my children.

Part Five: The Girls

The Girls is the emotional heart of this book, and the one part of my story I won’t give away here. I will only say this: the true victory was never mine. It belonged to my daughters. For years I tried to protect them, and for years a system that was never built for them stood in the way. In the end, they found a strength I never taught them — and it is theirs to tell.

Who This Memoir is For

Just Us Girls is for the woman who is still inside it — who reads these pages and recognizes her own story, and needs to know there is a way out. I lived it, I documented it, and I survived it. So can you.