When I see it, I see it in flashes—like someone changing the channel from one horrific moment to the next. This is all I remember of Brian 2: flashes. Flickering on and popping off.
I have long, drawn-out memories from everything else in my life—except Brian 2. It’s too hard to remember.
The flashes and the icky feeling of being touched. Not good touch—the kind that touches your raw soul with evil. That down-your-spine shiver. The type of touch that pokes at the nerve in your stomach and makes your heart pound in fear.
I fear I must first walk back through the darkness of the Brian 2 years in order to move forward. I have to go back to the darkness of losing the kids to really understand how Brian 2 got me and undid me.
I didn’t lose my kids because I was a bad mother. I didn’t lose them because I beat them or starved them or neglected them. I was the mom who was there for everything—the mom who told them how proud she was of everything they did.
Between dance, gymnastics, Civil Air Patrol, math team, chess team, robotics times three, band, and orchestra—there was always something. Max had a meltdown once at a concert. He ran off stage; I ran after him. We talked, and I got him calm. He went back out on stage with a smile and got a standing ovation from the audience. That was the mom I was.
I was so proud of my boys. They were all boys at that point. We went to concerts, we ate dinner together every single night. We had so much fun—it was a blast. There was always music. They were my entire world.
Sure, we fought. They’d seen their dad hit me. I was in severe depression a couple of times in their younger years, but I always made it good for them—as best I could, given my limitations.
I lost the kids because of a suicide attempt. This one, in a strange turn of events, wasn’t even what it seemed. I had been suffering from severe pancreatitis for months due to a gallstone growing in the bile duct. My insulin levels were all over the place, and I went months that way. I literally almost died the week after I tried to kill myself—from the pancreatitis. It had affected my mind.
I had just moved the kids to Vegas and started teaching, and I was bad at it. I was trying to teach but spend all my time with my kids, and balancing that and work was going badly. I was alone out here, and I lost it.
I was put on a 72-hour hold, and they gave my kids to Brian 1. I got joint custody, and they spent school there and off-school here, so they flew about once every six weeks. If they had a three-day weekend, they were with me.
These were the Brian 2 years.
Brian 2 got me with a few things. I met him less than a week out of the hospital for the pancreatitis. While I was in the hospital, Brian 1 had sued me for custody of the kids. I had to be in D.C. in like three days. I was on painkillers because pancreatitis is exceptionally painful, and I had to go to court to fight for my kids—and I had to be there in person.
I think the first hearing I went to alone. I remember being angry and my lawyer telling me not to look him in the eye or at him at all. Standing there in the suit I picked out, I remember that pissing me off.
But the rest of the hearings, Brian 2 would be with me. He told me he would get my kids back. He told me I was crazy and he was normal, and if I just did everything he told me to do, he would get my kids back.
So the defiant, back-talking, eccentric, loud, boisterous Katie was taught to hide and never show her face. I had to be someone else’s idea now.
Brian 2 was affectionate to the point of violation. We had to constantly be touching. He was to have access to any part of my body at any time, no matter how uncomfortable I was.
At first, I could just ignore it. People had been touching me in ways that made me uncomfortable my whole life. I would just focus on something else—like what my toes felt like—and force my mind there instead.
But it was constant, and I was at a point of uncomfortable overstimulation. Too much touching. Too many sensitive places. It was too much for me to neurologically process. He wouldn’t stop.
And the sex. He needed, he told me, the dopamine release of orgasm to stay “on kilter.” I would have to have sex with him when his mood got bad, and all he would do is yell at me and insult me.
Everything was my fault. Everything. His moods were particularly my fault because I wasn’t keeping his dopamine level up.
If I didn’t want to be touched all the time, why would we even be together? He wouldn’t just stop—he’d kick me out of my home. He usually did that a lot while I had the kids. I wouldn’t be paying enough attention to him because I was paying attention to the kids, and he would start a fight where everything was my fault, I was crazy, I was out of control.
It was always my fault.
I wasn’t allowed to leave the house without him. I had to stay inside. I couldn’t go anywhere because I was such a whore he couldn’t trust me—not that I ever cheated on him or even thought about it, just because of my past.
His family hated me. What he didn’t tell me was that he met me a week after he left his wife and basically moved me in with him and his kids. He told me it had been a year. It had been a week.
I couldn’t figure out why everyone hated me, and no one told me. At holidays and birthday dinners, his ex-wife would always be invited, and she and his sister would sit across from me and talk shit about me right in front of me. I dared not say anything or cause a scene, so I had to sit there and take it.
That was what I was taught: sit there and take it, and the kids will come back. Sit there and take it. No matter what it was—sex, insults, touching, being trapped. Sit there and take it. You’re the crazy one. You are the problem. Take it.
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