The sun sparkled against the golden trim that framed the pink stars set in the sidewalk.  It was mid-August.  I was with my daughter Celeste and son Skyler, who were 12 and 9 respectively at the time.  My children and I had been traveling for days.  Travel was the point of this trip and we were now at our farthest destination.  We would stay here, or rather, a couple of cities to the East in Pomona, California, for the next week before making the trek back home.  We had followed Highway 101 down the West Coast from Seattle, Washington.  We were traveling on a shoestring budget, camping at KOA campgrounds, and eating freeze-dried camp-style food for almost every meal.   The meals came from a large white bin, containing silver packages of food – food that I bought on Amazon, advertising “30-day emergency food pack”.  It was cheaper than buying Backpacker’s Pantry or Mountain House brand-named camping food.  I couldn’t afford to take us out to eat very often.  But the Pomona KOA offered complimentary breakfast, a nice change. 

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      Today we were visiting the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  We had driven to a shady looking park-and-ride on the outskirts of town, where a rundown camper van was parked a few rows over from us. Homeless tents were pitched on the other side of the parking lot.  From there we took the Red Line subway to the Hollywood/Highland station, not far from the Walk of Fame.  We walked along the sidewalk, finding names like “Walt Disney,” “Sandra Bullock,” and “Ryan Reynolds” written in gold, inlaid inside the terrazzo stars that glittered down the walk.  We stopped to eat, sitting on a set of stairs and adding cold bottled water to cup-of-noodles and eating it partly crunchy. 

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      We didn’t have much, but being together was what mattered.  This trip was about bonding.  I had graduated with my associate degree from community college a couple of months earlier and wanted to give my kids something special to remember before I started university.  They deserved it.  They deserved it not because I had been busy with college and would soon be busy for another couple of years.  They deserved it because I was afraid to get close to them.  Because, sometimes, I threw myself into school or work to maintain a superficial relationship with them, giving the bare minimum.  I must sound like a bad mom, and in truth, I felt that way.

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      I didn’t always have this fear.  When my kids were small, I used to go on weekly adventures with them.  We would go to the beach and hunt for seashells.  We would explore the Pike Place Market and buy magic tricks from the magic shop, fresh flowers from the row of vendors tirelessly arranging them and eat fish and chips by the water.  We had tea parties around the kitchen table and picnics in the park.  I made fresh baked bread and meals from scratch.  To be a mother was what I lived for.  I dreamed of the white picket fence with my husband and children – being a stay at home mom and going to PTA meetings.  I worked for that dream for so long.  The problem with dreams is you can’t make them someone else’s dream.

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      The night I left my kids at my parents’ house was the tipping point for something that had been going downhill for over a year.  By then I had lost my house, my job, and in a big part, myself.  About a year earlier the drinking began.  My husband lost his job and I went back to work full time.  He got an under-the-table job with some drinking buddies doing construction.  The cash from his job never made it home.  I would find him drunk and broke at flop-houses in the next city over.  It seems now like it was just a never-ending fight.  I can’t remember specific fights, they just blend into each other.  The accusations, the name-calling, the excuses to leave, to drink. 

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      I kicked him out once.  It only happened once.  It might have been the night of our son’s birthday party, the party that my husband had shown up late and drunk for – but I can’t remember for sure.  I don’t remember what we were fighting about.  But what I do remember is trying to convince him to not get on his motorcycle and ride away drunk.  I remember putting my arms around his neck and pleading for him not to leave in the state he was in.  And then I remember being slammed against the sidewalk so hard it dislocated my shoulder.  He sped away on his motorcycle as I screamed in agony on the front lawn. 

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      I told him we had some things to work through before I let him back in the house.  I started working on myself.  I went to al-Anon meetings, found a sponsor.  I moved to a smaller place closer to my parents.  I tried to get us into marriage counseling.  He never showed up.  This is the point in time I look back to and think “this all could have been avoided if I would have made a different choice.”  I don’t remember why I let him back in.  I do remember feeling desperate for that dream – the one with the white picket fence and him by my side. 

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      The thing about abuse is it starts long before any physical violence.  It starts with name-calling and threats.  It starts with arguments and accusations that the problem is you … it’s you.  It breaks you down and makes you forget who you are.  The next time he hurt me, I went to stay with my parents.  He had made it clear that he would never forgive me for putting him on the streets again.  I eventually came back.  For the next six months, it was a whirlwind.  He would leave for weeks at a time.  When he was there, he wasn’t really there.  He would get home after the time I was supposed to be at work or take off with our son while our daughter was in school.  Sometimes I’d get phone calls to pick our son up from a friend’s house where he had left him at.  Eventually, I lost my job, and then the house. 

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      My life crumbled, like a sandcastle being washed away in the surf.  As my life broke down, so did I.  I ran.  I let waves of despair wash over me and carry me out to sea.  I dropped my kids off at my parents and spent the next eight months homeless, staying couch to couch with my husband.  That eight months was filled with black eyes and bloody noses.  I was scared to death of him, but even more scared of having to rebuild my life alone.  I wish I could say I was stronger, but the truth is I stayed, even after he cheated; after he hit me; after he clasped his hands around my neck while I choked for air but could only suck in the blood that was gushing from my nose that had felt his fist.  Not long after that, he held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me.  I don’t remember if that was the last time, but it was close.  My fear of him finally outweighed everything else.

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      At the end of 2013, broken in so many ways after two years of fighting a losing battle, I went to my parents.  I went back to my kids who had come so close to losing me forever, more than once.  My parents took me in.  For months after that, I wasn’t suicidal, but part of me just didn’t want to be alive.  Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  I spent the next year in therapy, putting myself back together and building my life back up.  I was afraid of the fear that I couldn’t do it alone – that fear that had crippled me into staying with my husband.  After that year of therapy, I started college.  I wanted to know that I could stand on my own. I threw myself into my studies.  This I could do.  It required logic, not emotions.  So, by the time I graduated community college, I had come so far in my recovery, but I was still at arms-length from my children. 

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      California.  My kids and I had talked about moving there when I finish my bachelor’s degree.  The sun, the sand, a fresh start.  Maybe hoping that the trauma wouldn’t follow me.  So, there we were, on a two-week-long road trip, trying to heal that part of me that was still broken.  We laughed, we played, we argued. We ate Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland.  We saw the famous redwood trees in Northern California.  We traveled across the Golden Gate bridge.  We hiked to the Hollywood sign and shopped at Venice Beach.  We swam in the ocean and built sandcastles on the shore.  The waves that washed them away weren’t waves of destruction, they were waves of peaceful cleansing. 

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      I wish I could say that those two weeks healed me completely.  I wish I could say that now, a year and a half later, I am the same mom I was all those years ago.  The truth is, it will probably always be a struggle.  But what those two weeks did was push me in the direction I needed to go – closer to my kids.  It opened a door.  Sometimes something will blow it shut, and I have to remember to open it again.  But it’s the most important struggle of my life.  And I try.