Something Was Wrong - S13 E2: [Amelia] Your House is on Fire

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

This week, survivor Amelia shares the second half of her story. *Content warning: Today’s episode discusses Substance Use Disorder, emotional and physical violence and arson. SAMHSA’s National Helpline is a free, confidential, 24/7, 365-day-a-year treatment referral and information service (in English and Spanish) for individuals and families facing mental and/or substance use disorders. The National Helpline provides 24-hour free and confidential referrals and information about mental and/or substance use disorders, prevention, treatment, and recovery in English and Spanish. SAMHSA's National Helpline 800-662-HELP (4357)TTY: 800-487-4889 For additional information on finding help and treatment options, visit www.samhsa.gov/find-treatment.SWW’s theme music –  “U think U” by Glad Rags, from their album Wonder Under. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to something was wrong early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. I'm Candace DeLong and on my new podcast, Killer Psychy Daily, I share a quick 10 minute rundown every weekday on the motivations and behaviors of the cold-butter killers you read about in the news. Listen to the Amazon Music Exclusive Podcast Killer Psychy Daily in the Amazon Music exclusive podcast killer psyche daily in the Amazon music app. Download the app today. Something was wrong is intended for mature audiences. Episodes discuss topics that can be upsetting, such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence,

suicide, and murder. If you're in need of support, please visit somethingwaswrong.com slash resources for a list of nonprofit organizations that can help. I'm not a therapist or a doctor. Most names have been changed for anonymity purposes. Opinions expressed by guests on the show are their own and do not necessarily represent my views. Resources and source material are linked in the episode notes.

Thank you so much for listening. So I went and met with a divorce attorney who I actually found by way of one of the people in my continuing care group and shared with him kind of what was going on. I wanted to start the process and he gave me the checklist of everything that you need to put in order to do the filing. And I worked on that paperwork like my life depended on it. I think I got all of the documents, all the financial documents, everything that he asked for, like within 24 hours.

Because I just wanted it done. We were still living together. He didn't know that I was filing for divorce, but he certainly knew things were not good. We were at this point living very parallel lives. He was in the guest room. I was in our room. And I started becoming increasingly scared of him. In addition to not sleeping and disappearing, he started to become more paranoid, not just with me, but with life in general.

Weird things would start happening. He decided that he needed a very expensive sports car that I begged him not to buy because we didn't have the means for him to buy it But in his words, he's a man, he's gonna make whatever decisions he wants and so he went and bought the sports car So now he has two cars One of the cars, the old car, mysteriously disappeared off our street one night He said it must have been stolen but would not file a police report I kept telling him we need to file a report that it's stolen, we don't know where it is, it's insured, and he refused to do it. But then there was a sheriff walking around responding

to a call in our neighborhood one night. It was like 1 a.m. and he runs up to the sheriff and flags him down and decides now is the time I'm going to file this report, which was real weird. The sheriff came over to our house and certainly commented on how strange it was that this car was missing for about like two months now and he flags him down at one in the morning to Papand Stance Violet Report. And then there were times where he started hoarding Star Wars memorabilia and he would call me from like a target and he would be talking a mile a minute about how he found these lightsapers and their appreciating assets.

And he's going to spend $1,000 on them, but they're lying to him that they're saying they only have 10, but he saw online. They have 15. I could barely track his thoughts half the time. I think that's why I was so hellbent on getting the divorce paperwork going soon because I felt this sense of urgency that like the erratic behavior is ramping up and I need to get things in order because I can feel things going in a scary direction.

Did you feel like the behavior was because he was using again or did it seem like this was a different issue? This pattern was very different. He was telling me he was going to meetings. He was telling me he was working with a sponsor. And so in my mind, I actually called his stepmom and his mom and said, I think he might be schizophrenic or bipolar. And he needs help. His stepmom told me at this point, this is your marriage.

I'm no longer getting involved in it. This is an issue between the two of you. And I told her you don't understand, this is bigger than that. And she said, I'm not getting involved. You're his wife, you deal with it. His mom said, you are not a licensed professional how dare you label him with something like that.

And so it became clear that at this point in time, I was on my own. My attorney got a process server to serve him. By this point in time, Jake was leaving our house at all hours of the day, wasn't showing up to work anymore. He went to serve him at work. They a couple times told him like he's not here. He didn't show up to work today.

So clearly that pattern was starting up again, and I knew it was a matter of time until he was going to get laid off again. And finally, he came home one night at like 10 or 11 and the process server, I could hear them outside our window, hands them the paperwork, and walked away, and the process server texted me and said, watch your back. My heart dropped. Jake walks in, comes up the stairs, and is enraged. You want a divorce, you've actually went and filed, how dare you, you're giving up, berated me. And that's when things started getting scary. He began accusing me of cheating on him, he started stalking my phone. He was an IT guy. He is so technologically savvy. I would get phone calls from a weird number. I would pick it up and

there would be nobody there. Or I would get text messages saying they were like a friend of mine when it wasn't the right number. I knew it was him. I knew there must be some way that he figured out to have it ring through a different phone number. One of the girls that I worked with, her name's Brittany, she was going through a divorce. And she didn't know I was about to file for divorce. We were at lunch one day at work and she was joking, but she said it would be so much better if you were going through a divorce too, so we could just hang out and do stuff. I looked at her and I said give it time. It was my way of inching towards the truth with her. I filled her in on what was going on and she and I would text constantly all through the day

because his behavior at this point was becoming increasingly scary. He would wake me up at all hours of the night and would be right in my face saying, I know what you're doing. I know what you're doing. You're cheating on me and he would take clothes out of my closet and point at marks like deodorant marks or whatever and he would say, I can see the stains here. You were with somebody. I'm just like, you're talking nonsense right now. Like, what are, I have two young children.

You actually think I'm cheating on you? Like, when do I have the time? It got so bad and it got so harassing that I would have to leave the house because he wouldn't leave me alone in the middle of the night, and I would grab the boys, and we would go stay at hotels. He would text me hundreds of times a day. Just come clean. I know what you're doing. You're making a mistake. How dare you. It was just constant. And because I was texting Brittany so much, I guess somehow he was convinced that she was a guy that I was cheating with. One day he texted me this spreadsheet of how much I text different numbers and how much my texting had increased to this one number by what percentage

it was bananas. And he's like, clearly this is the person that you're having it affair with. And then he starts texting Brittany, disguising his phone to try and figure out whose phone number it is. He's texting her, trying to bait her. She's like, I keep getting these weird text messages at all hours of the night. I think it might be him. He had always thought that I was cheating on him with my old high school boyfriend, whose name is Ron. And so one day, Brittany is getting text after text after text from him. And I told her, I said, tell him that your name is Ron. So that way, he calls you and you answer.

And he'll know that it's you and he'll realize how dumb this whole thing is. Well, that was the stupidest idea that I've ever had because she did that. And the minute she said this is Ron, he called me and says, you're caught, you're going down now, I'm getting 100% custody, you lying whore. You're a cheater and this sent him off. And I was like, Jake, you don't understand. Like, that's my friend, Brittany.

Call that number, she'll answer, you'll see it's Brittany. We wanted to show you like how ridiculous is that we know it's you calling us all the time. We knew it was you, we're trying to get you to see none of this makes sense. And this just enraged him. He would wake me up in the middle of the night with receipts from the grocery store, and he would say, you bought 10 Capri Sons at the grocery store. I see a receipt for two boxes, that's 10. But there's only seven in the refrigerator. Where did those three go? Who drank those three? Come on, tell me who drank those three Amelia.

I'm not stupid, I know there's somebody. And it's like I could not piece together what he was trying to say, or the points he was trying to make. And I kept trying to tell him, none of what you're saying is making sense. It got so scary to where he wouldn't leave the house. And I certainly wasn't leaving the boys with him. We would seek respite at friends' houses and at hotels. We would do that on a pretty regular basis

until he would start threatening to pick the boys up from daycare unless I brought them home that night. And so we would get a night or two in a hotel and then we'd have to return to the house. I went to a doctor's appointment one day with the boys and our three-year-old found a book on the ground that was clearly somebody's like Little Addressed Book and it had clearly a whole bunch of really important information. And so I told my son, let's try and figure out if we can find out who's that is. And I'll get it back to her. It was clearly a woman because the name was written in the front. I left it in the car, he broke into my car that night and found the book and was convinced that the only thing

that made sense to him was that I had another identity. And so he started calling me by this woman's name and saying, I'm a fraud and I lied to him and I trapped him in this marriage and he knows that I have two social security numbers and that I'm defrauding him and that I'm a liar and that I've been married before. And he is calling me hundreds of times during the day

with these accusations. And I keep telling him, leave me alone, leave me alone. We're going through a divorce. We will be done soon. Just leave me alone. One night I woke up and the whole house was shaking. It was like 11 or 12 o'clock at night. The boys were asleep in their room. It's this deafening sound and I run down stairs and Jake is holding a chainsaw and he's

sawing one of our walls in half in the house. And I'm screaming, what are you doing? Stop, what are you doing? He said, you say that I can't do anything. You say I'm not a man. Well, I'm gonna show you a fucking man. I'm gonna fix this house up. I'm yelling as loud as I can like stop.

You need to stop. And he finally stops and I run upstairs to the boys room. They're still asleep, thank God. And I laid in bed with them. And that's what I started doing when he would spin out of control and he wouldn't leave me alone. He wouldn't necessarily go into and chase me into as the boys room. And so when things started getting bad, because I couldn't leave all the time, I would run

into their room. I told my attorney about the chain-sothing the next morning and he said, you need to start documenting this and calling the police. We need to start building a case. I was terrified of him getting custody of our kids or even shared custody. So that's what I started doing. I started calling the police every time he would wake me up in the middle of the night and call me different names and threaten me and wouldn't leave me alone. It got to the point where I would hide in corners because he would chase me around the house and he would not stop. I would ask him, you know, please just leave me alone, please just leave me alone,

and he would get in my face and call me a whore and a cheater and say things like, your dad never loved you and you're just a fat bitch. I would beg him, please leave me alone and don't wake up our kids and think God he always did it at night to where our kids never witnessed any of this. The police would come and they would say until he physically assaults you, there's nothing we can do. I really started leaning back on my mom for support and filling her in on how bad it had gotten. Sometimes I would call her and she would sit on the other end and listen to it

because I'd wanted a witness if anything happened to me. There would be somebody that knew what really happened so that hopefully my kids would be protected if he ever did hurt me. When I started leaving with the boys, I was carrying our youngest in my arms and our oldest was walking in front of me and he grabbed our oldest and wouldn't let him leave with us. And I begged him, please just let us go.

He blocked my way and pushed me against the wall. I kept walking. I was able to get away, and our oldest wanted to come with me, so he eventually relented and let our oldest down. We get in the car and I'm buckling the boys in, and I'm in the driver's seat, and he grabs one of their toys from the back, and he threw threw it at me and it hit my face. I called the police and told them what happened. They said it sounds like assault but we don't see any physical marks so we can't do anything. No video tapes that I took of him, no text messages of threats, nothing was enough. I had called the phone company because he was stalking my phone so much and finding my whereabouts, finding who I was calling and calling them.

I wanted to get his phone shut off and take it off our account. I remember being on the phone with them and they were actively working to get him taken off the account and he was on the other end undoing everything. The phone company pulled their security on the line trying to figure out how he was doing what he was doing and they said this guy is good. We don't know how he's getting through all these walls, we keep shutting his phone off and he keeps turning it back on and we don't know how he's doing it. What if you were trafficked into a cult over shot nine times or fell in love with a vampire or went into a minor surgery and woke up one week later, paralyzed? What would you do?

I'm Whit Missildine, the creator of this is actually happening, a podcast from Wondry that brings you extraordinary true stories of life-changing events, told by the people who lived them. From a young man that dooms his entire future with one choice, to a woman who survived a notorious serial killer, you'll hear their first-person account of how they overcame remarkable circumstances. Each episode is an exploration of the human spirit and personal discovery. These haunting accounts sound like Hollywood movies, but I assure you this is actually happening. Followed this is actually

happening wherever you get your podcasts, you can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Londoner app. I started becoming paranoid even having a phone or my computer on me because he's so smart with those things that I don't know if he can log into my computer and see what I'm working on or turn on my cameras on my laptop. As I'm actively trying to shut his phone off, I get a text from him. And the text message says, I can hear the gears burning from here. I still have service. How crazy is that?" He said,

Princess, you should just stop now. Look where I'm at. And he dropped a pin on his location. And when I zoomed into the location, it was a gun store. And the next text said, you look like a deer flopping in the road, you should just go quietly. I immediately called my attorney and I said I think he'd retten to kill me and I explained what happened and he said you need to go home and you need to call the sheriff's department because he wanted everything in the same jurisdiction as all the other calls. And so I did that but when I got to the house he was there. I parked down the street, I called the sheriff's department and they said to wait for them. I waited. They pull up to the house and I start walking up to the house

and Jake is standing on our front porch and has this look of like, what's going on? This is weird. And he looks at me and he puts his arms up and he's like, Amelia, like, I would never hurt you. What are you talking about? That's crazy. I didn't do any of that. I didn't mean it that way. You think I would actually hurt you? I would never hurt you. I told the sheriff, I'm not comfortable coming home today. And he said, okay, we'll hold him outside and you go in and you get your things. And then you can leave.

And I go into our bathroom. And on my side of the vanity are pictures of me and our kids and him with one of my journals from high school opened with pages ripped out of it with excerpts that are like circled and highlighted and notes that are written like lying bitch and you don't know what love is and there's candles lit. It's like this super creepy shrine and I run downstairs and I asked one of the sheriffs to come upstairs and I said, you need to see what's up here. He comes up and I'm taking pictures of it

because I need documentation and proof. And he looks at it and I said, this is not normal. And he said, oh, it's definitely crazy, but crazy is not illegal. We can't do anything. I got my stuff and I went and stayed at one of my friend's houses where he didn't necessarily know where she lived. The next day, she came back to the house with me to grab some things.

We're sitting at the dining room table and Jake walks in, looks at her and says hi and she said hi to him and he walks straight upstairs. She looked at me and she said he's cracked out. I just kind of laughed and I was like, no, there's no way he's doing crack. By this time, the accusations and the texting started ramping up. He started saying that I was stealing money from him and that he was going to take me down,

awful disparaging things. I was at my friend's house with the boys, no plans to return home. After the whole shrine and gun threat, he said he was going to call the police and say I was kidnapping them. And my attorney just kept urging me, do what you're doing, don't walk into his traps

of trying to bait you to come home. I took my attorney at his word for that. One day I met work, I look up, and he's standing outside my window. He's motioning for me to come outside and talk to him. And when I look outside, his car is parked on the wrong side of the road, one tire is up on the sidewalk. I call him instead of going outside and I said, Jake, you look like you have not slept in

days. You have not showered in days. you don't look well, you need to go home and take care of yourself. You're going to lose your job again. Why are you not at work? It's like nine in the morning, you should be at work. And he said, you continue to steal money from me. You need to give me my money back. Your heartless, he's just reading me the riot act. I go outside. And I actually had one of my boys with me that morning. Our youngest was with me because he was sick and I couldn't drop him off a daycare so I brought him into work with me. Our oldest was at the daycare which was on my work campus. I am trying to de-escalate the situation because at this time nobody at work knows besides one or two people how

awful my personal life is. I'm trying to contain it and get him to leave. Everybody is coming to work at that time. Everyone sees him being disheveled, me in the parking lot trying to get him back in his car that's parked all out on the road. And finally I said, I'm done. I'm not doing this anymore. I'm walking away.

And he said, okay, I'm gonna go get our oldest from daycare. And I said, please don't do that. We'll come home tonight. We haven't been home in four days. We'll come home. Don't get him from school. Leave him there and we'll come home. I walked away and I go back into my office and by this time, I guess my work security had called the police department because of the way that his car was parked and everything. He's out there now talking to the police. And when he sees me looking out the window, he throws his arms up like you called the police on me. By this time, a whole bunch of people had gathered in the lobby and are watching everything go down.

And I have my youngest with me. And my boss says, what's going on? And then the police come in and start talking to me about what's going on. And I fill them in on the chaos that our life has become. By this time, Jake had driven away, and my boss said, do you think he's going to go to the daycare? And I said, I doubt he's going to go to the daycare.

I had actually filled the daycare in. I believe he's a threat to our children. And so if he shows up, please call me. I know you can't keep him from picking up our boys, but just call me so I can at least try and intervene. I said, I don't think he would go down there, but I'll go check. I load my youngest in the car,

and I drive down the campus to daycare and his car's in the parking lot. And so I go inside, the director of the daycare has the phone in her handage that I was just about to call you. He's in the classroom. I walk outside to where the classroom is, and by this time he has our oldest,

and he's holding him. And our oldest has not seen him for days days and is thrilled that his dad is there. Mommy, Mommy, Daddy's taking me out for a field trip today. I feel like I'm holding it together, but I can feel like tears running down my cheeks and I'm like, Jake, please don't take him. Please just leave him because I can tell he hasn't slept. I'm starting to think he's on some sort of substance. Clearly he's not in his right mind and I am terrified that he's going to get in the car wreck with our son.

I'm begging him not to take him, and he pushes me away from him and says, fuck you, get away from us. And I'm talking to our oldest, and I'm like, come with mommy. We'll see Daddy later tonight pleading, and I can't get close enough, and I don't want to rip him out of his hands and have this physical altercation. And so I follow them back to the car and I'm loading my youngest in his car seat because I'm like, something's about to go down and I just need to be ready to drive. Jake puts our oldest in the passenger seat of his car and shuts the door and locks it. I can't get to him. And I'm pleading with him, please, please, please don't do this. I look

in his car and the car seat is tipped on its side, unrestrained, there's trash everywhere. And he puts the car seat in the upright position, but doesn't secure it, and yells to our son, get in buckle. And I'm like, Jake, it's not even buckled in, please just put the car seat in right. And he's like, we're leaving. Until you wire that money, we're gone. He gets in the car and starts driving away and I follow him we're on a main busy road and he runs a red light and starts weaving in and out of traffic driving

really erratically I Stop following him and I called my attorney and I'm hysterical telling him what's going on and he said You should not be calling me you You need to call the police. I called the police and told them what happened. By this time, Jake had texted me and called me and said, unless you buy your $5,000 into my account by the end of today, you're not seeing your son again. I told that to the police and they dispatched a helicopter

to try to find the car. I drove back to my work where the police had come back at this point in time because they heard the call come through. By this time, Jake kept calling my phone and I put it on speaker so the police officer could hear. And he said, say hi to Mommy. And I heard my son say, hi Mommy, we're going on a field trip.

It's going to be so much fun. And he said $5,000 or you don't see him again. Any hung up. And the police officer said, you need to go now to the courthouse and get a restraining order. I dropped my youngest off at a friend's house and I drove to the courthouse to file for a restraining order. I am so incredibly sorry. I can't even imagine how much terror was running through your body in these moments. How long did he have your son before you were able to essentially confirm that he was

safe after that? I got to the courthouse by this time it was pretty late in the afternoon because I had to go by my attorney's office and luckily we had already had a lot of pictures and text messages and stuff because we were building the case for the divorce to show this increasingly erratic behavior. I hadn't been in the house for stretches at a time and when I would come back, the house would have dog poop everywhere, urine everywhere. He was starting to tear floorboards up and so I had all this photographic evidence of the conditions. My attorney was like, you're going to get one shot because you're going in X part A restraining order. The judge is going to see it.

You're not even going to get to talk to the judge. I got all of that stuff together. It was about two or three o'clock and the courthouse closes at like five. I go to the area where you get a restraining order and they gave me a sheet to fill out. And one of the questions on the sheet was, are you a victim of domestic violence?

And I checked no. And I turned it in and she called me up and she said, are you a victim of domestic violence? And I said no. And she said, well, then why are you here? And I explained everything that was going on and she looks at me and she said, that's domestic violence. And it was the first time that finally somebody validated what I was going through wasn't just someone being mean to them or me overreacting that it was actually domestic violence. The cops had been to our house like eight or 10 times by now. Every time it was like until he hits you,

until he assaults you, there's nothing we can do. And so it was driven into my head that nobody's gonna listen to you because it's not bad enough. And it was the first time that somebody actually validated that it was bad enough. They told me which courtroom to wait outside and I waited for two hours for the judge to look at it.

The bailiff came out and he was holding a bunch of papers and he said, okay, follow me. We're going to get this validated to put into a restraining order and I said it was granted. He's like, yeah, it was granted. Basically saying he has to leave the house immediately. The next problem was that a restraining order doesn't go into effect until the person is served, but I have no idea where he is. And he has my son with him, and I don't know if my son's safe,

and I certainly don't want someone to serve him the papers I'm terrified of what he's gonna do to him. I was in a days for the rest of the day, eventually went home with my youngest. I would get sporadic texts from him through the day. That word, like, doesn't it feel awful not knowing where your child is? Now you know what you've been putting me through.

Now you finally get to taste your own medicine and it feels so good to finally put you in as much pain as you've put me. I was told that a police officer would not serve a restraining order because it means they have to show up in court. The plan was that someone would come to the house the next morning and hopefully he would be there by then and would serve him the papers in the morning. About midnight that night I heard the car pull up. So I run outside and my son jumps out of the car and is in the same clothes carrying a bucket of Kentucky fried chicken.

The biggest smile on his face telling me all about his day and how much fun they had. And why was I so upset at daddy for wanting to take him out and that I wasn't a good mommy for not letting him see daddy? And when I tried to get close to him, my son ran towards his dad. And he said, I know daddy, you don't want mommy to get me. He looked at him and said, that's right buddy, let's go upstairs. They walked upstairs into the house and locked themselves in the bedroom.

I went back into our son's room and laid in bed with our youngest about a half hour. Later, I hear the door open and Jake is standing over me in our son's room and he gets really close to my face and he says, princess, did it feel so scary? Were you just so scared all today not knowing where he was and what a horrible person you've been to me and how I felt all those nights seething with anger? I said, please get away from me. Just get away from me and he wouldn't leave. I had my cell phone in my hand and I said I'm going to call the police. He's like, well,

I'm just going to say I've been sleeping all night, so you're going to look like a stupid bitch. And he walked away and locked himself back in the room. By this time I'm on the phone with the police department, I said, I have a restraining order. It hasn't been served yet. I'm scared. And they dispatched a sheriff. And it just so happened that it was two sheriffs that showed up. And one of them was the one sheriff that was patrolling our neighborhood that one night at one in the morning that took the report on the stolen car that clearly did not like Jake. I met them downstairs. I told them what was going on and they said, well we'll serve it on them right now. I said, I thought you guys didn't do that. They're like, no, we'll do it right now.

They told me to go in the kitchen to be away from his path because that's usually when people get hurt. One of them walked upstairs and starts pounding on the bedroom door and I hear him say, Jake, this is the sheriff's department, answer the door. He opened the door and I hear him say, Jake, this is the sheriff's department, answer the door. He opened the door and I hear him in a really sleepy voice go, what's going on? The sheriff said, you look real tired for somebody that just went to bed a second ago. He said, this is a restraining order. You need to vacate the premises immediately.

I could tell Jake was completely stunned and confused. They said, you have five minutes to gather some clothes in a bag and you need to get out of here. They walked him downstairs and he walked straight out the front door. They shut the door behind him and locked it and then sat down at my kitchen table and said, he's going to come back. So we're going to hang out here for a few minutes. I started telling them what was going on and how many times I had called and nobody could do anything. And finally, I had the order. One of the sheriff said, is your house secure? I said, no.

He has disabled our garage. So you can just pull the garage open. Our house is in shambles right now. And he said, well, show me the garage door. Let me see if I can rig it so that it'll stay closed. We walk into the garage and he turns the light on and he said, oh, this is meth. This is definitely meth.

Again, just like when my friend said it's crack, I was like, there is no way this boy from an upper middle class family is doing crack or meth. It's not that, but it's definitely something. The sheriff stayed for a while, then our door flings open. And it's chick. The sheriff's both stand up, they rush him at the door and they say, what the hell are you doing?

We could have rescued, right? This meant we told you not to come back here. And he said, I forgot my phone, I just need my phone. They were like, we'll go find your phone. One of them goes upstairs and then you hear Jake yelling from outside. No, no, no, never mind, I found it.

I found it. I found it. The sheriff looked at him and said, more making this real clear. If you show up here again, you're going to jail. Jake left. The sheriff stayed a little bit longer, and then they left. That night, it laid in bed with our oldest. He woke up, and he said, where's daddy?

And just immediately started crying. I told him that his daddy had to go. And here's this three year old that just had in his mind the best day with his dad who he hasn't seen in a week. Then he goes to bed and wakes up and he's gone again. He was devastated. I felt like a monster for hurting my kids like that. Our house was torn apart.

There were floorboards that were torn up. The garage was in disarray. There was garbage overflowing everywhere. We had a wall that was chained, sawed in half. I knew that I would have to sell the house. And I called a friend of mine who had been my friend since gosh, I was 14 years old, who had no idea what was going on in my life. But it's kind of the friend that you don't talk to for a while and you pick up right where you left off. He was in construction. And so I called him that morning and I said, Nick, I need your help. I really didn't fill him in on what was going on. I just said, I filed for divorce, our houses and

shambles, and I don't know how to put it back together. He said, I will be there in two hours, and he drove up, assessed what needed to be done. And he said, it's going to take me a couple weeks. I'll go get all the materials. I'll go get off my tools. His wife is the most amazing woman. He said, I'm going to camp out here for the next couple weeks because I'm not leaving you alone in this house. And he basically moved in with us for the next three weeks, spent day and night repairing the house. My friend Brittany and I had become very close and she was with me every step of the way through everything.

She would come over after work and I would make dinner for everybody and we would open the garage and the boys would play with all the neighborhood kids and the alley like all the other kids got to do. And it was the first time that life felt normal. Life felt so much lighter. Nick is, he's a great guy.

He would make comments like, I feel like I'm being watched. I heard a car kind of idle around the house today. I would just dismiss it like Nick, come on. You're just being silly. There's nobody watching you during the day and he's like, no, I have this feeling. And that's one of the reasons why he didn't want to leave. He basically slept in our guest room and fixed the house.

It was probably a couple weeks in and I get a phone call really late at night. It was about 1 a.m. It was a number I didn't recognize. I picked it up and it was one of the sheriffs who had shown up to serve the restraining order. And he said, Amelia, I don't know if you remember me, It was one of the sheriffs who had shown up to serve the restraining order. And he said, Amelia, I don't know if you remember me, but I'm one of the responding officers. And I saw how much you were struggling, trying to figure out what was going on.

I'm not supposed to do this, but I wanted to let you know that we just pulled over your husband for a DUI. And he's clearly under the influence of something. We're going to arrest him and take him in and we will figure out what he's on as part of the booking process. And I'll let you know what we find, but you can't tell anybody. He calls again and he said, I just want you to know he tested positive for methamphetamine. It was unbelievable to me. In a way, it made everything make sense, and in a way, it made no sense at all.

Somebody that started with Vykinin, who had supposedly been working a program, was now completely addicted and psychotic on methamphetamine. I think Tim, and it was a couple days later, that we had to show up in court for the restraining order hearing. Certainly the new methamphetamine DUI didn't help his case at all. The judge basically said that he still had to stay away from the home and he was still not allowed in our residence, but that he would allow monitored visitation with our children,

so long as it was monitored by his mom. And I agreed to that because his mom adores her grandkids. And I knew that as much as we didn't see eye to eye on certain things, I knew that those boys would be safe in her presence. So I agreed to it. I dropped the restraining order with the stipulation that he would stay away from the home and that he could do monitored visitation. So the boys saw him on a Saturday. I dropped them off. The boys were happy. I picked them up and it was fine.

Wednesday came and it just so happened to be the last day that Nick was working on the house. Everything was falling into place. I left early that morning with the boys, and Nick said, I'm gonna lock up. I'll be out of here by noon. I had a work lunch meeting. I'm at the table with a whole bunch of people, and the owner of the restaurant comes up and asks me if I'm Amelia and said,

there's an emergency phone call for you up front. I was confused, because that's weird. Why wouldn't someone call my cell phone? But then I looked at my cell phone and realized it was on vibrate and I had like 30 something this calls from Britney. I go up to the front and it's my work. It's the receptionist and she said,

Britney's trying to get a hold of you, answer your phone. I run back to my cell phone and everybody at the table's like, what's going on? I said, I don't know if something's wrong. And my phone starts ringing. It's Brittany. I answer it. And she's out of breath.

She says, where are the boys? And I said, what do you mean, where are the boys? She's like, just answer me. Where are the boys? I said, they're at daycare. And she said, are you sure they're at daycare? And I said, yeah, Brittany, they're at daycare. I dropped them off this morning.

She said, I need you to listen to me. Stay where you're at. I'm on my way to get you. You need to call daycare and make sure they're there. I'll be there in a minute. I said, what the hell is going on? And she said, just do what I said. But I called the daycare.

And I said, are the boys there? And they said, yeah, they're there. I said, are you sure they're there? And they said, yes, they're absolutely there. We can see them. I said, okay, I don't there? And they said, yes, they're absolutely there. We can see them. I said, OK, I don't know what's happening, but don't let anybody near them and keep them safe. By this time I'm standing outside of the restaurant

and Brittany drives up, she says, OK, don't freak out, but your house is on fire. There's somebody barricaded inside, and there's a swap team with gun strong on the house. I said, it's Jake. He's he's going to kill himself. And she said, we don't know that to be true. I was like, Brittany, and she said, okay, Jake has broken into your house. He has set it on fire. And there's a SWAT team with gun strong out front. One of my immediate neighbors, she actually knew. And he called her and said, something's going on in our neighborhood

right now. Amelia's house is on fire. We start speeding to the house. 911 is calling me and it's a 911 operator who has me on the phone with Jake's mom on the phone. Jake's mom is frantic and crying and she said Jake called me, saying he's gonna commit suicide. Please don't call his phone. The operator is trying to triage what is happening,

but essentially what happened was Jake called his mom to say goodbye. She got scared and called 911, and they pinged his phone and tried and gulated it and found it in our neighborhood. And by that time, the neighborhood had started calling 911 because they saw somebody break into a house and there was smoke coming out of the house.

So Brittany and I are driving as quick as we can. We get close to the house off the freeway and there's just fire trucks passing us in the car, paramedics passing us in the car. And police, it seems like there's hundreds of people descending upon our neighborhood we get there and There are hundreds of people in the street, but barricaded by police tape. There are tons of fire trucks helicopters going overhead

SWAT teams running through the neighborhood in full gear. This is a beautiful neighborhood that looks like teams running through the neighborhood in full gear. This is a beautiful neighborhood that looks like it's on a movie set. I felt like we were at Universal Studios, like in some sort of movie scene. We jump out of the car and I start running towards the house and I'm stopped by a police officer. I say, that's my house, that's my house. They go, okay, you need to go talk to the hostage negotiator and they direct us to the schizibo that is like ground zero. I sit down, the negotiator has a laptop open, has Jake's Facebook page open, they start asking me questions. What are your kids names? What is he like? What are his friends names? All these things. And as I'm feeding them information, I hear the SWAT team on the bullhorn saying, Jake, come out for your sons. They're saying our son's name on the bullhorn. They're

just saying, don't do this. And you hear him yelling from inside the house. He was hanging outside the window with his clothes off and just blood all over him, smoke pouring out of our bedroom. And the SWAT team, they were stationed behind his car with guns drawn so that the fire department could have hoses on our house trying to put the fire out. That was where we camped out for the next six hours as they tried to get him to surrender. I'm so sorry. What was going through your head during this time? I remember telling the negotiator, please don't let him die, because all I could think of was,

what am I going to tell our kids? If their dad doesn't make it, our oldest was so attached to him, and I just knew it would break his heart. On the way there, I had called my mom, and my brother called me, and they were both scrambling to get on flights to get to me. I was just wantingambling to get on flights to get to me.

I was just wanting them to get him out of the house alive. I felt so sad for him. That's how horrible he feels. That's how low he's, that's how devastated he is and how can you not feel compassion for somebody that is in such a helpless state. His stepmom arrived after a few hours on scene, and I remember feeling this rush of anger. And I looked at her and I yelled,

do you believe me now? Do you believe me now that this is bigger than just a marriage problem? I started crying. When you're in these situations and you're told, until they hit you, until they do this, until it gets this bad, like you get nothing. You're isolated, you feel shame, you feel alone, and then finally things get so bad that you finally feel like, okay, now maybe people will believe me, maybe we'll finally get help, maybe this will finally stop.

It was hours of the house burning and he had apparently barricaded himself in the guest room at this point, people were out of their house with their children when they made it clear. We don't know if he has a gun, he has said he's had a gun, he has made threats to shoot out the window and people are just there with their kids, like watching everything unfold. After a little bit, I hear everybody start cheering. I asked the police officer, did he come out? He said, no, I don't

know what that's about. We had a dog, Gus. When we got on scene, they said, was anybody inside? And I said, Gus is inside. They were like, getting on the radio, like, who's Gus? And I was like, it's our dog. And they're like, okay. Is there any more humans inside? And I was like, you don't understand. He's a bulldog, and he'll be dead, but within 20 seconds with all that smoke.

Well, apparently Jake, before he set the house on fire, he had taken Gus out of the house and put him in his car so that he would be safe. The SWAT team realized that he was in the car, got him out of the car, and him in his car so that he would be safe. The SWAT team realized that he was in the car, got him out of the car, and that's why everyone was cheering because the dog that we thought was not alive was alive. A few hours later, finally he surrendered. The SWAT team went inside and brought him out. I didn't see him or anything. I just was told like he came out. He's on the ambulance and he's being taken to the hospital.

By this time his aunt was there, his uncle, his mom, and his stepmom was there. And they asked me what I needed. And I said, I need to figure out what we're doing from here. I can't go pick the boys up. I need somebody to make sure they're safe tonight and that they're loved. So his mom and stepmom went and picked up the boys from school and took them home that night. While I stayed and waited for them to clear the house so that I could go inside and see if there was anything salvageable. But about seven o'clock that night I went inside and it was the moment I walked through the door, I realized it was not a suicide attempt

and that it was something different. The police warned me that it wasn't a suicide attempt because they said his wounds were superficial. What they didn't warn me or prepare me for was what I was going to see when I went in the door. The first thing I saw was spray paint on the wall that said Amelia did this. And all the pictures on the walls that were of me had knives and screwdriver stabbed through them. There were blood-written messages on the walls,

bloody handprints everywhere. He had taken pictures of me and if he didn't stab them, he tore them in half so that I was missing from all of them. He had ripped doors off their hinges and thrown them down the stairs. What wasn't devastated by the fire was completely destroyed by him. The worst of the fire was in the bedroom. His mom had come and taken most of his stuff out of the house when the restraining order was served. So all the clothing and everything in the house was mine and

the boys for the most part. He had taken all of my clothes and jewelry, everything, and put it on the chair that I nursed the boys in, the recliner in our room, and piled everything on there and blow torched it to set it on fire. The only thing that I really wanted was a necklace that my grandmother had given me. And it was placed on top of a jewelry box and it was completely ash and dust.

There was nothing to take. Brittany was there with me the whole time and we decided that I would go to Jake's aunt's house to stay the night there. She and I stopped at Coles and bought underwear and something to sleep in. And I bought a stuffed animal for the boys and a couple things of clothes for them and went to her house. There were definitely really touching moments that night. One of them was one of my neighbors who I had never met. She ran across the street and I'm standing there just lost on the front porch and she hands me, I don't even remember how much it was,

it was like $250 and she said, be the neighbor's wanted to give you something. So you had money to buy clothes, the red cross showed up, and handed me gift cards. I had nothing left. Everything was gone. All my kids things were gone. I had the clothes that I left that morning in, and they had the clothes they left that morning in, and that was it. It was really sweet of people that I don't even know to do that.

I'm so sorry. It's really amazing in those moments, the people that show up in those acts of kindness and how much they truly mean. Yes. So I'm at his aunt's house. She sets me up in one of their spare rooms. And by this time my brother had gotten there. And I'm laying by myself.

He walks in and he said, what the fuck is going on? And I was like, well, it's been an interesting day. And he's like, no, no, no, no. Everybody is downstairs eating pizza as though nothing fucking happened. What parallel fucking universe are we in right now? What is wrong with this family?

It was weird. It didn't really strike me as weird until my brother called to my attention how weird it was. And he was like, we're getting out of this house. strike me as weird until my brother called to my attention how weird it was. And he was like, we're getting out of this house. He was paranoid that Jake was going to find us. And I was like, Jake is on his way to jail. I was told because I got an emergency protective order from the sheriffs that night.

You can register for a phone call that basically alerts you when there's a change in status if you're a victim of a crime of the person that was the perpetrator. And so I knew if he were to be released that I would at least get this phone call. Brittany also registered for this number. So we both were on alert. But my brother was like, no, you're not staying at this house. By the time my mom arrived, we decided that we would go stay at my mom's friends house, who was also local. The boys were dropped off. and I had told them, you know what, it just so happens that yesterday,

a family was going through our neighborhood and they needed a home, and they loved our home so much because they knew that we were gonna have to move, and that we were in the process of figuring out where we were gonna move next. I was trying to prepare them for obviously like having to sell the house. So I said, but they loved it so much. So we're going to let them move in. But they told me that you could make a list of all the things from your room that you wanted and that they would ship

it to us when we finally get our new place. That was kind of a task that we would do from time to time, as they knew that I was keeping this list of their things that came in their mind that they wanted at the new house. I want our bed and I want this stuffed animal and I want my, you know, spider-man toy. My job was to try and locate all of those items. Our insurance let us know that they were not sure if they were going to cover the loss of the home because it was arson by an owner of the home. They prepared

me for, we're going to do all we can, but this may be a total loss for you and you may not have any claim. That was scary, but the insurance company put us up in a hotel and we were going to be put up in the hotel for, you know, a few months until we found a home. Whenever we would stay in hotels, I would always tell it boys like we're going on an adventure and we're going to stay here and I made sure there was a pool there. My work was wonderful. My work said take some time off, get your feet back under you, we're fine here. Brittany lived right across the street from the hotel so she was with us every night essentially and she would bring her kids over and we would have big slumber parties

for the first few nights. One night Brittany and I are sitting there and it's about midnight and my phone rings. I was like, who the hell is calling me at midnight? And then her phone rings. And we both look at each other and we pick it up and it's that registry calling both of us saying that the status of the inmate has changed and he is out on bail. Both of us looked at each other like what the hell do we do now? He was also on the policy.

The insurance company told me that he would know where we were the next morning after consulting with a whole bunch of people at my work. I worked in the healthcare field, a lot of the mental health providers. They highly urged me to go into hiding. So I packed up the room and we went to a women's shelter. You follow the police car and they take you to the women's shelter. You follow the police car and they take you to the women's shelter. And it was in a neighborhood I knew very well. And what have never known that a women's shelter was there.

I've sent a text to my friends that had been helping me through this whole thing and said, I don't know when. I'm going to be able to reach back out to you. But I love you all. And thank you. And I'll see you on the other side, which turned out to be a very dramatic kind of statement because we were there but two days.

It was awful. I don't know how women's shelters are. This was my only experience with one, but it was not the environment that I wanted my boys in. I decided I'm just gonna roll the dice and try to be anonymous on my own. Be real smart about places that I go and watch my back in case he's looking for us because he was out on bail and I had no idea where he

was. So we moved back into the hotel and I had a friend who met me at the airport and rented a car for me for a month or two so that we could drive around not worried about him knowing the car that we were in. I had amazing people rally around me to get me and the boys through this time. It was a gift because people don't get to really see what they mean to people ever, you know, you hear. really see what they mean to people ever, you know, you hear what people mean to people at their funeral. And I got to hear and see what I meant to people firsthand. And it was a lucky thing. It made the journey a lot easier. We filled the front desk people in on what was going on. We told them if anyone calls the front desk and asks for me by name to immediately call me because anybody coming to look for me, I was registered under an alias. One day my stepdad tried it out.

They passed because he called and asked for me my name and they immediately rang my room and said, someone just called looking for Amelia. And I said, okay, good, you guys passed. I wasn't there long before I got a call from the police department of the city that we were staying in. It was a detective who said that he was conducting a threat assessment on Jake,

because Jake's former employer had contacted them after hearing about the fire and that Jake was making erratic threats at his workplace. That was concerning a lot of his co-workers and a lot of people were scared for their safety. They had hired an armed guard to stand outside the company and they had reached out to the police department to do a threat assessment on him to figure out if he was an actual threat. It worked out well because I was staying in that same city and the detective said, we're going to do some extra patrols around the hotel you're staying in to make sure that you're safe.

It gave me a little bit of solace. How would you say that this impacted the boys during that time? How did you explain to them about where their dad was? It was hard on both of our children. This whole journey was hard between the crying for him at nighttime, waking up to him not being there, not seeing him for stretches of days at a time. It was definitely hardest on our oldest, who was very attached to him, and he would cry and ask for his dad. I would rip my teeth and hug him, tell him that we both loved him, and that he would see Daddy again soon.

And that Daddy was trying to work through some things right now. Ultimately, when the criminal process started, the terminology that I would always use with them was that Daddy broke some rules and they're very important rules. And when you're an adult, breaking rules has a lot bigger consequences because you should know much better. And because of that, he has to go into timeout and work for his privileges back.

Mostly, I would try to reiterate that I understood how hurt they must feel, and how sad they must feel, and that I loved them, that he loved them, and that they would see him again. It wasn't easy. Eventually we had to get a 730 evaluation ordered by the court. That basically did a full evaluation of Jake and of me to figure out where to go from here with custody and visitation. During that 730 evaluation, he tested high for her having

anti-social disorder and being a narcissist and showed very little remorse for what he had done. His stepmom had said in the 730 because family members are very much a part of the interview process. They had gone on record and said they thought I was overreacting and that I was being too dramatic about everything. And that was essentially when my relationship with them ended. That was pretty devastating. Eventually, we found a house that the insurance company said they would back the claim. They said it's not normal that they would cover an arson by someone that owned the home, but because I had the restraining order and because I did everything to get him out of

the house and this was not my doing, that they would cover me a hundred percent. Any of the things in the house that he tried to claim loss on, they would deny. The insurance company was unbelievably amazing. They put us up in a really small house that was about a mile from my work, and that's where the boys and I landed for gosh, the next year or two. When we got there, I had the full list

of all the things that the boys said they wanted from the old house, and I was able to find everything on their list. My oldest wanted what he called sneaky. It was a blue snake that we had got from an amusement park that we went to, and he had colored on it, and it was ripped up. I mean, this thing was loved, and completely just a mess. So I found it on Amazon and told him, you know what, buddy, what if, because we're moving in a new house, we send Snaky to the groomer before he comes home. That way he looks all new and he feels all fancy in his new house. And my son thought it was a great idea. So when it came to opening the box,

he looks at it and he's like examining it and I'm thinking he's on to me, he's gonna know this isn't sneaky. I'm trying to figure out my next move. He's like, mommy, sneaky looks amazing and it was a really nice moment because they got their old bed, that they thought was their old bed,

all the toys that they wanted back and sneaky. I'm so happy that you got sneaky back and that you guys were able to get your own place and start to move forward. It's so heartwarming that you spent so much time doing that for them. It was really sweet. Thank goodness they had you.

Was he able to seat them during this time? Yeah, so he was out on bail for quite some time. And ultimately, it took a good year and a half, two years for him finally to get convicted. That's one of the reasons why we had to do the 730 evaluation is the court wanted to figure out what is the best interest of the children as far as how much they can be around their dad and what's appropriate. What was decided was that he could have monitored

visitation by his parents, by his step-on and dad. The boys got to see him and it was wonderful. It was definitely hard because I didn't want to be anywhere around him. I would have very panicky feelings when I would even be in his presence and I didn't want the boys to get any of that energy at all. As far as they knew everything was fine, daddy was just going through some stuff and all was well. I was hypersensitive because I grew up around parents that I felt that energy. I felt that disdain and that anger. I know how damaging that is. His mom and I also had a falling out

for a few reasons, didn't feel comfortable having her be around the boys because I didn't fully trust that she would have the ability to not be super emotional around them or put Jake's interest over theirs. And there was just a lot of uneasiness. And so I didn't speak to her for about a year. It wasn't until the boys started asking about her

and getting sad about not seeing her. And that was when it was like, okay, we need to reevaluate. The loss there, let's see if enough time has passed to where we can find the new situation. I reached out to her and said, let's start with FaceTime. If you can FaceTime with them and you cannot cry, if you can just be happy and keep everything that's happened with Jake out of it

and all your feelings about how I've dealt with it out of it, we started FaceTiming her and she did a wonderful job. It is not easy to be happy and go lucky when you have all this devastation around you. And she did a great job. And then one day I called her and said, I'm taking the boys to Chuck E. Cheese. Here are the parameters.

You cannot take photos. You cannot tell Jake where we're at. You cannot tell Jake you're coming to see them. And when you see them, you cannot talk about what's going on. They have no idea what transpired. It has to be about you and them. And she said, okay, I can do that. She showed up and she was amazing with them.

And you could tell when she first saw them, she teared up a little bit and she pulled it together. I have a lot of respect for her ability to do that. Every kid deserves a grandma like her. And I'm so glad that they have that, because they'll be better for it. I highly respect it. I understand not everybody can have that,

but I love that your kids get that. And I love that she respected the boundaries you set, because that's how you rebuild trust. Yeah. It was very clear that, to me, that she had done something, some kind of work in order for all of the people involved in this situation, in order for any of us to have any sort of semblance of a healthy life after, we all had to do some serious work on ourselves.

It would have been very easy to walk away and be like, I did nothing. The dude burned our house down, went bananas on methamphetamine. It would have been very easy to wash my hands of it and say, I had no part in this. But I did. I allowed certain behavior. I accepted certain behavior. I chose to overlook all the deficits in what a relationship should be because I was running out of time to have kids.

And now because I now have children that are going to feel those deficits for many years, and I'm the one that did that to them. And that is not okay. And there's inventory that I need to take of myself so that I don't continue that pattern. If I didn't do that work, I would be putting us in the same pattern over and over again. And that's not okay. There's things I certainly did wrong and I needed to figure

out why I made those decisions because I owed it to myself and I owed it to my kids. It was a very long process on both sides because what I've learned about the legal system is it's definitely not a straight line and it's not fast. The legal process ended up being a few years. Our divorce was frozen for a while because there was a criminal case attached to it. There were certain things that he couldn't say in civil court because it would, I don't know the right term, but like criminalize him in his other case. He eventually was sentenced. I was able to give a victim impact statement

in front of him in the judge where I was able to tell the court exactly what his years of harassment and ultimately the just total devastation of our family home had done to me and our children. Ultimately, he was convicted of felony arson, breaking an entering and vandalism for all of that. He received one year of jail time with

eligibility for a pay and stay jail if he could afford it, which he could. So he was able to go to jail from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. every day for a year and be out all day long to go to work and his meetings and all of that. Quite honestly that felt so unfair at the time. I was at a loss for how someone could do all that he had done and basically get to continue to live life as usual. After that year, he'll have three years of probation with 13 years hanging over his head if he violated his probation. His parents could continue doing the supervised visitation, but during that year of incarceration, he would not see the boys, but he could FaceTime them. And

that was something that I felt very strongly about because whatever he's done, the boys are going to benefit from having their dad in their life. I did not want our boys to ever think for a day that neither of their parents loved them. I was looking at Instagram one weekend that he had them. It was overnight that he was able to have them with his parents. I was still connected to one of his cousins on Instagram. I looked at her story and I see that she's up near Northern California and I see my boys in the frame. The protective order was very clear that they could not leave the county. And now I see pictures of my boys but like five counties away. I freak out and call his parents, what are you guys doing?

What the hell is going on? You're not supposed to take them outside of this county and now you're like 10 hours away. It was this continual lack of respect for boundaries that Jake always had. He was always above rules. So we called him into court and the judge terminated visitation. A few months before he was incarcerated, the boys once again immediately stopped being able to see their dad. And once again, I had that internal battle of, did I do the right thing? Should I have just let it go? I could have just let it go,

but I also know that holding boundaries and accountability is a very big deal in recovery. I remember the judge telling me in court that after the arson, he said, I have a lot of respect for mom, but one thing that I don't is that she dropped the restraining order. I questioned mom's judgment. That stuck with me. The judge basically

reprimanded me for dropping that first restraining order, and my house was burned down three days later. If I don't hold him accountable, am I just doing the same thing I did before? It was hard being the one that was constantly the trigger point of the boys losing access to their dad that something that I still struggle with knowing if I did the right things but I did the best I could at the time I took them out for ice cream. And I told them you know how we talked about daddy breaking some rules well the judge has decided that daddy needs to go to adult timeout for a while. And that in timeout, he's not allowed to do things that are really important to him. And one of the things that's most important to him

are the two of you. So daddy needs to be in timeout and he won't be able to see you, but he can call you. And once daddy is out of timeout, he'll be able to see you again. And I know that he's going to work really hard in timeout because I know how much you guys mean to him. My youngest, it rolled off his shoulders and my oldest, he was devastated. I'm so sorry. What is your relationship evolved into now? I never thought that we would be where we are now,

especially after how I've seen the relationship with his mom evolve over time, how dear I hold her. I've learned to never say never, and to always have hope that there's another side to some of the darker moments. He served his time, he worked his way from court appointed monitor, which is like a court ordered person, not a family member, that monitors the visitation. He worked from that to full days to overnight visitation supervised by his sponsor. That first overnight I was at Target. I had a whole cart full of those tiles,

and I was convinced that I could sew tiles into all the clothing that I was packing so that if he abducted them, I would at least know their location. I made it all the way to the checkout before I realized I just had to let go and trust that they would be safe. I felt like he was getting access to them and that he hadn't earned it back yet and that he was still blaming me for everything. But the court is there to work in the best interest of the kids. And luckily he rose up, did the work to actually be a good functioning parent for the boys. He has every other weekend with the boys. It's been a very slow step up process. He did two years of monitored visitation in different varying degrees.

It is very clear that he's working a program. It is in stark contrast to the person that told me they were working a program when we were married. He is consistent. He shows up when he says he's going to show up. He is not late for pickup serve drop-offs. When I've had issue with some of the things that he's done with the boys, regular co-parenting things, he listens, he's respectful, he processes it, and he addresses it. This is not the person who was strung out on meth and threatening my life.

This is a very different person in front of me. The best thing for me and for our children is that I take him for who he is in front of me in this moment. I've had to really compartmentalize the different people that I know him to be, take him for face value. He's still at his core a narcissist. He still has anti-social personality disorder or at least that's what the 730 evaluation found.

However, he is doing the work to override his initial instincts and be a better person for our children. I have to have a hell a lot of respect for that. I've remarried and have an amazing husband who is a partner that I hope everybody finds in somebody. We have a two-year-old now who my boys adore, and I have a stepdaughter who is beautiful and wonderful, and my life is blissfully predictable. I know what my house looks like when I open that door every day. I have someone that shows up for me and our family every day. And I'm able to sit on the sidelines of soccer games

and watch my two boys and have their dad sitting next to me cheering them on from the sidelines. To this day, they don't know what happened. They know that he did jail time. They've asked questions like, Mommy did daddy go to jail. Because you told me that a judge decided that he had to go on time out and it was adult time out. That sounds like jail. We'll talk about it for a minute and then I'll encourage them to talk to their dad about it. They want to know why we got divorced, at least my nine-year-old does. I tried to answer it as honestly but age appropriately as I can. The answer that I give him is your dad and I got married for a very specific reason and

that was to take the best of him and the best of me and to make the two of you. And we did that. And that was the reason why we came together. And for a lot of reasons that will not make sense to you, we just couldn't stay together. I've had to kind of evolve that conversation with my nine-year-old specifically who asks a whole lot of pointed questions and doesn't take surface-y answers.

He remembers that day that Jake showed up at his daycare to take him and he still talks about it, about why were you so angry that day that he came to school to get me? What I've told him is that daddy was making decisions that were scary, that weren't safe for him to be around them or to be around me. And that is why I was trying to keep him from taking you

that day is because my job is to protect you. And in that moment, daddy was not safe to be around. However, he has done so much work because you and your brother mean so much to him. And neither of you deserved for the two of us not to be married, but you absolutely deserved for the two of us to be the best people we could be and the best parents that you deserve. And that's what's most important. And that's where we're at. And that's what matters.

I try my best to keep that narrative because at this moment in time, it will not serve them to know what their dad did. It will not serve them to know what happened to our home. They have been the compass through all of this. And we love them so much that we have faced our weaknesses and become stronger because of it. And it's because we love them so much. And that they had nothing to do with the reason why we're not together Thank you so much for

All of the time and energy you have given to share your story I greatly appreciate it and I've learned a lot just through listening to you and I've benefited a lot from your words. Thank you Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe friends. Something was wrong is a broken cycle media production, created and hosted by me, Tiffany Rees. If you'd like to support the show further, you can share episodes with your loved ones, leave a positive review, or follow something was wrong on Instagram.

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