In the Patriarchy, No One Can Hear You Scream
My ex claimed he was freeing me from oppression, but it took years for me to begin my financial escape
I needed a job. In four hours, I cobbled together a resume, pieced together from my 12-year-old curriculum vitae, a document assembled in my final year of grad school studying creative writing. I needed my own income. I’d been denied it the ability to work outside the home since I became a mother. Since I married, really.
My MFA was meant to open the door to teaching at a college level. Instead, I’d used my student loans and scholarships and work income during college to house and feed not just myself, but my husband. Then I’d made his babies. Every time I mentioned how much I’d like to work and build my career, he’d argue that “it just didn’t make sense.” I wouldn’t get paid enough to offset the cost of childcare. And we wouldn’t know the people taking care of our kids. I stayed in the house. I mothered full-time. After 12 years, I made some discoveries about both my husband and myself. I needed a job so I could leave.
We married at 18, both of us products of conservative religious teachings, such as: You can’t have sex until you pledge your lives together under God. Men marry women. Women marry men. Sex is between a man and a woman. Specific to my upbringing and upheld in our relationship: Women are meant to service men. Also, sex is inevitable if you date—so no dating. Just marriage. Better hurry up then. Plus there was my need to escape my abusive natal home, the only articulated path to which was finding a husband.
I picked someone with what seemed like a healthy life. His parents didn’t fight. They managed their ample dual income well. Their home was always clean. White. Two kids, boy and girl. Upper middle class. Midwestern.
My family life was chaotic. Messy. Brown.
I was marrying up, right? I was marrying into whiteness and security. I believed I’d found someone who would be a partner. After all, in his home I was welcomed and fed. No one yelled. No one got hit. Everyone had access to what they needed when they needed it. His parents took me to see colleges. His mom brought me swimming and toured every bookstore she could find with me. They bought me a laptop when I started my undergraduate studies. They had gifts for me under the tree every Christmas. And later, that first year of college, they paid off my credit card bill when my husband ran it up over $600. That was the first time he took my money.
Years later, I kept money for my allotted spending in an envelope taped in a kitchen cabinet. I’d slip a $20 bill inside during Target runs, choosing the cash back option to make sure I got the money before it vanished. I learned that if it was “available” in our joint account, he would spend it even if it was clear I hadn’t received my agreed-on portion. This included the savings I’d created over years to take our kids to meet my family in Lebanon. But during the war in 2006, he decided the money shouldn’t just sit there. Lebanon was too unstable. I probably wouldn’t be able to go anyway, not safely. He had access to the account and that was that. My savings disappeared.
Every month, I dipped into our dwindling join savings to cover his personal spending budget overages. I kept spreadsheets and tracked all purchases. He bought himself video games, new tech, and lunches out, even though I packed his lunches for him. Even though I used either Saturday or Sunday every weekend on meal prep for our family of five to keep our spending at or below what he brought home.
I begged him to eat the meals I made. To stop going over budget. He told me “we” could figure it out. That man had never denied himself anything, but he denied me everything. All I was allowed was healthcare, the need for which he still weaponizes by calling me “crazy” in front of our children.
So I needed a job. I opened my own bank account. I put in applications and interviewed. I updated him on my newly limited availability, letting him know he’d need to pitch in more with the kids and the house. All of this was a predecessor to a realization that ended our relationship: My ex and I had both been dating. We both had girlfriends. I’d thought I might be bisexual, but my experience in a female-female relationship made me realize I would never be happy with a cis man again. I began the simultaneous processes of feeling out my queerness and determining the value of half our household assets so I could move out and move on.
He told me I could stay. He offered to keep me on his health insurance. To let me live in the same house with our kids. He would house and feed me on his income. I just needed to continue the childcare, cleaning, and cooking. I knew what this meant: I would be a live-in servant. I’d remain trapped because by choosing to stay, I’d be sacrificing my financial freedom. By choosing to leave, I’d be choosing poverty.
And I almost did it. I tried. I wanted to be close to the kids. Plus, there was this moment that felt sweet at the time. We stood together in what we called the library, a den we’d installed a wall of bookcases in. It was the room I’d moved into when I left our marital bed. We were talking about how we never imagined our marriage ending. The sun was shining through the picture windows on us. He told me he wanted better for me. We were smiling. He swept his arm around like a wizard. “I free you from the patriarchy,” he said, and it meant something to me to hear that. A newly-realized queer, brown woman trying to find her place in a white man’s world. He meant it, and I believed he would continue to mean it. After all, we’d been best friends for nearly 20 years.
I truly might have stayed, but it took over a month to convince him I should be allowed to have doors on the room I moved myself into (formerly our library). Doors were too expensive, he said. Then, once he agreed and installed them, he wouldn’t let me keep them closed. I wasn’t allowed to stop people from entering, using my bathroom, or even sitting on my bed. He told me it “didn’t make sense” for the room to no longer be accessible to everyone when it always had been before. He brought his dates there after work. He shot down my suggestion we turn the outbuilding into a space where I could live, although he did so within a year of me leaving and moved our 13-year-old son into it.
After we divorced, it took him three years to remove his debt from my credit card. He didn’t pay the small court-mandated child support (about $10 a month) because it “was ridiculous.” I was in poverty, working 36 hours a week as a barista until COVID-19, and then scrambling for remote employment while juggling a barista-related disability. I needed every penny, even if he saw the amount as ultimately minuscule. Yet I let him convince me to waive his arrears and state we didn’t need to pay each other going forward in order to end a by-the-hour mediation I couldn’t afford. Then he abused our negotiated custody agreement without compensating me even though he made more than four times what I did per month. Finally, he came after me for child support with a high-end law firm when I moved out of state to escape him. Even though I haven’t been able to level up my income due to my time as a stay-at-home mom caring for our children—a choice we made in order to make ends meet by not paying for childcare while he grew his work experience and income.
I’ll explain something here: When I say “escape him,” I mean him cornering me and accusing me of something every time we swapped the kids. Anything. He’d grown angry. In response, I’d grown shifty and avoidant. That validated his anger, it seemed, and those by-the-car “conversations” grew crueler and more intense. I would shake for hours afterward. My partner (now my wife) told me not to let him talk to me, but I didn’t know how to cut off the man I’d been convinced knew more than me.
Finally, my therapist encouraged me to relocate like I’d always wanted to. She told me to stop talking to him in person. Suggested his tactics were narcissistic. That I should only communicate with him in writing. The first lawyer I hired said the same, offering to handle all communication on my behalf, but I couldn’t afford that. The next lawyer I was able to retain two years later read some of his communications and insisted I not speak to him outside of writing at all. His behavior needed to be on record. More importantly, I needed to keep myself emotionally safe.
Once, in a moment of weakness, I overshared that I was struggling financially. He suggested we meet up. I thought he wanted to discuss a more equitable financial arrangement, perhaps opt in to paying child support or allow me to opt out of paying it. This was when I was still trying to fulfill the “amicable” part of our divorce agreement. Before I gave up.
When we sat down, he began to tell me how to manage my money. I cut him off, fighting back tears of rage. How dare he? The man who overspent every year we lived together. He might know what a budget was, but he’d never applied one. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know how to manage money; the leap my credit score took as soon as we were no longer financially connected attested to that. It was that I didn’t have access to money. I’m a brown, queer woman in this xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, post-capitalist timeline. Remember? Didn’t he recognize that and free me from the patriarchy?
Still, it would take another cruel exchange for me to fully see him for what he was. One I’d bet he doesn’t even remember, because it was simple to him. Obvious. He told me in the gentle, patronizing tone he’d always used when letting me know I was wrong that my “being poor” was my choice. I could have stayed. He’d offered, hadn’t he? I could be financially comfortable now if I’d remained in his home. He made no mention of how years of gendered violence against women by the state had a role in my inability to compete for jobs in a depressed economy. He was oblivious to the fact that me staying in the home while he worked built up 12 years of strikes against me while his career bloomed. He neglected to take into account that I am visibly brown, and even told our children I’m white because the U.S. census says Middle Easterners are Caucasian.
His cis/white/hetero/male privilege was on full display. I was horrified to realize I’d spent so many years loving and caring for this person who not only didn’t comprehend how much the patriarchy was at fault for my financial difficulty, but felt justified in his own complicity. All of this ran through my mind, yet I said nothing to him. Just shut down and stared blankly, a good, quiet woman holding in my scream.
I’ve been four states away for almost four years and I’ve only just begun to break free of his financial hold. It wouldn’t have happened for another five years except our middle child got tired of him blatantly catering to our eldest and only son. She decided to graduate high school early and came to live with me for her first year of college. This means I now receive the child support. But I had to do the legwork of getting the state child support tracking system number to which he can pay it.
Next year, our youngest will move here, too. They are also tired of the favoritism, of men being prioritized over everyone else. My ex-husband makes over four times what I do. Still, I’ve managed to afford child support, live within my means, and haven’t overdrawn an account since we divorced. I’ve even accrued a small savings. And I don’t have to hide money from my wife to make it happen.
That first job was me setting a boundary that led to my escape. The jobs I’ve had since are me building the life I deserve—one where I feel safe, secure, and valued beyond my ability to rear children, prepare food, or keep a house clean so that a man can leave it behind every day, work in a field he loves, and buy himself whatever he wants whenever he wants it.
is a brown, queer, Durham-based writer and instructor whose work prioritizes the engagement of difficult topics. After recognizing the personal benefits of writing for release and recovery, she has made her practice public for the last 15 years, offering courses independently as well as through the . Her work has appeared in Verywell Mind, Survivor Lit, Exit 7, [wherever], The Archipelago, and The Manifest-Station. | A guest post by
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Well-written and very clear, specific--it's the sort of honest writing that makes this magazine worth reading.
I will always grieve for the women trapped by the earthquake, the ones the men won't rescue because they are not allowed to touch women. "Let them die rather than commit the sin of touching a woman." They are waiting for the women diggers to free them. The women medical helper, where are they? The Taliban does not allow women to study medicine. I grieve over them, the bones of our sisters.