An Extraordinary Life

Chapter 24 - Settling down with his anger building up; death threats

We were happy with the house and I was mostly happy with all the new furniture. We hired a part-time maid to help with all the unloading and cleaning once a week while I was taking care of all the other matters. He took care of all the paperwork and complained about why he had to be the one to do it.

His anger built up really quickly this time, since he hadn't had a chance to really vent at me before we came. All the work we had done on immigrating drove him crazy. During his swearing and yelling, he almost threw a crystal fruit bowl at me one night when we were having dinner with my sister and her husband. He drank as usual and got angry upon my disagreement on something we were talking about. Luckily we talked him down and stopped him for the sake of our children. He was losing it again.

The following months got worse with Jayden having problems sleeping through the night. I had to pat Jayden to sleep two to three times a night until he was over three years old. That gave me a tennis elbow. I already couldn't sleep well with my husband in the other bed with the loud snoring after his heavy drinking. I had to take sleeping pills sometimes and wear ear plugs.

We were really unhappy and he would pick fights all the time about nothing in order to yell and swear at me and give me the horrible bulging blood-shot-eye look. I was always in fright-or-fight mode and felt unsafe.

Around my birthday, he threatened, "I'm going to kill you."

I felt my life really was in danger. I talked to my sister about all his bad treatment, who said, "If you decide to leave him, Taylor, Jayden, and you can live with us before you can get back on your feet."

About two weeks later he was getting angrier and said to me with an oddly calm and wry voice, "I will get somebody to kill you." He was sober.

I felt a chill throughout my body and believed him because he had money and it didn't cost much to hire a low-life to kill me! I started to get a bit paranoid. I told my sister I was very scared and that I believed it was time to end the marriage and leave him.

But my sister got scared and worried that he would come for us and cause her and her family harm like the OJ case and turned me down. I didn't blame her as he was acting like a crazy guy and I didn't want anything bad to happen to my sister and her family because of me. I had only been there for four months, had only one old friend/colleague living there, and had no money.

I didn't know what to do and had no place to go. I could only stay and hope that nothing bad would happen. I panicked but couldn't do anything except wait like a sitting duck.