Go to the bank with your ID, check the balance, take what you want out of it. Then leave the SOB. You don't have kids keeping you together. Stay with a friend or family member if you have to. But leave him and get a divorce.
momz
time to leave after 42 yrs of marriage
by tiffy0212 23 Replies latest social family
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dawg
First thing to do, go and see a lawyer, use those notes you've kept on his abuse to hand him his penis in a watch pocket, make sure you can get what's coming to you before you walk away. Then go and live your life to the fullest, take some of that money and visit Paris, or some place you've never seen.
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jstalin
Start over... maybe go to college, takes some classes in a subject that interests you. Pursue your own interests. Your life isn't wasted. It's never too late to pursue your interests.
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winnower
Harvey H. Jackson: Husbands, a word of warning
05-28-2008Back in a pile of clippings I clipped in case I ran dry, column-wise, was a piece telling how Mary Winkler, the Tennessee wife who shot and killed her preacher-husband, was freed after 67 days of treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder. Add that time to the five months she spent in jail awaiting trial and she served less than a year for her "crime."
Some folks were surely surprised by this, considering how we Southerners like to lock-em-up and throw away the key.
But not me.
'Cause I had read Julia Reed's In Defense of Southern Womanhood: How to Kill Your Man and Walk in the 1996 "Crime" issue of The Oxford American (to which you all should subscribe — no lie). In this wonderfully wicked essay, Reed revealed what anyone who has hung around a Dixie courthouse already knows — that "a woman — a white, well-dressed, church-going woman — in the Deep South could, generally, kill her husband and walk away."
Right.
Long before anyone down here had ever heard of PTSD or such, we knew instinctively that if a woman like that did something like that she surely had a reason. And even if it was hard for judge and jury to figure out just what it was, in the South the ultimate penalty was simply out of the question.
So, for that matter, was hard time.
Reed asked readers to consider the case of Erma Abraham, who shot her husband in the head with a .38, wrapped the gun in aluminum foil and put it in the deep freeze. Her defense, carefully concocted to touch deeply repressed sentiments in the all-male jury, was she went crazy when her husband forced her to commit "unnormal" acts that were described in detail to the deeply embarrassed "twelve good men and true."
For good measure, Erma's one-armed, never-miss-a-trick defense attorney, Howard Dyer, brought in a psychiatrist who testified that the defendant suffered from "acute brain syndrome" and that she never would have done what she did if she had known what she was doing.
Erma Abraham got 60 days in the state mental hospital and was set free.
The psychiatrist got $500.
Erma's attorney got enough money to buy a black Continental, which was known from then on as "Howard Dyer's Abraham Lincoln."
A few months later, the folks for whom Erma worked discovered that she could afford this sort of representation because she had been embezzling from the firm. But when they asked the district attorney to take action, he reminded them that "if she was crazy when she killed her husband, she must have been crazy when she took the money."
Case closed.
Erma's defense was the best defense because Southerners readily accept that the mind can do all sorts of things. A person who seems perfectly normal one day can "just snap" the next and return to normal a little later. And women, being the "weaker sex," are particularly susceptible to such snapping.
We have all heard how someone "just lost their mind," and when that happens there really isn't much to do but put things in order as best you can — as Jean Wilson of Nashville's wealthy Belle Meade district did when she killed her husband with a samurai sword. After the "tragic accident" (or so the jury concluded) but before the police were called, Jean and her best friend cleaned up the place (and destroyed the evidence) because she did not want everything to be a mess with all those people trooping around.
(Reminds you a little of the Sissy Spacek character, Babe, in Crimes of the Heart, who shoots her abusive husband in the stomach, goes into the kitchen, makes a pitcher of lemonade and offers him a glass as he lies there. Some folks — Yankees, mostly — found that improbable. Not me.)
As do most Southerners, I have my own story to show how and why women can murder husbands and go free.
In the summer of my youth, I often would slip into the courtroom to listen to lawyers argue their cases.
It was air-conditioned.
And one of those times I came on a lawyer arguing on behalf of a woman who, after years of abuse by a husband everyone knew as a bully, got up one morning, fixed his breakfast, got the kids off to school, and while he was finishing his second cup of coffee she went into the bedroom, into the closet, got the shotgun, loaded it, walked back into the kitchen where he sat and blew him all over the Frigidaire.
It was not a case where the "she just snapped" defense would work because of the way she got everything done before she did the deed — to which, by the way, she confessed when she called the sheriff.
Instead, her attorney catalogued for the jury a history of the man's misdeeds against his family, against his neighbors, against the community in general. No one, not even his own blood kin, rose to his defense. And when all was said and done, the lawyer concluded that here was a man who "needed killing."
The jury agreed.
The widow, white, well-dressed, church-going and a mother to boot, was put on probation.
And no one was surprised.
Are you?
http://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/2008/as-columns-0528-hhjacksoncol-8e27s5529.htm