The one boundary I wish I’d set on day one: is if the two of us, the children, and their mother couldn’t all sit down face-to-face with an older, wiser adult present to hold everyone accountable, the relationship shouldn’t have continued past that point.
My husband came and got me without answering to anyone. No family sit-down. No elder asking the hard questions. Looking back, it feels like he found someone unclaimed and did whatever he wanted with what he found — like an orphan nobody was watching over. To this day, despite everything we’ve been through, there has never been one wise adult who questioned him about any of it. He moved through my life freely, with no fear of consequence, because there was never anyone positioned to hold him to one.
That conversation needed to happen before anything else did. Ten years later, it still hasn’t.