Warning - this post is not appropriate for kids under 18 years old. Parental discretion is advised. This is a personal recount of life changing events in 2025.

A year ago in the beginning of 2025, something shifted in me - I knew I deserved better and that our children deserved to see a mother who was happy and in a supportive relationship. My family deserved to live a peaceful life, free from nightly fights, aggression, and substance abuse. I never wanted our children to grow up in a kind of home with beer cans piling up in the recycling daily and their father coming home at unreasonable hours who was usually irritable, violent, and intoxicated. What could I do to move our family forward? I tried everything - I bought our family a house, signed us up and participated for weeks in couple’s therapy multiple times, provided our family the healthcare and substance abuse treatment needed. I covered the bills and took care of all the children’s daily needs, every single day, year in and out. I knew it wasn’t fair but I knew the other option required legal action. As time and my efforts went on I received belligerent, nightly rages that always resulted in an unsafe environment for everyone. There was no way to communicate with my co-parent, I tried all the methods over the 5 years of living as a family.

Finally on my birthday - the final day of winter in March 2025, I decided to go for a solo hike up Mount Sanitas in Boulder. I journaled and documented my journey along the way from the base to the summit. From the summit - I looked over Boulder, scanning my hometown on the final day of winter. A vision of me appeared on that hike and here is what I saw.

I was living in the luxurious home at the base of Mount Sanitas - those million dollar plus homes that are brand new. I was close enough to my parents that I could take care of them in their old age while they lived out their days in my childhood home just half a mile away from my dream home. I was married to a wealthy, loving, generous, and smart man who helped my children and I achieve our dreams as a family. They were teenagers gearing up for their futures as adults with college on the horizon. Laz and Pearl were excelling in school with a traumatic past far behind them, you would never know that they had lived through. They had grown to be healthy teenagers supported by years or adventurous travels around the world. I never envisioned myself as a writer but in this vision, I was a successful writer making millions of dollars a year selling my art and writing. I had left behind my years of teaching - I didn’t need to rely on it anymore because my art sales and writing projects generated more than enough revenue. I still had my house in Denver but it was a rental property that I managed.

When I had this vision, I thought it was impossible and was tremendously afraid to take the steps to get there. I wanted my co-parent to be with me in this fantasy - that he could recover from whatever was motivating his substance abuse, aggression, and violent behavior towards our family. My intuition, and later my research on abusive co-parents, told me otherwise. I still took every action I possibly could to preserve our family and move towards a brighter future before seeking help from the legal system.

Finally a fateful day appeared on Aug 17, 2025. The father of my children who had been living with us, left our family home enraged and I didn't hear from him until the following morning at 3 am. I woke up because I realized he never came home and was expecting him to walk through the door the way he usually did. Instead, when I checked the time, I had received a text from my co-parent that he was almost to Tennessee and heading to Florida where his mom lived.

I had no idea he would leave Denver, let alone Colorado because he never informed me where he was the day prior or what he was doing. All day prior, on 08/17/2025, I thought I should let my co-parent cool off and would eventually hear from him. This was his normal manic behavior as he would leave us on a nightly basis, always upset and enraged from something the kids or I did and just go somewhere - I never knew where. After leaving he would text me harassing and aggressive messages. I would usually find out later that my co-parent would go to the bar or sleep in his vehicle at the park, and then he always came home between 12 am - 3 am, usually intoxicated. He would do this because he always said he “had nowhere else to go.”

So, when I received his text that he was on his way to Florida where his mother lived, and he always said that he could only live in Denver if he lived with me and “the only other place” he could go was his mother’s house in Florida, I told him to stay there while we assessed his actions.

Here’s the question I am still trying to answer: how do you move forward with your co-parent after he abandoned our family and has a history of domestic violence? He nearly abducted our two children too, which he had been successful at doing earlier in the summer.

That morning on Aug 17 was truly traumatising. My co-parent and I had been sleeping in separate rooms and he had gone out drinking the night before on 08/16/2025. He came home around 12 am on 08/17 and then entered my room at 6 am, yelling at me and accusing me of infidelity - for the 10th time. This false accusation had been bruins since Friday 08/15, when I had gone on a hike with my ghost writer to discuss an article I hired him to help with for Voyage Denver Magazine about my art business. My ghost writer is a childhood friend who I have known my whole life and was 8 months freshly married to his wife. When my co-parent was verbally assaulting me with false allegations, I denied it repeatedly but my co-parent refused to believe me and just became more angry. By 6:30 am both of our children ages 1 & 4 years old woke up from their father’s yelling. I tried to talk to him and calm him down while I watched my co-parent manically pack his suitcase with only his t-shirts. Before leaving the house, my co-parent almost abducted our two children ages 1 & 4 years old. Neither child was packed, still in their pajamas and had not eaten breakfast. Our 1 year old was seatbelted into her babycarrier car seat and my co-parent was insisting our 4 year old son go with him as he was headed out the door. I demanded that the children be left with me at home since they hadn’t even had breakfast yet and were still in their pajamas. Our son refused to go with his dad and my co-parent became too frustrated. That Sunday, my co-parent left our home around 7:30 am and left both children with me. Come to find out that he would have taken our children out of state without my consent or knowing any sort of travel plan.

After my co-parent left that day, social media saw my co-parent’s story posts begging for money and sharing his venmo code because he didn't have the funds he needed. His last client had stopped hiring him back in June 2025 and we had been living entirely off my income while he was job searching. I later found out that he spent the last $50 on a debit card I gave him specifically for kiddo spending money that had been gifted to our children. He spent that money on gas in Kansas instead.

The question remains: how does a mother continue on without taking legal action when her co-parent nearly abducts their children, without any means to care for them, and goes out of state without making any travel plans with their mother? The situation was obviously getting too dangerous to continue on in the way we had been.

For the weeks following Aug 17, 2025, I decided that this was our chance to move our family in a different direction than we had ever gone in before. That direction was my last ditch option: to ask the legal system for help. I had tried everything else, but nothing had worked, which is normal for abusive partnerships. As much as others wanted me to get a protection order over the years - I still held off for some time while I researched the decision. Meanwhile, a brave crew of angels helped me to remove my co-parent’s items from my house - approximately 10,000 lbs of stuff over labor day weekend. They swooped in to help protect us and exit the cycle of intimate partner domestic violence.

On Sept 05, 2025 I received a Temporary Protection Order (TPO) which was made permanent on Oct 28, 2025 and granted me temporary sole custody of our children for 1 year. Sept - Oct 2025, I was going to court every single week to keep the TPO current. I gained pro-bono legal representation by way of Project Safegaurd. My personal life has dominated my time and I have fallen months behind on my work. On 10/02/2025, my co-parent began a custody case because he still wants to be in our children’s life regardless of his behavior.

And the question still remains, how do you continue with a co-parent after what my ex did on Aug 17, 2025? Currently, moving forward isn’t easy by any means, I am a sole custody single mom who is only making half our monthly budget as a self employed artist who is self represented in our current custody case. My co-parent and I were never married and we aren’t even common law married so luckily there is no divorce case. The daily emotional struggle is just as difficult as it was living with my co-parent - just now, we are recovering and healing instead of surviving and living with daily violence. The periods of clarity and hope become foggy, confusing, and overwhelmingly sad. My safehouse Denver advocate affirmed that exiting the cycle of domestic violence is incredibly difficult but staying in it will only become more dangerous. Most days, I don’t have hope and my worries dominate my internal narrative. Through therapy, community connection, and sticking to my daily routine, there will be a way out but for now the future feels like I am in a pitch black cave and alone.

I write this post because as I journey through healing from intimate partner domestic violence, I have felt hopeless and lost. My therapist said that, “not being able to see the future is a common sign of trauma.” My co-parent has gone to great lengths to discredit me and flip the narrative that I was the aggressor over the years and currently. This is common for abusers to do and part of what makes me a survivor. Therapy twice a week for me, once a week for our 5 year old, and the books I have read regarding domestic partner abuse, all confirm that my family was living with abuse and domestic violence that would have only gotten worse with time.

To close, I remember that I am incredibly brave and that leading up to Aug 17, I had been making multiple plans to help us exit the cycle of violence. As a family, we deserve to live peacefully and not allow violent behavior. I was brave enough to recognize an opportunity and take a risk that might work better than to continue to allow our family to live with daily dangerous and violent behavior. I could not have done this without my community, domestic violence survivor nonprofits, healthcare providers, legal personnel, childcare providers, and my parents. Your angelic presence has changed our lives forever and for the better.