After they were married, John issued instructions to Karen on what to wear and discouraged her from being seen in public wearing makeup. As her husband, he provided her with a weekly allowance for her spending money. At times, he literally threw food into her face when it wasn't cooked to suit his liking. The glaring of his black eyes taught her more cruelty than she had learned as a child watching her father beat her mother. Still, each evening when climbing into bed, Karen would say a prayer and ask God to help her to figure out what she was doing wrong in her marriage.
To keep her sanity, Karen turned more, and more, to talking to strangers about her problems. Finding anyone to listen and to pay attention to her pain was her daily goal. Fear began to infiltrate her life. On Sunday, she would find comfort in long talks with her preacher after church... she began to feel better by confiding in him. Talking was not her only soValiumpain pills and Valium came next. Everything she tried, backfired... still John kept beating her. Karen could not figure out what would set him off or cause the beatings.
Whenever she was home, her husband would scream at her, cuss at her, and hit repeatedly. The cycle never seemed to end; he would get angry, she would cry, he would beat her, he would say, "I'm sorry," and she would accept his apology.
A couple of time during Karen's unplanned pregnancy, John even kicked her in the stomach... still, she stayed with him; thinking their situation would someday improve. When the abuse worsened (and it did,) her need for sympathy worsened. Instead of seeking a woman's shelter, or calling the police (he was, after all, a policeman himself,) she spent endless hours crying to people who could not assist her. Karen told her friends all about how horrible John was to her.
Karen married John even after seeing him be cruel to his sister, obnoxious to his friends and allusive with his father. She still fell in love with him. He reminded her of her own father. A year later, Karen found herself in a situation that was driving her over the brink of insanity.
One day, working as a secretary at a real estate company, she looked up from answering the office telephone, only to see John standing beside her.
"Why aren't you at work?" she asked her husband, John. Opening her desk drawer, John first stared at his wife, and then he slapped his wife's hands and pulled her to her feet.
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