</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
Mouse_ said:
if someone is abusing my kids, man I'm out of there...I'm sorry perhaps I'm being dense here, but I do feel angry reading this...perhaps mothers need to apologise for not escaping with their children?

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">Mouse, I think I'm the dense one. It took me many, many years to wake up to the fact that abuse was occurring in my marriage. When I grew up, I was verbally and emotionally abused all the time and rarely a day went by when I wasn't hit by a parent (usually my mom but sometimes my dad). This just seemed "normal" to me. In my own marriage, I thought I could provide my kids with a home not like my own. I did not yell at them, belittle them, hit them, etc. I told them I loved them frequently (neither of my parents ever told me that). I thought I was doing good! And my H hit my kids only occasionally--it just seemed mild in comparison to my own childhood, so I maybe I thought, hey this is a pretty good situation we have here. The truth is that my H can be very angry at times and we all were kind of scared of him. And he is emotionally abusive in his own many ways. I didn't recognize any of this as "abuse" until I was over a year into therapy. So I guess I am kind of dense. I am now leaving the marriage and doing what I can for my children's emotional health and physical well-being. And I continue to work in therapy on how to set boundaries, not be a doormat, stand up to people, tell them no, etc. These are things I did not learn as a child but I am trying to learn now. One thing that did make me feel well at least the girls felt that I did do something, was that the youngest told the specialist, "my dad gets angry at us and my mom tries to protect us."