I have talked with a lawyer, but it has been a few years. It is probably worth doing so again. I didn't think of the women's crisis center. That sounds like a really good idea.

I feel like a line has been crossed tonight from which there is no going back, even if they are sitting here when I get home from work tomorrow. My emotional attachment to Spouse has just been a thin thread for a long time. The challenges around custody of our child has certainly held me in the marriage, but not that alone. My values around commitment, obligation and responsibility are deeply ingrained (programmed from the cradle, so to speak) and kept me in the marriage for many years before we had a child (who was not planned, by the way--I had been told several years earlier that I was infertile.) I remember telling a therapist once that the misery of staying was more tolerable than the guilt of violating the commitment I had made when I married.

But tonight changes things. The resumption of physical agression, the utter disregard for either me or our son expressed by this dissapearing act--my well release me from that commitment. There have been many times when what I most wanted to do was grab the child and run. But I knew that wasn't the right thing to do. That it was a childish, selfish and cowardly thing to do. I knew that in my particular circumstance it wasn't a necessary thing to do.

And he knows that too. Or he damn well should.