My Divorce

The world was spinning around me. I could feel it moving under my feet, I felt like I was underwater. It was like some horror movie that was now my life. I was walking as fast as I could barefoot to the barn. My mind was racing, everything that I thought I knew was broken and gone. Hot rage and cool resolve wrestled together but deep down I already knew that things would never be the same. The great beautiful old gray barn came up on my left and I followed the gravel driveway to the back of it. I didn’t want him to see me as I wrestled with the news he just gut punched me with.

Simba the newest little calf came up to the fence when he heard me coming. He was hungry since it was almost his dinner time. He came up and I pet his pretty head and he looked at me through long fringy eyelashes. His golden brown coat glistened in the sunlight, he was such a pretty calf. I spoke to him softly and let him suck on my fingers to soothe him. I told him, “ It’s never going to be the same, It’s over.”. He didn’t seem too impressed but was happy to have some attention. I don’t know how long I stood there with him but I knew what must be done. Too many things had rocked our little family and this final blow shattered it all to bits.

Resolved I walked up to the house and I told him I wanted him to leave. Lukas Dahlin was a sobbing mess and I felt no pity, only disdain. He packed a bag. He looked at me as he went to pack his handgun. I knew what he was thinking and I yelled, “If you kill yourself you’re a f@#4ing coward!” and I walked out.

The girls were so upset, why was Daddy crying? Why did he have to leave? My heart ached for them. A conversation I’d had with Adriana maybe a year before came back to haunt me. I’d said Divorce was something God hated and that I would never ever do such a thing. Things in our marriage weren’t great but they weren’t too bad either. I know marriage is hard and I know that things aren’t all fairy tales and romance novels.

He left out the front door in the bright summer sunshine. It was around 6 o'clock and the July sunshine was still bright and piercing. I watched out the window as the Chevy pick up left a trail of dust and in it’s hurry fishtailed it’s way down the long gravel driveway. It was so surreal. I thought this was somebody else's life that I was watching. Through it all I also felt a strange lightness, a feeling of a huge weight being lifted off of me.

I thought back to that first month of our marriage. I had been sitting on the couch while he was in the shower and I picked up his phone. It wasn’t locked and the image on the screen when I opened it up was a very graphic pornographic image. I was shocked, he had claimed to never look at porn and his Dad had confirmed this when we were dating saying none of his sons did any of that. Yet, there it was. I confronted him with it when he came out. I was hurt and angry and I shut down, unable to deal with it in the moment without losing it. I went into the bedroom for the rest of the day and into the night. We were newlyweds and this was already an issue? He sobbed and cried and begged in a way I’d never seen before. He read the Bible and prayed and begged me to forgive him. He said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”. I really thought that he was so upset and repentant about the porn that it wouldn't happen again. I decided to forgive him and move with our lives. That was the first blow that began to crack the foundation of our marriage.

A couple months before that fateful day at the barn, a sister had come out to all the family saying she had been raped by one of her brothers. I was in shock and it seemed so impossible. How could this “perfect” family have such dark skeletons in it’s closet? I knew that the Dad had struggled with alcohol abuse and witnessed his verbal and physical assaults on his wife. I never dreamed that was only the tip of the iceberg. Luke was very upset by this, in fact he was sick about it. For a couple days he was not himself.

One day we pulled up in the driveway and he said that he had something to tell me. He said he had “inappropriately touched” one of his sisters when he was younger. I felt sick. I asked him to explain and he told me that when he was younger they used to touch each other and look etc. but it didn’t go any further than that. He said he realized he needed to stop when she came up to him and tried to perform a sexual act on him. He said he was about 16 or 17 and she was pretty close to his age he thought. He said that they lived together for about 5 years after that incident without anything happening between them. He said they had both moved on and she had forgiven him.

The math wasn’t adding up in my head though. I knew the sister he named was much younger than him. I was sick. I called my Dad and told him what I knew. He was pretty upset but he talked me down and said that I had to go off what I knew about him now. He was a faithful husband and a decent man. That it was a long time ago and I had to make my decision on how he was living now. The pastor of the Church we just started going to came over and talked with us as well. He was pretty concerned and thought that it was pretty valid for me to be so upset. Luke said that there was nothing else to tell and that was the extent of the relationship with his sister. I was still pretty sick inside but I thought once again that it was in the past and he had changed and seemed to be sorry about what he’d done.

Then a few weeks later, (the day this story started) he once again said, “there’s something I have to tell you.”. I just said, “No, not again” and laughed nervously. We had been having a really good day. It was Friday, the day before my 30th birthday. We had plans the next day, I don’t remember exactly what they were but I had been looking forward to it. I’d had an awesome workout that morning. Adriana had gotten to go with Daddy and get a new car seat and all the girls had gotten to have ice cream cones. They were happily playing in the living room and Luke was starting dinner for me. I had just come in the door and saw that same look in his face as when he told me about the issue with his sister.

I somewhat exaggeratedly drug my feet as I went to the bedroom. He followed me and I sat down on the bed and he sat next to me. He told me that he had gone to get a massage a couple times where he “let” them touch him “inappropriately”. He said he was sorry and he wanted to communicate with me and be truthful with me so we could have a better “deeper” relationship. He was still talking and my mind was reeling. It sank in what kind of massage he was talking about. It was illegal and those women were prostitutes and he paid them for sexual favors. He hadn’t gone there looking for a back massage and then suddenly they started touching him inappropriately. You have to know where to go and know what to ask for.

He used the words “inappropriately touching” again. That rang an alarm bell in my head. He used it to minimize what he was actually doing at those massage parlors. He also used it to explain what happened with his sister and I began to doubt if he’d been completely truthful about that as well.

He said that he’d gone to an Asian “massage” parlor about 6 times over that past year and he felt guilty about it. He said he thought that was why God took our baby Noah James. My mind was whirling going over his words, they kept sinking in and realization was washing over me. He was talking like I had already forgiven him and how we would move on in the future. He said he’d talk to the pastor and to my parents. They were planning on coming for my birthday the next day and he said he would tell them everything tomorrow. The first words I could say were, “ What makes you think you’ll be here tomorrow?” Then I went out to the porch trying to hold it together. He came out and kept crying and begging, once again all too familiar. He was acting the same as when I’d found the porn. I turned and walked to the barn trying to clear my head.

He was gone and we were reeling. My girls were broken. I was numb but I knew what needed to be done. I asked the sister he had spoken to me about to send me a letter to tell me her side of what happened. I never spoke to him again face to face. I couldn’t. I couldn’t trust anything he had to say anymore. He was a master at lying and manipulating. When I got the letter back from his sister it just confirmed everything that I feared the most.

Her heartbreaking letter was worse than I ever imagined it could be. It was sickening to think that the man I had been married to was capable of such evil. He had begun touching her inappropriately when she was very little. He was also not the only one doing this to her. She said her two older brothers Matt and Ben had done this to her as well. Then she went on to say that when she was about 10 they began raping her. Luke went on to manipulate, bribe and force her to keep quiet about it for years. It didn’t stop at 17 like he said. It went on until he left for college. He would have been about 22. She thought that I had known about it before we got married. I was physically ill reading the atrocities that had happened to her. I imagine there were more sisters affected since I already knew of two.

I had begun speaking to a divorce lawyer already. When I got the letter I knew that the parenting plan we had been working on would change drastically. He admitted to me over text that what his sister had said was true. That he’d tried to forget how bad it really was. He also told me he never quit porn completely he just got better at hiding it.

I knew I had to keep my girls safe. I also knew we had to leave Newport. The whole Dahlin Family lived close the uncles that had been accused used to be a weekly part of our life. I was all alone now and had to keep my kids safe. So, I sold that beautiful dream of a farm. I sold Simba and his mama Tina the milk cow I had gotten to have for a year. We lost so much, the girls miss it every day. I’d do it all again though to keep them safe. They are loved and happy. Their world is smaller but I will not have to wonder everyday what their Daddy might be capable of doing to them.

I have so much more I could say. I am not perfect. I am not proud of everything I did or said on that day. I believe God gives us trials to bring us closer to Him. When we go through dark times we seek Him and look to Him for answers. I’m so thankful God protected me and my girls and gave us a way out.

Listen to my story at Sons Of Patriarchy on all major podcast platforms or follow the link here https://youtu.be/_zSqY_1hYXg?si=BeXEixmupZtux7WB