Fleeing Abuse – One Woman’s Story of Life in Shelters, Help and Support From Community ( Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 11, 1999) His anger erupted shortly after midnight when he found the Lifesavers candy wrapper on his young son's pillow. He had ordered Mark and his three other children to leave his sweets alone. In the wee hours of this morning, his son would pay for disobeying. As he spanked and shook the whimpering 5-year-old, his wife cowered in the doorway. For the first time in her nine-year marriage, Miriam saw herself. Her husband's large fists usually pummeled her face and 99-pound body. Usually, she cried out in fear and pain. Now he was beating one of her babies. She listened helplessly to the child's screams and made a decision. Her husband's put-downs and punches had to end. No longer would he keep her locked inside the prison her home had become. Less than 24 hours later, she and her children had gathered on the porch to wait for their ride to safety. She was ready to surmount her fears, relinquish her privacy and accept help from strangers to save her sons and daughter. Miriam's five-month struggle for independence had begun. This is her story. The relationship Miriam had been a college sophomore studying to become a high school math teacher when her life changed course in 1989. With the help of an older relative, her Asian parents had betrothed her to a retired American war veteran who was living in her native country. Miriam was 21 then. She didn't know the man well and was reluctant to interrupt her education. She had been raised, however, to abide by her parents' wishes. Her family believed the American man could give her a better life. She suppressed her doubts, became his wife and moved to Virginia. Four weeks into their union, her 42-year-old husband choked her for the first time. Verbal and physical abuse became as routine as the morning sunrise. Bedtime rarely brought safety. "When we were sleeping, he would start boxing me because I have Asian features like the enemies he fought in Vietnam," she said in her high-pitched, heavily accented staccato speech. He forbade her to speak to neighbors or to leave their modest Central Virginia home for afternoon strolls. He approved only of the relationship she established with his mother, who urged Miriam to forgive her son each time Miriam received a beating. The children were born in quick succession. First a daughter and then three sons, with four years between the oldest and youngest child. Early on, her daughter, Michelle, became a mediator. "Sometimes he would put a gun to my head," Miriam recalled, "and my daughter would beg, `Daddy, please don't shoot Mommy!'" Miriam survived, she said, by following his instructions to the letter. "He considered marriage a war game. `Disobedience can cost you your life,' he would tell me." The night her husband beat her son, she realized that remaining under his rule could be just as costly. "To see [Mark] get beaten like that, continuously, continuously, I can't describe how I was feeling. I kept that [pain] all night long." Blind flight Hours after the incident, Miriam stuffed clothes and shoes for herself and her four children in seven large, black garbage bags. She called the local police department and asked for help to leave. The two officers who responded made no arrest, but persuaded her husband to giver her $15 for cab fare. They ushered Miriam and the children into the taxi that soon arrived. By 9 o'clock that December night, Miriam and the children were huddled on the steps of Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Church on Laurel Street. This was the sign-in site for CARITAS - Congregations Around Richmond Involved to Assure Shelter. The program, which provides shelter for families in Richmond-area churches and synagogues during the winter, had closed for the night. Miriam and her children had missed the bus that would have taken them to the church offering housing that night. She gathered her daughter and sons and their trash bags around her. She rested her chin in the palm of her hand. The children - 8-year-old Michelle, 7-year-old Anthony, 5-year-old Mark and 4-year-old James - lay across the garbage bags and drifted to sleep. Fortunately, the temperature that night hovered at 54 degrees. The family would wait there until morning for the shelter to open. As Miriam made that decision, a children's ballet, "The Night Before Christmas," ended at Richmond's Landmark Theater, less than a block away. Mark awoke from his restless sleep. Sir Thomas Sr., his wife, Pamela Steadman, and their 6-and 7-year-old children were among the throng of Richmonders who walked briskly past Grace and Holy Trinity on the way to their cars. Thomas and Steadman looked into the church's doorway. They stopped and turned around. "The first thing I saw were the garbage bags, and there were children lying on them," Steadman said. "I asked if they were hungry. The mother said no, but the child [Mark] said yes." Thomas went to a McDonald's restaurant inside the nearby Virginia Commonwealth University Student Commons. He returned minutes later with five bags of hamburgers, fries and drinks. He pulled out his cellular phone and tried to contact CARITAS officials. He got a recording. Attempts to obtain help from other shelters were unsuccessful. They were full for the night or did not have enough beds for five people. "At that point, if we had to take them home with us, that was just what we had to do," Steadman said. "We don't usually bring people into our home, but she had all of these children and they were obviously tired. They looked sad." Miriam balked at the offer. Instead, the couple piled the mother, her children and their own son and daughter into their Mazda MPV and set off in search of a hotel. By 11 p.m., Thomas and his wife had registered Miriam and her children at the Massad House Hotel on Fourth Street. They paid $65 for one night's lodging. Miriam refused their offer to buy groceries for her family. The couple went home to western Henrico County and put their children to bed. They opened the telephone book and contacted all the area shelters and social service agencies listed, seeking a program to help Miriam and her children. When Thomas and Steadman called the Massad House the next morning to check on the family, they learned that a shelter had responded to their messages. Miriam and her babies had been rescued. Months later, 31-year-old Miriam would view that couple as the first of several good Samaritans sent by God to help her escape the abuse, terror and shame in her marriage. At the time, however, with Christmas 21 days away, she was reeling from her decision to uproot her children. "When you first leave home, you're really scared," she said later. "You're asking yourself what's going to happen to your kids." A safe place On Dec. 31, as other Richmonders rang in the New Year festively, Miriam and her children settled into a local YWCA shelter for battered women and children. They had arrived there by way of two other local shelters. CARITAS had housed them for four days after Thomas and Steadman assisted the family. Miriam and the children then moved to the Salvation Army emergency shelter for women and children for three weeks. At the YWCA shelter, she and the children each slept in a bunk bed. The cramped room also served as a temporary home to a 20-year-old woman with an infant girl and 2-year-old boy. Because the door to the room usually remained open, Miriam draped pastel-colored sheets over the footboards of the top bunk beds to afford her family some privacy. Most of her bags had been put in storage because there was limited space in the shelter. She neatly folded and stacked the clothes she and the children had been able to keep on two changing tables in the bedroom and in boxes under the beds. The 6-month-old daughter of her roommate often cried during the night, waking Miriam's children. It made them cranky, but there was little Miriam could do. Sometimes, she'd rise and soothe the baby back to sleep so the infant's mother could get some rest. In the quiet of those late-night caretaking sessions, she would question whether leaving her husband had been wise. With minimal job skills, no family nearby and only the $15 the taxi driver had refused to take when he drove the family to safety, she doubted her ability to survive on her own. To reassure herself, she would think of her mother. "I have a father who has been paralyzed for years. There were 10 of us. My mother went out and worked and came home and massaged him and then cooked. I looked at that and said, `If my mother can do it with 10 children, why can't I?'" On days when her dark thoughts won, Miriam still realized she had landed in a good place to succeed. She and her four children were among the more than 3,500 women and children from across Virginia and the United States who had lived in the rambling, two-story shelter operated by the YWCA in North Richmond since 1981. The YWCA opened a second battered women's shelter in Chesterfield County in 1989. It has housed more than 1,800 women and children in the past decade. Along with offering a safe place to eat and sleep, both 20-bed residences give women and their children access to numerous community resources, such as assistance with obtaining permanent or transitional housing, job training and counseling. Miriam embraced every opportunity she could, both inside and outside the YWCA. "I need encouragement," she said one winter afternoon, resting her hand on her hip as she stood at a counter in the shelter's kitchen and prepared green peas and chicken for her children. "A lot of times you get depressed. You're feeling very hopeless. I joined the church for that reason. Physical knowledge can be balanced with spiritual knowledge." Her church served as an anchor in many ways during Miriam's stay in the YWCA shelter. She had met Patricia Brown, a member of the small congregation, at a Christmas party hosted by the Salvation Army for women and children living in the Army's 20-bed shelter. Brown had offered Miriam and the children her support. She invited them to church. The congregation prayed for the Asian woman and her children about their plight. They quickly became Miriam's extended family. Patricia Brown, her husband, Ronald, and their two children often invited Miriam and her youngsters to their home. Patricia Brown sometimes accompanied Miriam and a legal aid lawyer provided by the YWCA to child-support hearings in juvenile and domestic relations district court. To prevent the children's relationship with their father from deteriorating, Miriam had decided to permit visitation. However, she had asked the judge who granted her a protective order against her husband to require that the meetings be supervised. Church members volunteered to chaperone the children's twice-a-month visits with their father. When Miriam wanted to attend Bible study, members of the church would meet the family away from the shelter - to keep the shelter's location private - and take them to the Thursday gatherings. Helping Miriam was easy for members of the church, Patricia Brown said. "She wasn't looking for a handout. She wants to do what's right." Moving forward By early February, Miriam and her children had mastered the shelter's routine. Residents had to be dressed by 8 a.m. each day and in for the night by 8 p.m. Names had to be written on food they bought and stored in the kitchen. Shelter chores, such as cleaning bathrooms, were to be completed by 10 p.m. Children could not be left unsupervised. Miriam began concentrating on herself. The YWCA enrolled her in a program with Goodwill Industries Inc. Through a partnership the two local agencies had formed, she received help from a domestic violence counselor and a job retention specialist. She learned basic computer skills, created a resume and practiced how to market herself in mock interviews. In March, she went to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service office in Norfolk to purchase a green card. She needed the card to get a job because she is not an American citizen. Her husband had refused to turn over the card she had received shortly after moving to the United States. The four-hour bus ride to Norfolk opened a new world to her. "I saw things I've never seen before!" she said of the jaunt through Williamsburg, Newport News and other localities. She used money she had been saving from her monthly welfare check to buy the $29 bus ticket. Her church gave her $135 for the green-card fee. However, when she arrived at the immigration office and told officials she was living in a battered women's shelter, they waived the cost. Her search for housing wasn't as easy. Robinette Reaves, a mental health counselor with Access Services, a division of the Richmond Behavioral Health Authority, counseled Miriam and helped her look for a place. They toured subsidized and public housing complexes throughout the metro area. Affordability would determine Miriam's choice. The prospects in her price range depressed her. "It's a place of drug addicts," she said of one public-housing complex. Of another: "They said they had two murders in that place. I cannot let my children go to that environment. "They're going to do something to help in this world," she said, as if envisioning their futures in her mind's eye. "I've got to keep trying." Read More from The Reporter »