My Story - Part One

My Marriage

I met Dolf when I was only 15 years old, I should've known then from his violent behaviour and excessive drinking that it was not the right thing to stay with him, but I was a rebellious teenager and he was a manipulator.

Have I known then what I know now, I might have made different choices, but I was young and naive.

The early signs was already there...
Whenever I left him, he'd threaten to commit suicide and told me that he couldn't live without me. He used to say that if he couldn't have me, then no one will.

By the time I fell pregnant at 17, he had his hold on me. He had been emotionally and physically abusing me from the start, but ignorance caused me not to recognise it. He had strangled, hit me and threatened me, I stayed with him because I felt ashamed. My mom had been right...she never liked him.

We got married on 15 October 1999 when I was already 3 months pregnant with Lili. My parents only wanted the best for me and my child so they paid the rent for our apartment and Dolf only had to provide in terms of food etc. I was studying Marketing through a correspondence college then.

I thought the abuse would stop while I was pregnant...I was wrong. He hit me, kicked me and threatened me with a knife and whenever I screamed he told me I was crazy and that he'd get me locked up in a mental institution and then he'd take the baby. I lived in fear. By that time he had already estranged me from all of my friends and I told nobody. He came home drunk a couple of times, I tried not to fight...I was afraid for my baby.

After Lili was born, everything got even worse. Dolf had no patience and I had to get up and nurse Lili in the other bedroom, he got angry when she cried.

I loved my baby to bits and it broke my heart to hear her screams whenever Dolf was hurting me.

One day one of my old college friends came by to see Lili and she asked me to go home with her, she wanted her mom to see Lili. I did, but when Dolf came home and I wasn't there, he phoned me and told me to get myself home immediately. When I got home, I could see the anger in his eyes. Lili was hungry, so I sat down on the bed to feed her. She was lying in my arms when I felt him slap me across my face. I didn't react, just held Lili closer.

Sometimes when I screamed he used to put his hand in my mouth, scratching it inside. It hurt. Still...I kept quiet. I was too afraid that he'd take my baby away.

Then things changed...

My mother could no longer afford to pay her part of our rent, so we moved into a bigger place with her, My dad and my brothers came to visit us from Pretoria, as we were living in Bloemfontein then.
They were all downstairs when Dolf and I started arguing upstairs while I was giving Lili a bath. Dolf hit his fist against the wall just above Lili's head and everyone came storming up and grabbed him away from me and Lili.

That night Dolf told me that if I didn't move with him to Kuruman, he would open a case of assault against my dad and my brothers. The next day we moved to Kuruman into his parents' house.

For two months I had no contact with anyone....