Mary Flores is a mom of six children who has walked through the fire of abuse, domestic violence, separation, and divorce and found freedom and healing on the other side. She is now a LegalShield associate who seeks to help other women who need access to affordable legal services. In this interview, she shares her story from non-profit ministry to marriage and family life to post-abuse recovery.
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MaggieYouville: How did your abusive relationship start?
Mary Flores: My first husband and I met through work. We were both involved in community outreach in the not-for-profit world and we worked collaboratively. We were very passionate about our work and helping others, so we had an immediate connection. I had just turned 26 and he was a bit older at 32. We quickly discovered we both wanted to get married and have a family; we were ready for that phase of life. Not surprisingly, it was a whirlwind romance.
We met in January, started dating in February, were engaged by late March and I moved in with him in early May. The weekend I moved in, we found out we were having a baby and we were thrilled! We actually moved our wedding further out because at this time we felt called back to the Catholic Church. We started attending Mass and, in order to meet the pre-marriage requirements, pushed our wedding out to August 2000. Our first child, a baby girl, arrived just after Christmas. It was a busy first year!!
Interestingly enough, we agreed on all major areas of family and faith. We both knew I wanted to stop working outside the home so I could focus my attention on our family. I actually quit my job two months before our daughter was born. He supported me in this and it was one of the best decisions I ever made, although it shocked the people I worked with. They claimed I would soon be bored and wagered I’d return to work within a couple of months. They were wrong. I never looked back. I felt so fulfilled. I now understood the difference between vocation and job.
We grew in our faith and in parenthood. He supported everything I wanted – natural childbirth, breastfeeding, co-sleeping, cloth diapering, subsequent home births and later homeschooling. He became an avid enthusiast of these things and talked about the benefits of our choices to total strangers. I had many outside interests that he also supported.
Underneath these major realities were problems. He claimed he would quit drinking alcohol and did not. I later found out that on our wedding day, he drank an entire bottle of whisky before saying “I do” at 1 pm. In the early years of our marriage, it was not unusual for him to simply not come home when I expected him after work.
I was scared and, no matter how many times it happened, I always thought something must have happened to him. He would minimize this and make it my fault or say I was overreacting and controlling. He also was in a band. This went hand in hand with the drinking so it was not at all a positive thing, not a creative outlet, just a bad habit.
The man who said he wanted a family really wasn’t ready to give up his bad habits and, to protect them, he started his campaign of manipulation. He also became a master at causing me to react, especially in public, so most people around us would agree I was at least part if not most of the problem. I began to lose my ability to see reality and started questioning myself.
MaggieYouville: What helped you see the abuse?
Mary Flores: During the first 10 years of our marriage, I honestly believed I needed to be a better wife. More understanding, more prayerful, more physical intimacy. I read books on praying more for my husband and for our family.
I finally started to realize this was not in my control. He was manipulative and incredibly verbally abusive. I was always walking on eggshells and trying to protect the kids through my efforts to control and manage his emotions.
Additionally, about every two years, he would lose his job. These job losses stemmed from his obvious problems which affected his performance but somehow it was never his fault. He didn’t exert control over me by controlling the finances; rather, he left me to stretch the very little bit of money we had to pay all the bills. I carried the entire burden, despite my efforts to involve him. He would spend money that wasn’t there and then have screaming temper tantrums when I brought it up.
Because of the nature of his work and who he was, his manipulation of reality and blame shifting once reached levels of a public campaign that resulted in strangers sending us enough money to survive for over a year. A fundraiser was actually organized for our family. I was horrified at the deception.
I kept searching the internet for answers and late one night I found information on personality disorders and began to realize the ramifications of this. Because I knew my only option would be divorce, I turned my back on that. We went to a marriage retreat, Retrouvaille, which is designed for couples who are on the verge of divorce. It was an absolute disaster for me emotionally.
I was pregnant with our fifth child, sick and exhausted. It was during this retreat that I asked him about publicly belittling me and he said, without emotion, “Oh, yeah, I know I do that.” For 10 years, I had believed he just didn’t realize what he was doing. It was beyond my human understanding that someone could deliberately hurt another person to control them, but he said it without remorse.
He told me he remembered the exact moment when he decided at age 12 he would hurt other people before they could hurt him. This is the place he operated from within our marriage. We came home and nothing changed. I still didn’t leave. On the surface, many people would look to alcohol as the source of his problems, but it went so far beyond that. He was merely using alcohol to treat a much larger issue.
At one point, he was forced by his job to attend inpatient treatment for alcohol. Nothing changed. He continued to drink. The abuse and manipulation escalated. I left to visit my parents at one point for about two weeks. While there, I unfortunately received some very bad counsel from a poorly trained priest who reinforced the idea that this was somehow my fault and that I needed to be a better, more giving and more prayerful wife. I came back feeling lost and without choices.
MaggieYouville: What kept you in the abusive relationship?
Mary Flores: I didn’t know what to do. I had nowhere to turn. I just kept hoping he would get better. We tried everything from alcohol treatment to trauma therapy. This was really a final attempt to save him. My older two, who are girls, laughed at me. I said, “Let’s just hope this is what helps him.” At that point, we were the ones who needed trauma therapy.
Right after my sixth child was born, we moved to another state. I lost the support of my homeschooling community, which was really our family, and we started over. Things improved slightly for about a year but the following year, everything got much worse.
MaggieYouville: What was the final trigger / motivation to get out and stay out?
Mary Flores: I have 6 children. Two girls and four boys. Once the girls were about 12 and 10 years old, my husband began directly his abuse not only at me, but at my girls. As they were getting older, they were now becoming his victims. He separated the boys and the girls in the way he talked about them.
Once when the girls and I returned from an outing, he described us as a “witch’s coven.” He did this in front of the boys to create division. He started publicly embarrassing the girls as well and was physical aggressive with them.
Once I tried to go out for ice cream with my sister, who was visiting at the time. About 15 minutes after we left, my second oldest called, screaming for me to come home right away. Apparently, my husband had hit my oldest daughter in the face, causing her nose to bleed, and pulled her by her long hair down a hallway. I came home right away and he claimed they were overreacting. I should have called the police, but I did not. I will always regret that.
However, now that the abuse was directed at my girls and not just at me, I knew we needed to leave. Or, more precisely, HE needed to leave so the kids and I could stay in our home. The question of how to make that happen paralyzed me.
The first time I called the police was on New Year’s Eve, which happens to be my birthday. He had become really violent and I was afraid. These episodes of violence didn’t really leave marks. He was too smart for that. He broke things, especially things that mattered to someone, claiming if he wanted to hit or hurt someone he could.
I ran down to the end of the road to meet the police. I was afraid my kids would be scared if they came to the door. Looking back on that, it’s pretty foolish. My kids had been living in fear for a long time and it was ridiculous of me to think I would further traumatize them by actually admitting something was very wrong. But that’s how it is when you live with crazy for long enough. Right becomes wrong and you no longer trust yourself.
MaggieYouville: What or who helped you get out?
Mary Flores: About 18 months before I called the police that first time, I had gone back to work. I didn’t want to. It was supposed to be temporary at first, but it led to a full-time outreach position that I could predominantly do from home. My direct supervisor was a mom of 7 who was also homeschooling and she convinced me that if she could do it, so could I. She had no idea what other complications I had going on.
Later, she said, “Mary, God called you back to work to provide you with a way out!” I know that is probably true, but it fundamentally changed my family and I resented it greatly. All the years of my husband’s job instability had pushed me into this, and it affected my family, particularly my youngest two children. It did, however, ultimately give me some options.
A priest had advised me to set up a separate bank account. He was so supportive. His actions helped heal the pain caused by the bad advice I had received from the previous priest. I had always controlled the finances in our home and in late April the inevitable happened: my husband lost his job (for the sixth or seventh time). The minute his final paycheck hit the bank account, I transferred every penny to the other account that only I could access.
He was furious. He contacted our local parish priest (who was not the same priest who had advised me to set up the private bank account). My husband assumed the priest would take his side. Instead, after hearing what we both had to say, the priest said my husband had 30 days to move out and that he had no claims to the money I had transferred. The priest offered to pay his rental deposit and first month’s rent. He established a time frame of 12 months and told my husband if he could get himself together – get a job, quit drinking, seek help for his emotional problems – then we could talk about reconciliation at that point.
Unfortunately, my husband didn’t even try. After much grumbling, blaming and attempts at manipulation of the children, he did leave in May 2017. He squandered the priest’s offer on a completely unsuitable living situation, and he tried to do what he always did. He turned the tables around and made himself a victim.
My husband was a public figure in the Catholic world, as was I due to my outreach position. He took the whole matter to Facebook and publicly slandered me. He tried to destroy me both personally and professionally.
I was also afraid during this time that he would come back and try to hurt me or all of us. My mind kept returning to the statistic that 70% of domestic violence murders occur after the victim leaves. I spent money I didn’t have to get a security system and I developed severe anxiety. On Saturdays when I had to drive the boys to see their dad, I would develop hives before dropping them off.
MaggieYouville: When did you file for divorce and when was it finalized?
Mary Flores: I was unable to file for divorce or secure legal counsel in the state I was living in. I had already been told by a domestic abuse detective that “it wasn’t illegal to be a jerk.” Domestic violence is not taken seriously in that state and I had no resources.
I would have to support myself and my six children on 40K/year in an area of the country where that just wasn’t enough. I somehow scraped together $1500 to declare bankruptcy to free myself from the $60K in debt my husband had managed to accumulate. There was no way I could pay those bills and the rent. I visited food pantries to stretch my food budget.
Finally, about 9 months later, I made the decision to move back to the state where my parents still lived. They needed my help. I made inquiries in that state before moving and found that after 12 months I might qualify for legal assistance from a law school that specializes in cases of domestic violence, providing legal aid to low income women.
Twelve months later, I qualified. It was still another very painful year before my divorce was finalized. His abuse escalated during this time through phone calls, texts, random wellness check and visits from CPS, manipulation of my boys, who he was still allowed to see on a weekly basis, and his ongoing Facebook campaign. It was a very difficult time. My faith was seriously tested and I held on by a thin thread.
Our divorce wasn’t finalized until March 2021, four years after our separation began.
MaggieYouville: Was your lawyer helpful during this process? Did you feel heard and defended by them?
Mary Flores: Once I finally got legal counsel through the law school, yes, they were very helpful. Even the judge assigned to the case took special interest in it. For the first time, my husband was not able to manipulate his way around the system.
He was required to pay a very meager amount of child support (less than $500/month for 5 minor children). When he failed to pay, he went to jail. His wages were then garnished for only one month before he lost his job for the final time. Altogether, I think I received 2 child support payments.
MaggieYouville: What do you wish you’d done differently in your separation / divorce?
Mary Flores: I wish I had been able to get help sooner. I wish I had found spiritual support reassuring me that abuse is not God’s plan for marriage. That I couldn’t just pray more or be a better wife. I also wish I had known what I now know about obtaining legal services through a monthly membership. As much as I was struggling, I surely could have afforded the low fee. I wouldn’t have had to navigate this alone and it would not have taken 4 years.
What I do not regret is my children. They are the greatest blessing in my life and always have been. As a society and as a culture we need to be more aware of domestic violence, which is alarmingly prevalent. Men need to be held accountable as husbands and fathers. The family unit and more specifically, the importance of a woman’s role in caring for her children, needs to be more highly regarded. Abusers should not have equal rights to their children.
I should say also that in the end, it was not one, but three Catholic priests who worked diligently to help me and my children. They made it possible for us to escape. So I will not put the blame on the Catholic Church. However, education about abuse and domestic violence in seminaries and Catholic parishes is vitally needed. The world asked me, “Why did you stay so long?”, implying it wasn’t that bad or that I am stupid, while faithful Catholics shook their heads at me and loudly asked, “How dare you leave?”
I had one family (who knew us well) who sent me letters stating they were continuing to pray for the reconciliation of my abusive marriage! When all was said and done, I received no apology and no support of any kind. And they were not the only ones. I anonymously received a book in the mail which describes the trauma of divorce on children, while denying the effects of living with an abuser. It is a despicable work of statistical manipulation. This is so misguided.
MaggieYouville: What helped you find healing after all this?
Mary Flores: My story ends with an incredible amount of grace that only God could bestow and with lessons of forgiveness and the importance of a person’s last days. Within a year of our divorce, my husband became mortally ill. The years of drinking caught up with him at only age 53. He had caused irrevocable damage, developing hepatorenal syndrome, a diagnosis we did not learn until after his death.
During the weeks he spent in the hospital, I dropped off the boys on several occasions to visit him but I stayed outside. One day, while they were at school, I brought the ICU nurses some cookies to thank them for their hard work. The nurse’s station was right outside his door, and I had the urge to go into his room.
He was on a ventilator so he couldn’t speak but his eyes were open. I laid my hand gently on his forehead, which was very warm, and I was filled with grace and true forgiveness. He looked up at me and through my simple act of empathy, God set me free! Free from years of pain, anger, and fear.
When the doctors informed us that there was nothing more they could do and that he could go home, I knew he had nowhere to go and no one to care for him. I said, “He can come to our home.” His sister nearly fell over. I actually prayed he would live through the transfer. Within 2 days he was there.
We had a wonderful hospice company who took care of everything. It was so healing for both me and the children. My oldest daughter looked at me and said, “It’s so good that he is here. He can’t hurt us anymore”. Miracles happened during the eight days he lived.
Now, four years later, no one has forgotten all the bad. It made us who we are – strong, empathetic, caring, insightful. We chose to grow through it rather than just go through it. We can’t control the bad things that happen to us but we can choose how we respond to them and, once the trauma is over, we can choose to rebuild rather than to live in the pain.
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