June 14, 2018. I woke up in a panic. The night before was the first night that my husband gave me any indication that he would sacrifice my daughter’s well-being in order to hurt me and gain control.

June 13, 2018. It was my daughter’s bedtime and my husband insisted on giving her a bath and putting her to bed for the third night in a row. This had never happened in her whole life. I knew something was definitely off. He took my daughter into his bedroom (I had been sleeping in her room) and turned the lights off so she could drift off. About 15 minutes went by and I heard the faint cry of “mommy, mommy!” coming from his room. I came in and saw that my half asleep daughter was reaching for me. She wanted one last hug before she completely dozed off. I came over and laid down next to her and enveloped her as she drifted off. What came next scared the ever living shit out of me.

“Paulina – get out of here! You can’t be here!” over and over and over again. I refused to let him bully me and continued to quietly lay with my daughter. “Get out of here!” My daughter was half asleep so luckily she wasn’t alarmed by his strong tone. He then took his phone, turned on the flashlight, and started flashing it across both of our faces and into our eyes. My daughter’s eyes fluttered open. I continued to hold my ground. I wasn’t going to be bullied into leaving her. She needed me. This left him extremely frustrated. He then took his phone and blasted loud music into both of our ears. “You’re some piece of work, Paulina! Get out of here, you can’t be here!” I lay motionless.

This went on for at least 20 minutes. I gripped onto my daughter for dear life and prayed neither one of us would get hurt.

Luckily things didn’t turn violent. He finally left the room and went outside to smoke his cigarettes. I walked out of his room and started sobbing violently. My whole world had just turned upside down. I had come to the realization that my daughter was not the most important thing to my husband anymore. My pain was.

The next day I had plans. It was the day that I was picking up the keys to the new apartment. I didn’t want to rent an apartment, but my husband talked me into it. I was constantly told that if I’m going to leave I need to find a place that would house my grandmother and my daughter. So I did. The apartment was beautiful and peaceful. I was scared, but once I committed to it I knew it was the right thing to do.

At about 2pm I was getting ready to go to lunch with a friend. Then the call came from my lawyer – “Paulina, we just got a very strange phone call. You are wanted down in court right away because your husband has videos of you breastfeeding your daughter and masturbating…”

What???

I was in complete disbelief… but I knew exactly what was happening.

I knew exactly what videos he had taken. He caught me nursing my daughter while I scratched an itch due to a vaginal condition called lichen sclerosis. It was a skin disorder that crept up from hormonal changes during my pregnancy that I was still wrestling with. He set up the nanny cam so it would record me. He knew exactly what my hand was doing in my pants.  He had come with me to every doctor’s appointment related to this condition and watched the suffering I went through from the bad skin. He knew. And he lied. He lied to the New York Supreme court… under oath. He did it so he can cause me the worst pain imaginable – the loss of my child.

He also knew that I believed in attachment parenting and delayed nursing. He knew that my daughter would rather never eat a piece of candy again in her life than give up my boob. It was her comfort and her safe haven. It was a time for us to lay down and relax and bond after I came home from work. He knew everything.

I came into the court room and saw him sitting in his suit looking straight ahead, expressionless. I saw the sweat on the back of his head. The judge was there, the lawyers were there, but I couldn’t stop looking at him. This had to be some crazy temporary emotional outburst. My husband was a good guy who cared about people, after all. And he loved my daughter and wanted the best for her. This had to be a mistake.

The judge came in and addressed my husband’s attorney. “You are asking that, pending the hearing, the child –actually, that, in addition to the plaintiff being granted sole custody, that the defendant/mother be restrained from having any access with the child; that an order of protection be issued which prohibits, under the penalty of criminal prosecution, the mother from having any contact with the child; and that the plaintiff be granted exclusive use and occupancy of the marital residence.”

The rest of the hearing was a blur. There was not much talk of masturbation. The judge dismissed this notion fairly quickly. I’m pretty sure that any normal adult can tell the difference between masturbation and scratching an itch.

What he did not dismiss was the fact that I was non-nutritively nursing a four year old. This seemed “strange” to him. This strange feeling earned me supervised-only visitation with my daughter and granted my husband exclusive occupancy of our apartment pending the next hearing.

In other words, my daughter was being taken away from me, and I was being kicked out of my house.

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