A dark time

In one of my old posts, I relayed a dating story taken from a book that I had started writing a few years ago and never finished. I happened to be leafing through the book today, and decided to share a story about my relationship with Alicia's Dad. In the book, his name is "Spermy," "sperminator," "Spermy sperm sperm"
You get the idea.

Once, when we were arguing and I threatened to walk out, he told me I could go, but I would have to leave the baby with him. Well, all you Mommy lions out there know that them's fightin' words. As he stood between me and the little bassinet, my mind flashed on the incident I previously relayed to you, and I'm sure he saw something in my eyes that day that he never knew existed within me. The battle of wills had reached a frightening level, and I could feel myself reaching my boiling point. I told him that I would kill him before I would ever turn my daughter over to the likes of him and he dared me to do it. Now, I don't know if you can appreciate how precarious this moment was, but I turned around and grabbed the first thing that was behind me and flung it at his chest. I can see it in my mind's eye, cutting through the room in slow motion towards him. If you've ever held a knife by its blade and flung it overhand toward a target, you can imagine my perspective. I could see the realization reach his face, and for a moment in time I actually felt like giggling at his reaction. It was pure "holy shit, she's gonna kill me" fear in his eyes. As the object bounced off his chest, I could see that his mind had been so convinced that I had grabbed a Kitchen knife, that it took him a moment to realize it was merely a wooden spoon I had thrown. For me, the scary part of this is: what if the first object that was behind me had been a kitchen knife? It was simply luck that it was a spoon. I would have watched it embed itself in his chest rather than bounce off and fall to the floor. That was what our relationship had come to...

When I think back to this period in my life, it really feels like a dream, or like I'm talking about someone I used to know, rather than someone I used to be. I grew up in a peaceful home where we weren't allowed to say "I hate you" to our siblings and when our parents argued, we were blissfully unaware. I don't know how I got to that place, but I'm sure glad it was just a short stay.