All Because Of: How One Act Led to a New Life by Dona Hare Price

Photo by Andres Siimon on Unsplash

Pinpointing the exact moment it started is like sorting through a junk drawer with old matchbooks from long-forgotten dinners, birthday cards, a deck of cards with the Queen of Hearts missing, and a tangled mess of cords for every device ever owned.

Determining the exact instance when a caress turned to a pinch, a squeeze became a vice, and when pushing against the wall for a kiss became the excuse to pull your hair until tears ran down your face—is nearly impossible. If someone experienced early violent trauma in their family, as I had, your brain is trained from an early age to fade, blur, or lock away these moments. As an adult, when you recreate early harm, you can rewrite the experience to preserve the picture of love in your head you need to survive.

It doesn’t matter how the violence crept into our relationship, or when it started. The marriage to my daughter’s father was brutal and abusive.

We moved to North Carolina for a new start, a promise that things would be different, away from my crazy family that we blamed for his erratic behavior. I hoped the cross-country move from California to Winston-Salem, North Carolina would allow me to leave his behavior and my shame for staying with him on the Pacific Coast. I was twenty-six years old, had a beautiful one-year-old baby girl, and academic accolades from a prestigious university, yet I allowed this husband to drag me up and down a hall by the hair when I was pregnant.

In his remorseful afterglow of violence, he said reassuringly, “It didn’t hurt the baby, and you need to learn how to hang a roll of toilet paper correctly. Will you do better?”

“Yes. I will get it right next time and put the milk in the spot you prefer,” I nodded, choked back tears, fashioning my face into the appropriate remorseful expression for that Sunday morning and all the ones that came after.

We moved in early November to North Carolina so he could start his job at Piedmont Airlines as an Aeronautical Engineer. By the second week of January 1989, I started my job as a Speech Therapist at an elementary school in Lexington, North Carolina. I commuted twenty-five minutes from Winston-Salem to work while my fourteen-month-old daughter started daycare near his job. We had one car, one perfect child, and the one big secret of our chaotic relationship—violence. This was the precise equation for despair.

The Friday night of my first week of work, I was bone tired and distraught after another tirade over my poor housekeeping skills, and I ended up in a Winston-Salem Emergency Room. The husband told the Emergency Room doctor, “We just moved. She is doing too much and hit her head on an open cabinet door as she was picking up our daughter’s dropped cracker.” He failed to mention the tirade beforehand and how he grabbed my hair, pulled it, jerking my head so it touched my back, holding me there while the baby girl watched from her highchair, cracker in her small soft hand. Holding me in that position until a single tear ran down my face, all because the bed had not been made that morning.

The following Monday, I arrived to work with a black eye and by lunchtime was sitting in a local United Methodist Minister’s office. Pam, a colleague I barely knew, came into my tiny Speech Therapy office to ask if I was okay. I sobbed uncontrollably and shook my head. “No.” She walked me to my car, gave me the handwritten directions to the United Methodist Church, and said, “Go, I’ll take care of things here.”

Her directions read, “Go on the lake road to the big yellow house and make a right, follow this road to a large pasture with cows, then make a left on the corner with a red mailbox, and then turn up a driveway to the white United Methodist Church.” I pulled to the side of the road to look at the cows before I realized it was a cow pasture and drove past the red mailbox twice. I seriously considered driving away and getting a new job. I knew that I had violated a rule of our relationship by acknowledging I wasn’t alright, and I would do more if I talked to anyone else about my mind-numbing despair and desperation.

The fortyish dark-haired Minister with soft brown eyes greeted me outside the church, walked me into his office, handed me a steaming mug of tea with sugar, and asked gently as he looked at my black eye, “Did he do this?”

“No, no, it was my clumsiness and stupidity. I stumbled, catching my temple on an open cabinet, hence the black eye. It’s my fault. I have a master’s degree with academic honors from USC, but I don’t know why I can’t figure out how to make things different at home.”

He pulled at the neck of his black shirt with the white collar and motioned for us to sit down. “I’m going to tell you a story. Pam said you are a Californian and a surfer girl, so bear with me. It’s a southern story, drawn out with vivid color, but it will have a point.”

I nodded for him to continue. He leaned forward and began, “Our cows eat corn for feed, and when cows poop, they often have a kernel of corn in their cow pies. One kernel in a hand-sized mound of steaming shit. Raccoons love corn, and they know there is often one kernel of undigested corn in a cowpie. So, raccoons wait and scurry to a fresh cowpie and dig through the pile of steaming, hot, gooey poop for one kernel of corn.”

I looked at him, startled not only by the new knowledge of raccoons and cows but the imagery of a raccoon holding one piece of corn covered in oozing mucky poop with their claws dripping with feces as if it was a trophy—one shitty piece of corn. I nodded and grimaced.

He continued, “Well, you are the raccoon.”

“What? No. Wait, what?” I replied, looking at him, shocked.

He held his gentle gaze before he said, “You are looking for the one kernel of good in a pile of shit, excuse all my cussing, but it is shit, you know? I’d never say your husband is a pile of poop, but you are in a cowpie situation, looking for one good thing in a terrible situation. Your daughter is worth more than one piece of undigested corn. You are worth more than that and you deserve more than a cowpie and one piece of poopy corn.”

I nodded, jaw open, eyes wide. This Southern story hit hard.

He continued, “The church has a lake house cabin, for our summer minister. It is yours. You and your daughter will be safe. Pam and her husband can help you move this weekend, but you can’t say anything to your husband. You will pay when you can, however you must pay this forward. Do something good for others.”

Overcome by the Minister’s care and concern, I gathered my thoughts and said, “He told me that he is going somewhere to ski on Friday so I can move this weekend. Also, I don’t have any money. I get paid once a month, and he gives me only gas money. I’ll pay rent as soon as I can.”

He stood up, and we shook hands on this new arrangement.

A week later, after Pam and the Minister helped me move, purchase a car and groceries, and arrange daycare nearby, my daughter and I were safe and cozy in a one-room cabin in the woods by a lake. A few weeks later, with the first February snowstorm, Pam and her family picked us up in their truck with large snow tires and took us down the hill to their home. On the way, Pam declared, “Hey, California girl! This is how we do snow in North Carolina. It’s a sledding day! A neighbor at the bottom of the hill has a snowmobile and walkie talkie and we will sled the whole road down and then he brings us back up to the top of the road.”

None of this made sense to me—the quick aid, the support and care of others in this small rural town, or the sledding on a snow day. Pam positioned my daughter and me on a sled at the top of the road on a smooth, straight stretch specifically for children and the “California girls.” My daughter sat between my legs where my feet would steer the sled, and I held this beautiful human tight. This baby girl who would not grow up with anger and violence, whose tiny presence spurred me to sit on this sled, on this hill, and break my silence so we could have a different life.

A different future life. A future life that would be filled with love, and a stable, secure relationship with a kind gentle husband, children, community, joy and belonging. This sweet, calm life thanks to two relative strangers in Lexington, North Carolina, who may or may not even remember me.

On the snowy road, Pam asked, “Are you ready?” I turned to her, tears running down my face, and said, “I think so.” I hugged my daughter close, and whispered, “We are going to be alright. I got you; it’s going to be glorious.”

Pam gave a slight push on my back like a mother urging a child to cross a threshold into a new phase of life. I leaned forward, screaming, laughing, giddy with joy. I held love, fear, courage, and faith. I knew how others had changed my life.

Dona Hare Price has written educational curriculums, creating tools to help parents and educational professionals interpret and respond to children’s communicative attempts in her career. She has written opinion pieces for Fresno and San Luis Obispo newspapers for years, never calling herself a writer until now. Her memoir will be published in 2026.