A Mother's Fight for Life

Teri and David's Hawaiian honeymoon should have been paradise. Instead, Teri says David started acting out in very controlling ways—and hit her for the first time. "Probably about the second day we got into a dumb little argument about what to wear on a hike. He said: 'I'm your husband. You listen to me. You do what I say,'" she says. "Because I said no to him, I got a couple blows to my head with the palm of his hand."

Teri was shocked. "The first thought that came into my mind was, 'I'm leaving,'" she says. "But he had the flight tickets. He had the credit card. He had everything. I felt sort of stuck."

Teri also thought about asking her parents to come get her. "But then I started thinking, logically, 'Well, my parents don't want to come down to Hawaii and get me.'"

Gavin says her original instincts were correct. "So it comes up into your mind, which is a total gift, these ideas, these plans, and then we start to debate and prosecute our own ideas and go through this process that lets us stay in situations we don't want to be in."

Ultimately, Teri says she tried to write the incident off as a fluke. "Maybe that's all the stress that was built up from getting married," she says. "I just thought to myself, 'Maybe I'll listen to him next time and do what he wants to do to make him happy and that won't happen.'"