If you were to meet Kaylie Price, you would never assume she had been through so much. The happy-go-lucky 30-year-old has contagious positivity and a heartwarming relationship with her kids.
It is hard to believe that someone so bubbly was threatened with a knife by own her husband just three years ago, not long after losing her baby boy.
Despite the subject, she is open and welcoming. The story is still emotional for her to recall and she tries not to mention anything too severe in front of her kids, moving into another room in their photo-filled home.
She recalls the night back in May 2015 when her husband returned home drunk, some time around 2am. She briefs me on how they had separated at the time because of his alcohol addiction, which came about in the years following the death of their son.
“There was years of build-up to it”, she said. “It mainly got bad when we lost [their son], that’s when he lost the plot; got mad on alcohol and that’s when, like, the violence got more,” her voice cracked and she struggled to get her words out. “He did it more then.
She tells me how she had been helping him sober up and allowing him to stay back at home for a two-week period when the main incident occurred. She continued to recall his actions once he got back that night, intoxicated after a funeral.
“I had said to him it was his last chance, I didn’t want him near the kids like that and I tried to get him to bed,” she explained. “He just got all violent.
"On that day, I only phoned the police because he went for [her daughter]. She tried to help me."
Kaylie's close relationship with her eldest child is obvious from being around them for a matter of minutes. She calls her "mini me" for their resemblance not only in looks, but personality.
She is conscious of her daughter jokingly following her from the other room, but laughs and tells her to watch TV with her siblings.
"I saw my daughter get the phone, I told her: 'say domestic violence'."
She tells me about how her attempt to help her daughter speak to the police that night was later thrown back at her in court, disgusted at how her words were "manipulated" to prove her husband's innocence.
"Because I had said 'say domestic violence', they argued it was staged. Even though [her daughter] was saying 'he’s beating up my mommy'."
She tells me that her husband took the phone afterwards and talked me through the police arriving not much later, having heard everything in the background of the call. “They could hear it all going on,” she said. “They could hear me saying something like:
'Just put the knife down, you don’t have to be like this.'
She explains learning that her husband had a history of violence against women through his adolescence, even towards family members. She said: “It’s weird because when I was with him, I wasn’t scared of him but after he left, I wondered what I was doing for so long.
“I had to have counselling”, she said. “I was having really bad nightmares of him beating me and I just couldn’t sleep at night.
She tells me that her two eldest children, both under the age of 10 when it happened, also needed to through counselling.
“[My son] has been scarred from it.”
She explained how she actually found out from her son's primary school teacher that he had talked about it in class. “They were sharing their first memories,” she said. “Other kids were saying that they remembered going to Disneyland, but he said that he remembered his mommy getting pushed over a chair and punched by daddy.
Whilst Kaylie knew her eldest daughter was aware of the situation and was in counselling for it, she only found out that her son had come across his mother being hurt by his father after two years of secrecy.
She recalls him telling her:
'Mommy, I was sat on the stairs. I went to come in the living room because I thought you and daddy were play-fighting, so I was going to come help you but I saw you crying. I thought daddy was being naughty, so I went and hid under my quilt.'
Her son is now in counselling, but Kaylie has since stopped, due to what she described an irrational fear of being judged by the counsellors."Instead of counselling, I write poems; I write loads about domestic violence," she told me. "It’s a whole book of how I’ve got through it and I think it made me cope after that.
"That’s how I’d let my dad and sister know. That’s how I’d talk to them."
Kaylie has since gone back to college, which she mentioned with a smile whilst explaining how that came to be. It was actually her best friend who wanted her to prove to people that she could do it and that she was putting her life on track, so took it upon herself to enrol her.
“She actually walked me into class like she was my mother,” Kaylie laughed, mentioning how she was initially too scared to attend on her first day due to anxiety. But went on to beam with pride whilst bragging that her eldest daughter was top of her class at school as well.
“She’s a high achiever, my child,” she laughed.
Their family seem to be doing brilliantly, in spite of all they have been through.
Image by Daniela Brown (CC BY-ND 2.0)
