"I have no backup. Nothing. We just have each other. I wish I'd never come back."
Trapped in a world where she can barely afford to survive and fights every day to feed her cute 23-month-old toddler, Sarah rues the day she came back to Richmond from her native Australia.
While heavily pregnant with her son, she fled to the safety of Sydney from Richmond Hospital, where she'd been admitted after another beating at the hands of her now estranged husband.
After giving birth to Simon in Australia and hearing promises from her husband that he'd turned over a new leaf, Sarah was later wooed back to Canada.
Now barred from taking her child out of B.C. - a province which prohibits her going home, but doesn't seem willing or able to support her and her son - she admits leaving Australia was the biggest mistake she's ever made.
More than a year after gambling with a return to Richmond, she has suffered more abuse, moved in and out of a women's transition home and now finds herself carving out a meagre existence in a basement suite in Richmond.
After shelling out $800 a month on rent, hydro and laundry, Sarah, 39, and her beaming beacon of a boy somehow scrape by every month on the remaining $125.58 of her income assistance, receiving no help from the father.
She combs the streets for free furniture and all their clothes are donated.
The law dictates, however - due to a custody battle with the boy's abusive Canadian father - the mother and son can't leave B.C. together, let alone fulfil her desperate desire to return to the sanctuary and support of her mother's Sydney home.
Yet neither Sarah nor little Simon (names changed to protect their identities) are Canadian citizens. And she wouldn't dream of leaving her young son behind.
"I basically have to feed myself and my son with $125 per month," Sarah, a qualified accounts clerk, told the News.
"I've been told by the Ministry that I need to look for work if I want the child care subsidy, but my child is so young and is still not that healthy, so how can I ask a stranger to look after him?"
Five weeks premature, Simon was in intensive care for 11 weeks after his birth and still has health issues.
"I don't have any backup here whatsoever and I wouldn't be able to afford the daycare anyway.
And who would employ a mother with a little child who has no support?
"I have tried looking for work, but it's tough with a small child and no one to look after him.
"I just want to go home. I have applied to the courts to let me go back to Australia, but I haven't heard anything back yet."
Sarah said she needs her cell phone in case of an emergency for her son and her old car and its insurance was bought by her mom in Sydney.
"I can't keep asking her to send me money," she said.
"I go to the food bank every week, but a lot of the food we get there is expired and I can't risk (Simon) getting sick again.
"The only thing he will take is milk and I'm buying several four-litre jugs every few days for him. We've both lost lots of weight."
To make matters worse, Sarah could have been getting another $100 a month in universal child tax credit if her husband hadn't filed tax returns in her name and then cashed the cheques when she was in Australia having their baby.
"He was filing stuff he shouldn't have and cashing the cheques," she said.
"Now I owe the government more than $700, which they're taking back out of the child tax credit. I've asked the police to look into that."
Back in 2009, however, when Sarah first met her husband while they both worked at Vancouver Airport, there was nothing untoward about his behaviour or anything to suggest abuse lay ahead.
"I was on a work permit working as an accounts clerk at YVR," she recalled. "The problems began early and when he heard I was pregnant, he tried to get rid of the baby by beating me up."
"One time, when I was in Richmond Hospital, about 20 weeks pregnant, he tried to physically abuse me while in hospital.
"I didn't see any of this coming. I thank him for the child, but I wish I'd never met him."
Even after she's managed to flee to Australia, the abuse continued over the phone.
After Simon was born, however, Sarah admits she had a yearning for her child to grow up with his father's name.
"I didn't want him growing up without his father's name, despite what he'd done," she said. "I didn't want people asking, 'Where's the father? Where's the father's name?'
"I know it sounds ridiculous given what he had done, but it seemed the right thing to do."
Sarah asked the father about getting his name on the child's birth certificate and he agreed, as long as Simon was brought back to Canada. In December 2010, Sarah received the fully signed birth certificate in Australia and in January 2011, she returned to Richmond where the pair got married.
"It was the easiest way of getting sponsored," she said of her decision to get married.
Due to her visitor status, she returned to Australia later that January, where she began to receive phone calls and promises that she and her son would be looked after and that she would be free to return to Australia if it didn't work out.
Believing her husband, she flew back to Richmond in May 2011, but had booked a return flight for July, just in case.
"When we got to Canada he asked me to extend my visitor's visa," she said. "I agreed, but as soon as the application went in, he started hitting me again. He would lock the doors, he wouldn't let me leave the house."
After months of being abused, she finally moved to a transition house in November last year.
"I just couldn't take the abuse anymore. He was physically and verbally abusive and threatened me with a gun at one point," she said.
On Jan. 12 this year, she managed to get a restraining order against her husband. But a subsequent court order prevented either of them from leaving B.C. with the child.
The father now gets four hours a week of supervised visitation and has applied for more time with his son. However, the next custody hearing is not until January of 2013.
Sarah hopes a child maintenance hearing next month will force the father to pay towards the child's upkeep. Until then and next January, she will have to sit and hope that, one day, she'll either have enough money to fend for her and her child, or be allowed to return to her support system in Australia. "There are days when I don't even have milk for my child and my mum has put a little money into my account to help," she said.
"Does my child have to live deprived for the rest of his life?"
