For Love

“You don’t know anything about love,” my recently dumped boyfriend said on the drive home from the grocery store.  I begged to differ.  I was only his first girlfriend.  I had been in love before.  After two whole years with this jerk, it became very clear that he had no intention of asking me to marry him.  I finally gave up on him when I realized how childish he really was, although he was three years older than me.  I was nineteen, and ready to be married.  After hanging out as “just friends” for a month or so, he finally worked up the courage to tell me where we went wrong.  The unexpected bomb he dropped on me that day changed the course of my love life.

            “I want to tell you something, but I don’t want to argue about it,” he began.  A lecture on love from him? Oh, please!  His eyes were on my windshield, not me.  Coward.  I watched as they searched through empty space as he recalled the words he had prepared for me.  “Sharon, you never really loved me completely…with your whole heart I mean.”

            “What!  That’s ridic...”

            “Please! …please just let me finish.”  His voice was sincere.  He wasn’t angry, but I was.  I gave up my protest, but only gave him half of my attention.  I didn’t need this.  And yet, the grown up inside me urged me to compose myself, stop pouting, and really listen.  Even if I didn’t agree with him, I still owed him a chance to speak.

            “I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said, much more calmly than I felt.  This was going to be difficult.

            “It’s the truth!  I think you’re afraid too.  I don’t know why you’re afraid, but I can see it.  I could feel it when you pulled away from me.  You depended on me for the mundane things, like helping you on the computer, or picking you up after work, but you didn’t depend on me emotionally.  You used me, and…”

            “I did not USE you!  I can’t believe you’d even…,” I paused to regain control.  Breathe.  Just let him finish, and then kick him out of the car on his face.  “Sorry.  I’ll try to be quiet.  But I don’t agree with you.”

            “All I ask is that you listen.”  Good. Because that is all you’re going to get, I thought.  “It’s complicated, so just bear with me.  You did use me, but you never depended on me where you were supposed to.  You led the relationship.  I never got to kiss you.  You kissed me.  You controlled everything, maybe because you were afraid to let go.  Because… well, maybe if you gave in, if you gave me a chance to earn your trust and your love, it would have left you vulnerable to what I could do to your heart.  You never gave me that chance.”

           

I put away the groceries with much more force than necessary and laid down on my couch-bed to think this one out.  I was seething inside.  It was all bull-shit.  I never swore, not even to myself, but those were the only words in my head.  Bull-shit!  Bull-shit!!  Bull-shit!!!  Why did this upset me so much anyway?  I dumped him for good reasons!  I had every right to hold back physically if I wanted to.  I did love him, and now I hated him for it.  How dare he even think those things when he was the one that had no intention of marrying me! 

After crying angry tears, and mutilating my journal with a ballpoint pen, I came back to my senses and tried to realize why the grown up in me decided to let him talk in the first place.  Oh, right… for educational purposes.  Years of childhood therapy and confidence building exercises had trained me to realize that even though I did not agree with someone’s opinions, they still had a right to them.  It’s also healthy to double check, to do a self analysis against how others perceive your emotions and actions.  And, though I hated to even think it right then, I cared about him, and I didn’t like to see him hurting.  Not because of me anyway.  If he got ran over by a truck, so be it.  I turned to a fresh page in my journal and wrote out everything I knew to be true about our relationship.

For the first time in my life, I was brutally honest about me and boys.  I made lists of dates, our behaviors towards each other, the pros, and then the cons of the break up.  I vindicated my side, and then reluctantly examined his.  When I finally came to the point, there was only one question I couldn’t answer.  I did always keep control of the relationship.  I knew this before I even started.  The question was, why?  I had a million ready answers.  Because it’s too dangerous!  Because of what it did to my mother.  Because, if you want to get ahead in this world as a woman, you have to take charge.  Don’t settle for second, or second best.  If you let a man run your life, he’ll ruin it…  I was very good at self preservation, but I had decided to be honest with myself, hadn’t I?  I didn’t want to make anyone feel that way about how I loved ever again.  I hurt him badly, but he loved me enough to tell me the truth with the hope that I might get it right some day and be happy. 

In that moment, the truth chiseled away the barriers my brain had built up to protect my heart.  He was right.  I was afraid.  I never wanted to hurt the way he did, and if I was going to ever experience love fully, I needed to let go.  I was going to have to accept that no man was ever going to live up to my expectations, and learn to deal with the “flaws” I could not change.  I swore that the next man in my life was going to get it all.

Unfortunately, this revelation was flawed.  I was so ready to be in love, real love, for the first time that I did not pause to consider what flaws Mr. Right had that I shouldn’t overlook.  I kept only one condition; he must be a Christian.  As long as he was a believer, his demons were between him and God.  It was not my place to judge someone else’s sins.  I would offer unconditional love, and help where help was wanted.  I would not ask him to do anything for me that I couldn’t do myself.  Above all, I would be forgiving, understanding, and generous with my love.

Out of courtesy, I have decided to call Mr. Right by another name. Though, now that I think about it, it might be more courteous to plaster his name and picture on a billboard with the caption “Just say no, and run away from this man” as a public service announcement for the good of mankind.  For now, let’s just call him Bill, the man destined to become my first husband.

After my great epiphany, I ran into Bill.  I had obsessed over him relentlessly in junior high, dated him briefly in high school, and lost contact with him when I moved out of state my senior year.  The summer after my first full year of college, I came to pay a good friend a visit, and there he was in the parking lot of Good Will.  He sat in his green, GMC Sonoma, waiting for his young and very gorgeous fiancée to allow him to give her a ride back to her mother’s house. 

“Sharon?”

I turned to see who had called me.  I didn’t recognize him at first.  He had grown a goatee and wore his hair shorter than he use to, more spiky in the front.

“Bill?  Is that you?”

His smile for me was the same, irresistible and inviting.  His eyes looked hopeful and eager to connect again.  But he was engaged.  We caught each other up on our lives after high school, our love lives, our hopes for the future, and our new phone numbers and email addresses.  That is when she came out, looking murderous at the sight of us laughing and talking to each other through his truck window. 

“You must be Ashley.  Congratulations!  I hear you guys are engaged.”  She did not smile back at me.  She simply replied in the affirmative and got in the truck.  She sat in her seat with fury blazing on her face as we said our good byes.  What was her problem?  Can’t a guy talk to another girl without getting third degree burns?  It was so obviously her problem, not his.  A month or so later, he called, and we arranged to hang out together at his mother’s house.  He was single.  He was in school.  He was writing a paper about his new life as a Christian.  Ding, ding!  He was fair game.

I was falling in love before I left that night.  He was gorgeous, caring, and so kind to me.  (Ugh!  It’s hard to admit that I ever saw him that way.  All I see now is a scrawny, brown toothed, scraggly bearded smoker with chronic bronchitis, diarrhea, and extreme mood swings.  If love is blind, I was brain damaged.)  Best of all, he didn’t just want to be with me, he needed me.  I fell hard this time.  I did what my ex told me to do.  I let go of everything.  I gave in 100%.  I saw the old warnings trying to build a wall up between us, trying to bring me back to my senses, and I didn’t care.  The fact that he was just engaged to a sixteen year old didn’t matter.  She was gone.  The fact that he wasn’t a virgin and craved my body didn’t matter.  He could have it if he asked.  For once, I would let it all go. 

However, our early courtship had a few bumps that I just couldn’t smooth out so easily.  Twice, I was forced to face the facts about who he really was.  After only a few weeks, he called me up to tell me that he kissed a girl that he worked with.  It crushed me, but I could not let him go.  After all, he convinced me that it was really my fault.  He said he was confused.  We hadn’t really been together all that long, and he must have misunderstood the sincerity of my feelings.  Plus, I had written him a letter from Maine saying that I would be there for him as a friend to help him with his addictions.  He took that to mean that until he was free from his addictions, I would only be his friend.  I would not blame him, but the warnings were getting louder.  How could he do that to me if he was really in love?  Even if he was confused, then shouldn’t he have waited for me if he knew I would always be there for him?  Why didn’t he try to clarify what I meant before he went to her?  I knew then that he couldn’t possibly love me the way I loved him, but I did what was necessary to keep him.  I stuffed that little voice deep down in my gut and told it to shut up.

I visited Illinois a few weeks later during fall break to clear things up for him.  Less than a month later, I withdrew from all of my classes at the University of Southern Maine, explained to my teachers, my family and myself that I needed to be a bigger part of the church.  I needed a break from school for my nerves, for my health, for my sanity.  I wasn’t pacing myself the way I should.  I deserved a break, a chance to rediscover who I was, what I needed, and how I could serve God.  What I really meant was, I am moving to Illinois to be with Bill.  It was all true, but I fooled myself into believing that I was acting solely on the more sensible reasons.  It worked.

The drug issue came up again one night while we were spooning on the ugly, outdated couch in his mother’s otherwise modern living room.  He struggled with marijuana, and much later he admitted to doing coke occasionally, but that was not for me to condemn.  He said he was quitting.  To me, that was all that mattered.  But things were quickly becoming serious between us.  We talked about getting our own place together and getting married some day.  It was getting awkward staying the night at his mother’s house.  I had never been intimate with anyone before him, and the fact that I had to look into his mother’s eyes the next morning at breakfast knowing that she knew what was going on was beyond embarrassing.  She was my advanced geometry teacher in high school for goodness sake!  It was far past time for him to move out.  The problem was that this new arrangement would bring new rules into play.

“Bill?  If we lived together, would you bring drugs into the house” I asked.

“You know the answer to that.”

“No, I don’t.  I thought you quit?  I know you still struggle with it once in a while, but wouldn’t moving in with me help you stay away from it?”

“How do you figure?  If I am going to pay for a place, I am going to live how I want to live there.”

“How much are you still…I mean… how often are you still tempted to smoke?”

“Are you sure you want to know the answer?”

I wasn’t at all sure, but it was too late now.  “Yes.”

“I smoke less than I use to, before you came around that is.  But…I still smoke almost every day.”  He looked over at me to catch how the news affected me.  “I told you you didn’t want to know.”

How could he joke about it so lightly?  This was serious!  We were talking about marriage.  I had just given him my body as a token of good faith that I wanted to marry him, as a sign that I trusted that he was putting away his juvenile habits to be with me.  I was frozen in my panic.  What had I done!?!

“Sharon?”

“Are you really quitting or aren’t you?  I need to know.  If we’re going to commit to each other, I need to know that you’re putting all that behind you.”

He looked me straight in the eye without an ounce of regret and said, “If that’s the way you feel, you shouldn’t be with me.  I would rather you leave me right now.”

“You mean… that’s it?”

“Yes.”

“But…I love you!  Doesn’t that mean anything?”  I was becoming hysterical.  There had been no grand fight.  No lead up to such a brief, emotionless dismissal.  Love couldn’t end this way.

“Sharon, I’m trying to quit.  I don’t want to lose you either, but I don’t want you to think I’m going to be able to stop over night.”

Overnight?  It had been several months since we started dating and even longer since he actually decided to “quit.”  How long could it possibly take?  His calm reserve shook me.  He was ready to lose me over this.  I wasn’t.  Was I willing to wait for him, like I promised him from the beginning?  Yes.  I would wait.  It wasn’t like we had to get married tomorrow.  We were still so young.

  “Then I’ll stay.  As long as you’re trying.”

“Okay.” 

And that was the end of it.  He went back to our evening as if all was normal while I tried to keep from choking to death on the lump in my throat.  The conscience I once tried to bury deep in the pit of my stomach was desperately clawing its way back up to rebuild the wall, to keep me safe from this idiocy.  It took all my effort to force it down.  I felt sick at the thought of losing him.  It would end me.  Who would want me after I had been…used?  And what of his habits?  I would never be happy in a home with drugs in it.  What was I thinking?  I believed the warnings this time, but I was in too deep to take them to heart.  It was like being chained to the bottom of a swimming pool.  The top of the water swarmed with life savers, but there was no way to reach them. 

Even if I wanted to. 

Before I could decide what I should do, it was too late.  I went to church alone on Mother’s day with a strange awareness of change.  My period was late, but that was nothing new.  It was never regular.  But I knew what had happened.  Two weeks after we had been intimate, he told me that the condom broke.  I sat through that service, crumpling and straightening the weekly service bulletin on my skirt, trying desperately to remember the ovarian cycle from freshmen biology.  What day does the egg emerge?  What are the best days for fertility?  How long would it take to show up on a pregnancy test if his little swimmers made contact?

The only thing I remember about the service was the little boy and his mother standing at the door with a large bucket of pink, white, and red carnations for the mothers.  The little boy was so eager to help with this task that no woman could find him anything but endearing.  As I reached the doors he looked up at me with his huge, chocolate-brown eyes, smiled angelically, and handed me a flower.  Red.  His mother looked at me with an expression that said, “Isn’t that cute?  He thinks you’re a mother too.  Oh just keep it dear.  We’ve got plenty.”  I had no intention of giving it back.

I held my flower in one hand and one of the empty pregnancy test boxes in the other as I watched the urine saturate the strips of the five tests on the bathroom counter.  Two lines for positive, one line for negative.  What did I want?  How would I tell my mother her twenty year old daughter was pregnant?  I didn’t have long to think on it.  The results were popping up faster than the directions said they would.  One by one, I watched the lines appear in the little windows, all positive.

I freed my hands to cup the sides of my flat little belly.  My whole life altered in that moment.  The plan I had for the progression of my life was gone.  I was an unmarried mother with no degree, no career, no stability, and for some reason I was supremely happy.  In that very first second of recognition I fell in love with my child.  It was so intense; I laughed and cried, hugging my belly as I shook with emotion.  There was nothing I wouldn’t do for this tiny little life nestled inside me.  She was all that mattered.

But with this happy change came a devastating realization.  My conscience had been kicked out of its hiding place.  There wasn’t any room for it to occupy that pit now that my baby was growing there.  The baby was my key concern now.  Bill was going to have to face his demons sooner rather than later.  This baby needed her father.  I needed a husband who would work with me as a loving partner that would help me raise her in a proper environment.  For her sake, I was willing to give him a chance.  

Three months later we were married, because of her.  Not for his love, but for my love for her, the little angel swimming free inside me. We had made a family.  We had to do the responsible thing, the right thing.  Did he even love me?  Did it matter?  I left it all in God’s hands. 

It shouldn’t take a genius to figure out what happened next.  Of course, I had been a complete idiot from the beginning.  I loved him more than I loved myself.  I gave up school to be with him.  I gave up my virginity to keep him.  I gave up my future to start a family with him. But he didn’t want it, and my resolve to keep those binding chains that insisted on drowning me finally broke.  I would not make my baby bear their weight.  When push came to shove, (literally as well as figuratively), he chose his drugs over me and his child in a fight I will never forget.  At least I walked away from it with her in my arms.        

Just before the divorce, I went up to Maine to visit my mother, brothers and sisters.  I ran in to my ex-boyfriend, Dr. Love himself, at the grocery store as luck would have it.  I did not have my eleven month old baby girl with me, but I was still wearing my wedding ring.  We exchanged the usual pleasantries politely and somewhat awkwardly, then moved on to current events.

“I took your advice by the way” I said.  He looked confused.  “About how to love.”

“Oh…uh, that’s great.”

“I’m getting a divorce.”  I told him why in so many words.

He finally looked up at me when I finished.  The expression on his face looked exactly like I felt, like a deflated balloon that had been backed over by a dump truck, then buried under several tons of manure.  “I’m so sorry.  Truly.  I only wanted happiness for you.”

“It’s okay.  You didn’t pick him.”  We both chuckled a bit, still staring at the floor again.

“Are you going to be alright?”

“I’ll manage.”  He understood.

“What about your daughter?  Do you have a picture of her?”  A wise move, changing the subject.  I did not like thinking about how I would never have a husband or a father for her.

  “Yes.”  I reached into my wallet and pulled out her Christmas picture.  “Here she is.  Everyone says she looks just like me, but I don’t see it.”   

“She’s beautiful.  She’s lucky to have you for her mother.”   

“I’m lucky to have her.  You were right you know.”

“About?”

“Giving 100% for love.”  His confusion lasted only a second.  He looked at me, then back to the picture, and smiled.