"So, I am feeling some things" I text a friend of mine.
She responds pretty immediately with compassionate concern and an offer to talk by phone later in the weekend.
When Tim died, it was the pinnacle of terribleness. There was so much that was wrapped up, connected to, falling apart at that time, but Tim's death was less "one more thing" and more "the thing." It was the only thing for a very long time. Because of the judgments of others and my disenfranchised grief, I tried to make it go away. Except it stayed and it loomed larger and larger every day. So, I tried very hard to make it very small and I locked it away and hid it deep inside of me and I never spoke his name and I never let others speak his name. Except it wasn't gone and it wasn't well-hid, and it leaked out of me in the most awful ways.
Then, ten years ago, at my wits' end, I sat down and I wrote. A lot. About Tim's death, about what happened after Tim's death. Somehow I managed to feel everything and it didn't kill me and then I figured out how to carry the grief lightly.
Somewhere in my brain, this seemed sufficient. The trauma of Tim's death was so monumental that it overshadowed every other horrible thing that had happened that autumn. Integrating the experience, if belatedly, had me thinking that everything else was okay, too. I did a fair bit of writing and work - and oh, so much therapy - around Tim's death and the rape one week before. Halloween is still uncomfortable for me, but the rest of it? The rest of it didn't register. Out of sight, out of mind. The big thing was healed, so the rest of it was done, too, yes? That's how it works, no?
And then last week, my pants slid down while I was walking from one location at work to another. Not all the way down, thank goodness. But far enough down on my hips that they would have made their way to the floor if I hadn't grabbed them, adjusted them, and removed everything from my pockets. It was like that time in New York, back in 2007, when I was walking to the subway station at 116th, wearing a skirt, and I felt my panties start to slip. I clenched my knee and waddled into Barnard Hall (quite the feat navigating a flight of stairs with my knees so tightly squeezed together), ducking into the first women's restroom I came to, relaxing my knees, and watching satin pool at my feet. Today, my smallest clothes are comfortably loose and rather quickly becoming uncomfortably oversized. I can easily see parts of my body I haven't seen in years.
Suddenly, I'm thinking about the lawyer, R. Seventeen years later, and I'm thinking about the first time I ever had sex. How horrified I was then by the decision. How I spoke to Tim about it the next day and he said, "Oh, you lost your virginity!" and I practically shouted at him, "I didn't LOSE it! It's not like I woke up this morning wondering where it went, scrambling around and looking under furniture for it, hoping to find it alongside my missing panties! I GAVE IT AWAY!"
Except, that's also not entirely accurate. I treated it less like a gift to be given and more like a bomb or hot potato, throwing it at the lawyer from across his apartment while yelling, "Just take it already!" It's strange - I feel so much ambivalence when I remember this. I was so ashamed then and I feel shame now when it pops into my head - shame that it still, sometimes, pops into my head - and I think about what sex with him was like. And, seventeen years later, I'm super proud of how I handled it - clear, forthright, explicit about my boundaries. I just baldly told him what I wanted, what I didn't want, and exactly where the boundaries were. And he respected all of that. I'm frankly in awe of this reality nearly two decades later, because honestly, having my boundaries respected was so freaking novel. I was in no way emotionally ready for sex - hot fucking mess. But, by any objective measure of how to negotiate sexual encounters ...? I did everything right.
The thing that's hardest, though, is knowing how wrong everything I believed then was. The hardest thing is knowing that I had been lied to, and I kind of think I might have known it was all a lie, but I was willing to swallow the lie whole in order to have something - community, belonging, validation. Except it wasn't belonging. I didn't fit in that place or that community and I was never going to fit in that place or that community. Who I am, in my fullness, was never going to be validated.
I did not know then - and I now feel like I should have known - that this was the beginning of my faith deconstruction. It was a seminal decision that changed everything. It was the moment when I began my journey to ex-vangelicalism. Still, it took far too long.
Because he, P, told me he loved me, he wanted a life with me, that I was “the only woman who fits the mold" of what he was looking for in a wife, and then he fucked the model-thin conventionally attractive woman. So, I fucked R, the lawyer - his college friend, his frat brother, the first one he introduced me to. Because P introduced me to them all - his friends, his colleagues, his college buddies, his family. "Oh, you're her," she said to me, pulling me into a giant hug - unimaginable for such a small woman - when he took me home to meet his mom. "P's told me all about you! Welcome!" And it felt like a "welcome to the family" as much as welcoming me into her home.
I remember sitting at the bar the night P introduced me to R, sipping French Martinis and thinking life was going to be beautiful from this moment forward. "What are you looking for in a man?" R asked me.
"I want someone who loves Jesus," I said.
"Definitely not me," R interjected.
"And someone who can keep up with me intellectually," I finished.
"That's where you're going to run into problems," P informed me. I've been described by men before as "scary smart." I never understood.
So many years later, I don't even remember when and I don't remember if it was from a book I read or in a sermon I heard, but some evangelical Christian pastor was sharing the tale of his wife (having recently given birth) eating a chocolate donut for breakfast one morning. He related how he was devastated by this because if she ate donuts for breakfast, she'd never get her pre-baby body back, she'd never again be the hot wife he married, she'd be sexually repulsive to him, and he wanted to want his wife and it was her job to be hot in order to make that happen. This was the prevailing message of the evangelical church. "Women: be hot and men will want you, will marry you, will protect you, will provide for you, will love you. Men: get yourself a hot wife and then make sure she stays that way so you won't be tempted to cheat."
Twenty-six and fresh-faced and oh so cute, but I would never be beautiful (except P told me that I was). I had been fat my entire adolescence and young adulthood. I would never be thin, but I still starved myself - eating a few hundred calories a day - and took up running and fasted two days a week until I was only overweight: heavy, rubenesque you might say, but no longer super fat. I was still a far cry from "hot wife" material.
Still, the evangelical church promised the fulfillment of every juvenile wet dream for the men and Disney princess fantasy for the women. I was killing myself to be (thin) enough, to be worthy - of love, of belonging, of validation, of being called good. But my life was turning out to be more akin to Hans Christian Andersen's version of The Little Mermaid - voiceless, walking on sharp blades, and in the end utterly shattered, moving through the world like a sylph. P set aside all of the things he'd said to me, all of the promises he made, and had sex with the pretty girl.
Still, he told me it was nothing. Still, he told me that he loved me. Still, when I dreamt I was at his engagement party and called him five days later to congratulate him, he said, "I'm not engaged to her. I don't ever want to marry her. I still want to fix this and make things right with you. I just need time to figure out how to end it with her." Two days later, when she told him she was pregnant, he proposed to her. He did marry her.
P had his hot wife. And I believed, because it's what the church had told me my whole life, that the whole thing was my fault, that what P did was not just understandable, it was acceptable because the single most important thing to a man is sex and a woman's primary, nay sole, job in a marriage is to be fuckable and I had failed. Even at my thinnest, cutest, closest-to-pretty stage in life, I was still failing to be the right kind of woman - the kind of woman who was wanted. The kind of woman a Christian man wanted to fuck - and would be willing to marry first.
It's been seventeen years. I never saw P or R again. In the course of time, I finished my master's degree and left New York permanently. I haven't been back for so much as a vacation. This is the first time in eight years I've even thought about P or R.
Forty-three-year-old me sees all of this very differently. I know now that it was never about me and that the failings were NOT mine. What I knew then but couldn't see until now is that P was repeating the exact same pattern he'd laid in his first marriage (albeit without children the first time around).
Still, hiking in the Chehalem Mountains a week ago, my twenty-six-year-old self just showed up out of the blue, turned to my spouse, and cried out, "Are you going to leave me!?" I know that he would never dream of it. Still, my younger self that lives in the space between my sinew and bones remembers what we lost the last time we weighed this little, and how much it hurt.
"What!?" he asked.
"Terrible things happen when I'm thinner," I told him. I know this is magical thinking. I know that this is magical thinking, but knowing it's magical thinking does not, in any way, make it less terrifying or lessen the anxiety.
Surprise and confusion clouded my spouse’s face. "Of course not," he told me in earnest. "I'm just glad you like me because otherwise I'd have to worry about all the hot young guys that are going to be hitting on you." Funny. And true. And then I remember R, who is forever thirty-six in my mind.
"I do like you," I tell my spouse. "And you're super lucky to have me," I tease. He agrees whole-heartedly and remarks on my chef-ing skills. "I'm extraordinary," I tell him, knowing that it's true. "Beyond my abilities in the kitchen, I - who I am as a person - am extraordinary."
My spouse believes this. More importantly, I believe it.
I grieve, deeply, that it took me forty-three years to figure it out. I wonder how different things might have been if I had known at twenty-six how absolutely worthy I am and have always been. It still hurts - the way P treated me, the lies and betrayal and broken promises. While I know that it had nothing to do with me, I also know that I will never receive an apology from him. Whatever his feelings concerning his choices, whatever regrets he may carry about how he treated me, I will never know.
I do know that I would not have been happy in the life that he so fleetingly offered me. The life I have now is beyond anything I could have even imagined all those years ago. I am thriving and I'm married to someone who loves, respects, and cherishes me quite as much as I love, respect, and cherish him. I wish I could go back and tell twenty-six-year-old me what it's like - to be loved, respected, cherished, to truly belong.
Because she has no idea and she believes that the half-life she wanted and was willing to settle for would be enough for her. She believes that that life would make her enough. I wish I could tell her - the fault, the problem, the sin does not reside in her. I wish she could know how extraordinary and truly lovely she is - and that none of that has anything to do with the body in which she resides or who chooses to do life with her.
"You, my beloved," I would say, looking her in the eyes, "are so much more than enough."
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