Finding the best of my love after abuse

Some people called him “Barefoot Lloyd”. On our small college campus, being the person who walked around barefoot could be a distinguishing feature where names failed. “Oh, you mean that guy who walks around barefoot?” 

We were both English majors. The first time he asked me out, I told him I had a boyfriend. It was true. I had a boyfriend whom no one ever saw because he was older and above my college life. I never said much about him because the relationship had become stifling and emotionally abusive by that point.

When I was away from my boyfriend, I could breathe a little easier. I didn’t talk about him because that was my other life, my life without air. In this life I was Catherine the newspaper editor and French speaker, intellectual and creative. That other Catherine was the shadow Catherine. It was hard to see her. She usually lived behind me, and when I turned around to try to get a good look, she would jump out of view. She was slippery and weak and selfish and you couldn’t trust her, at least that was what the one person who ever saw that Catherine told me. He was the one who controlled the angles of how the light hit me; he could make the shadow Catherine appear wherever he wanted. Even when I was away from my boyfriend, I could feel the shadow Catherine always behind me.

About a year and a half passed before Lloyd and I actually had our first date. After I told him I had a boyfriend, we remained campus conversationalists, not quite friends. I could tell all along that he adored me, in the most respectful way. He wrote a sonnet for me and delivered it by hand while I was making my way around campus distributing the college newspaper. He saw me sitting outside the cafeteria one day and got down on one knee to strike up a conversation. I enjoyed being around him, but I never planned to date him. He wasn’t like anyone who had been a romantic interest for me in the past. I had developed a pattern of being attracted to older men, often musicians, countercultural, troubled in some profound way.

Lloyd was not any of those things; he was younger, deeply healthy and stable, with a servant’s heart. He went to these weekly Christian meetings on campus, which I wasn’t so sure about at the time because I would definitely not have identified as a Christian. But he had a big dose of joyful weirdness that you could not miss in him. He once made a hula skirt out of newspaper and wore it to all his classes for a day. For no reason. He was light and fun and honest and liked books and ideas just as much as I did.

This is the kind of person who became my husband:  As a sixth-grader, he first heard Pink Floyd’s “Brick in the Wall” and felt concerned. We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teachers leave them kids alone. He heard the lyrics and thought, “Oh no! I hope Mrs. Hallmark doesn’t hear this! I don’t know if she could handle it.” He didn’t want his teacher’s feelings to be hurt. She didn’t know that a boy had been flipping the bird at her when she turned her back in class.

Shameless beginnings

I was a couple months past the break-up with Sean and studying for my comprehensive exams in the library when Lloyd sat down at my table. In hushed voices, we rehashed our weekend, when we had run into each other at a party and danced crazily before going to Waffle House with one of my friends. It involved a lot of rolled-down-window car singing, and it was a night of pure college fun.

In the library he looked me straight in the eye and told me with a smile on his face, “When you were riding shotgun in the car with me, and we were listening to MGMT, I really wanted to kiss you.”

GULP. Say what? I was speechless. Words came out that flittered and flattered, but I’m pretty sure they said nothing. I smiled and told him, “You’re shameless.” Somehow the conversation came to a miraculous end, and he stood up and went back to his own work.

French literature was no longer at the forefront of my mind. What just happened? I tried to sit and take stock of the emotions that flooded me when he said those words. Surprise…I certainly didn’t expect him to say that. Fear…I wasn’t sure if I was ready to kiss anyone after all I had experienced. Doubt…he’s always been a nice guy, but what if he cares more about sex than he cares about me?

I had to consider all those emotions before I reached the feeling that told me I was interested in kissing him, too. Delight…he always seemed to have his own way of doing things. I couldn’t imagine many people just inserting that statement into a conversation like he did. I loved the risks he took with people. Safe…he made me feel safe. No guy had ever been so honest with me before. I appreciated how straightforward and vulnerable he was.

I opened up my laptop and composed the first of what would be many e-mails, letters, and post-it notes between us.

Not an à la carte menu

Lloyd’s courtship. It was like coming out of a dark movie theater into the daylight. At first the light was blinding, and I didn’t know what to do with all of it. Can all this light be real? But once my eyes adjusted, I thought, “Wow, there’s a whole world out here. Look how the sun shines.”

A couple weeks after the library conversation, he did kiss me. After I gave him permission. I thought I was ready to kiss someone, but the moment it ended, I knew I wasn’t. I felt like I was doing something wrong. Like my body belonged to someone else. I imagined what my ex-boyfriend would do if he knew. I could feel him watching me. I hated that feeling. I wanted to just move on, to get on with my life, to be free. The kiss made me realize how much of a captive I still was to the emotional and sexual abuse, even though my life had changed dramatically.

I wanted to do everything differently this time. No hidden feelings. No games. No reading between the lines. No unwanted physical contact. I wanted to be intentional. The day after the kiss, I walked over to Lloyd’s dorm and knocked on his door. As I waited, I noticed a clear storage bin with shredded newspaper by his door and was not surprised to learn that this was Lloyd’s compost worm farm. After we cleared up that detail, I said, “I need to talk to you. Can we go somewhere?” We walked to the parking lot and stood under a tree by a construction zone.  My fingers grasped the chain link fence.

“I know I told you you could kiss me, but I’m not ready to be physical with anyone,” I told him. He knew I had ended a long-term relationship in the last couple months.

“Ok,” he said. “Take as long as you need. I’ll follow your lead. I just want to be around you. The physical aspect is an added bonus, but I don’t want that part if it makes you uncomfortable.”

It didn’t surprise me that he said this, and I really trusted him. I knew this wasn’t “Take as long as you need, but next time we have a few drinks, I’ll put my arm around you and try to kiss you.” This was a solid, “You tell me what to do.” But I still felt like, “Man, I’m so damn complicated. He doesn’t even know what he’s gotten into. Am I going to drag this poor boy through a quagmire?”

An excavator moved dirt from one pile to another on the other side of the construction fence.

“I just went through a lot in my last relationship,” I said. “It didn’t end well…I’m sorry to be so complicated.” I had this fearful feeling of “Who’s going to want someone as broken as me?”

He did. And he didn’t see me as broken. He saw the beautiful wholeness of me years before I did. But today he said, “Catherine, I don’t have a rubric in my head of what I want you to be. This is not à la carte–take this part of you, leave the rest. I want to know all of you. ”

Not ready to be a girlfriend

He did follow my lead. I wasn’t looking to jump into a new relationship; I thought some time unfettered would be good for me. What I soon learned was that I could be with Lloyd and still have my freedom. A breath of fresh air doesn’t begin to describe it. AIR. I could breathe. I had been living in a pressure tank for years. AIR. So this is what keeps us alive.

A few weeks after we started spending a lot of time together,  he wanted to take me to movie night over at his friend’s house. “How should I introduce you?” he asked. “My friend Catherine, my girlfriend Catherine?”

When I heard that word “girlfriend”, I panicked. I felt something tightening around my neck.

I could be open with Lloyd. I thought through this out loud.

“I don’t know if I’m ready to be a girlfriend again. It made me really nervous when I heard you say that. I mean, I really care about you and enjoy spending time with you and want to keep doing that, but…I’ve only been a girlfriend once. And I didn’t like how that felt. It wasn’t a good thing to be. It meant that I belonged to him. That my time was his. That he had a lot of power over my life. That he wanted to tell me what to do. Not that I think you’ll do those things, but the label just makes me nervous.”

We ended up deciding to think of ourselves as “the adventure duo” or something of the sort for awhile.

The best of my love

Despite my reluctance to take on the label of “girlfriend”, love hit me fast and hard. I wrote: It’s the heart-skip-a-beat love, enduring the quiet amazement of your presence whenever you’re near me–that kind of love. Yes, it’s newness, and it’s electrifying. Yes, it’s soon, and I feel young when I say it because it’s not love in daily practice but love as a humming charge that I feel emanating from you and me, me and you. But that doesn’t make it less real, and that doesn’t make it less love.

Lloyd had never been in a relationship before, and we found our way together. I did a lot of unlearning about what it meant to be in an intimate relationship with someone. Hello, Boundaries. Honesty. Balance.

When I first left the relationship with Sean, I felt exhausted. Emotionally drained. There’s a song by The Mountain Goats that I played on repeat in those days.

Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania. Trucks loaded down with weapons crossing over every night, moon yellow and bright. There is a shortage in the blood supply, but there is no shortage of blood. The way I feel about you, baby, can’t explain it. You got the best of my love.”

I thought he got the best of my love. I gave him everything. How would I ever have the energy to give that much again? How would I ever have the energy to learn so much about another person? How would I trust again? Surely any love that came after would be less potent because I would keep some of myself in reserve. I couldn’t give away that much again.

I was right in one sense. I never did give away that much again. Lloyd wanted to know all of me, but he didn’t need to possess me. I didn’t give myself away TO him, and I didn’t give myself away FOR him. I gave, and he gave, and I left feeling that my vessel held more than it had before. We remained separate vessels. We poured into each other’s vessels, but we lived in our own vessels at the end of the day. 

In another sense, I learned to give more. There was so much of myself that I felt I needed to hide from Sean. There were parts of me he wished into nonexistence and begrudgingly ignored until he actively condemned and tried to reform those parts. I had to pretend so many of my experiences did not exist. Beautiful, formative times I could never mention, like my study abroad trips to Greece and France. So many unspeakables. I think he was jealous of any experience that brought me joy that had nothing to do with him. It made him insecure. He thought that anything that I enjoyed without him would take me away from him, would make me want to leave him.

I can say with confidence that Sean did not get the best of my love. He did not get the best of my love because he did not love all of me. He didn’t even want to see all of me. Looking back, I hesitate to even call it love even though there were loving moments, and I cared deeply about him.

If it was love, it was love perverted. The love we had was so overgrown with fear on all sides that it could not even be recognized as a garden. It was fertilized with fear, watered with fear, and grew uncontrollable stalks of lies, suspicion, anger, threats, ultimatums, and silence. The weeds grew so tall and thick that you couldn’t even see me through them. Sometimes I would come across a flowering weed so beautiful and delicate that I would hold that weed in my hand and relish it for days. It made the thorny weeds less threatening. I lost my way. I came out the other side scraped up from all the prickly edges and covered in ticks. Some I was able to pick off and discard immediately; others have stayed well-hidden, and when I find them, they’re filled with blood that they’ve been siphoning off me for years.

A new garden

I went to visit Lloyd at his parents’ house a few months into our relationship. In the directions he sent me to his childhood home, he wrote:

“Exit north on the Natchez Trace. Travel north through many thousands of twisted, shaded furlongs, over the few long bridges and many short ones. Do not stop to feed the turkey poachers or offer transportation to any of the wildlife. DO NOT, under any circumstances, stop on the long bridges; beneath them lurk Trace Trolls.”

Lloyd and I have traveled thousands of twisted, shaded furlongs over our eight years together. We have our own garden now, and we are devoted stewards of our plot. Our hands are in the dirt together. New challenges always crop up. The soil changes, too much water or too little, too much sun or too little. Some plants we’ve grown strong and steady, some are more tenuous, and others we haven’t attempted to grow yet. We don’t even know the names of all the plants we will care for in the years to come.

He’s the most attentive and gentle gardener I’ve ever known. Our steady, faithful work has healed me in many ways. It’s healed him, too, from places he didn’t even know needed healing. We try to pull weeds every day. We help each other find hidden ticks. And we always, ALWAYS stay on the lookout for trolls. We’ve met a couple big ones. We’re not afraid. 

I think the shadow Catherine lives under a bridge somewhere on the Natchez Trace. She still comes by sometimes, but she’s not nearly as scary in the daylight. I’ve seen her face in the sun. 

Photo credit: Josh Hailey Studio