He called me “steel wrapped in cotton”. Resilient. Upright and tall in my demeanor despite all I had been through. Unyielding in my soft welcome.
He saw me as stronger than I ever knew I was. I liked who I was in his eyes. He made me feel like he was right, like the person he saw was the real me. That I was strong. Stronger than where I had been. I fell in love with him, and I fell in love with myself.
We met in college and started dating after I emerged from an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship. Lloyd was steady, honest, kind, and believed in the good of people. He was so healthy. I took none of these qualities for granted after what I had experienced in my previous relationship. If it weren’t for his weirdness and playful spontaneity, though, I think I would have written Lloyd off as being too square for me. But Lloyd didn’t fit into any square. He was more of a lightning bolt or a squiggle. Maybe a tumbleweed ball of hair. And I…I was a circle finding my center again.
There were real sparks between us, and his spark inspired me to let mine grow bigger and brighter. Together we were fire. We met an old man at the grocery store one day who took one look at us and said, “You two could change the world.”
We had a whirlwind romance and short engagement, and in just over a year after we started dating, we were married.
We built our marriage in the small town of Holly Springs, Mississippi, our home base for my two years in the Mississippi Teacher Corps. It was one of the most intense times of my professional and personal life. I was placed in a rural, critical-needs school to teach sixth grade English. This isn’t a story of “the kids were horrible and didn’t appreciate that I was there to help them”. This story sounds more like “the kids were in deep pain, and I was in deeper pain than I ever realized, and I didn’t know what to do to manage it all, and I think I helped the kids a little bit, and I hurt myself in the process.”
But the story I tell today isn’t the story about me and the kids. This is a story about me and my husband laying the foundation of our marriage at a time when I was crumbling. This is a story about how strong marriages can begin in unexpected ways. This is a story about how life changes us and how our marriage can grow around us, the way a tree will grow around a chain or tombstone that touches it.
For better or for worse
We got married at the end of summer school, our on-the-job teacher training when I regularly couldn’t sleep and emptied my bowels before dawn from anxiety about showing up to teach that day. That summer I looked in the mirror and practiced saying stock phrases like, “That’s a warning”, “Copy assignment”, and flat-out “No”. You know, to make sure I looked and sounded believable. To make me believe.
I drove straight from my last summer school class to my bachelorette party. I went from a room where I doled out consequences to being received by a room full of my best friends, who immediately hugged me and placed penis earrings in my ears. I went from a classroom where I was constantly on guard and pushing myself to the edges of my limits to my wedding weekend where people had traveled across the country to celebrate our love and to shower us with their own love. The shift was surreal. It felt like moving between parallel worlds.
Lloyd and I took a glorious honeymoon, and that was the end of the honeymoon period.
“Don’t smile in the first two weeks,” some veteran teachers in the program advised. It felt completely out of character and unnatural, but I vowed to take their advice. They knew better than I did, right?
Having lived through emotional abuse, I already had plenty of practice making myself less myself. I was ready to give up myself if it was required. I was willing and able. I didn’t know how to grow into the teacher I needed to be without losing myself in the process. Like a tree that grows around an object that’s nailed into it and later consumes it.
The best of me
“Your spouse will not get the best of you,” the program director had warned in my interview. “The day and the kids will get the best of you.”
At first my days had a clean divide. There was school, which was demanding, frustrating, confusing, crushing, surprisingly fulfilling at times, and everything more. Then there was home with my new husband, which was a soft landing place. I couldn’t wait to get home. I was happy at home.
The daily disappointments of teaching were matched by the joyful surprises of my new marriage. An encouraging note in my lunchbox. A poem in the driver’s seat in the morning. A hand guiding me to the soccer field down the street to gape at the stars.
As time went on, I didn’t have anything left after the school day. Lloyd took on the grocery shopping, the cooking, and the laundry. Without much culinary experience, he made meals that at first I sweetly accepted but after awhile became just as depressing to me as our surroundings. Spaghetti noodles with ground beef and worcestershire sauce. Water-logged tofu with soy sauce. An omelet with a surprise pocket of apricot jelly inside.
He packed my lunch with novelty foods of his creation. I ate my lunch at 9 a.m. during my planning period because my stomach was too tense and my attention too divided during my shared lunch period with my students. One time I got a few bites into a peanut butter sandwich and found dried coconut and chocolate chips at the middle. I couldn’t handle it. I told Lloyd my life was full of too many surprises at school. I needed Plain Jane food whose contents I could immediately recognize. I couldn’t afford to bite off anything else.
He tried to do twenty push-ups before I got of bed to turn off the alarm in the morning. Otherwise, if I had a chance to think about whether or not I wanted to get out of bed, the resounding “NO” would have been too depressing. Lightening the mood, bringing in humor, playing jokes on me…he tried all kinds of tricks. I appreciated his efforts, but after awhile, I just wanted peace and quiet. I already had faced a day of adolescent shenanigans. My introverted self was screaming for silence.
And so he started to change himself, too.
Running away
In our role plays in teacher training, we always used one scenario where a teacher had to manage a classroom with a mouse running underfoot or a wasp flying overhead. You know, the kind of thing that can create pure chaos in a room full of kids. This practiced scenario was not wasted on me; I put its lessons to use often in my real teaching life.
And guess what? Our rental home that first year of marriage was overrun with mice. I would wash all our silverware and cooking pans at night only to have a fresh sprinkling of mouse shit the next morning. Our evening recreation was a mouse hunt. We chased them around the living room and behind the couch. We used a broom and pillows to try to block them. This is not what the teachers practiced in the drills in summer school. Lloyd and I became the kids jumping on the couch and screaming. We were disgusted, squeamish, ecstatic from the diversion.
One time Lloyd crouched on the kitchen counter waiting for the mouse to emerge, and when it did, he threw the bath mat on top of it and jumped. A boney crunch, but on the plus side, the blood was contained under the mat. Not our proudest moment. Are these the two people who will change the world?
We couldn’t get our cat, Fenian, to care about the mice. Lloyd thought maybe he was overfeeding him, and that was the problem. So he cut down his portions. Then our cat ran away.
Other things ran away, too. The broom, the pane of glass by our front door, our laundry, my libido.
“What happened to the broom?” I asked him one day. “Oh, about that…” He had rested it on top of the car and driven off with it. It was gone. Probably lying in the street in front of a vacant, dying antebellum home.
We lived in a mental fog. My fog gathered around my daily decision fatigue, my sensory overload, and the weight of the responsibility I felt to my students. Lloyd’s fog gathered around my sadness that he couldn’t touch and the stability he tried to keep for both of us. Our fog drifted from its origins and settled over our entire life together.
We locked ourselves outside once when we went to Huddle House for dinner. Lloyd punched his hand through the window to get in. He bled. I shrieked. “Why the hell did you do that? What about using a rock? Why your hand?” These were desperate times. It was a time of extremes, a time when you think, “I need to punch my hand through a window,” and it doesn’t occur to you that not putting yourself in danger might be an option.
We regularly traveled the hour drive to his parents’ house on weekends to escape our reality. One weekend when we were there, Lloyd said, “You’re not going to like this.” He told me that he had taken a couple loads of laundry to the laundromat and forgotten them there before we left town. It felt like a huge loss. What was in there? Would I even have clothing to wear to school? Our wedding towels! My favorite pants! My favorite pants were in there. Now I don’t even have those. I have the pants that are too tight on my butt and make me feel like 12-year-old boys are staring at my steadily growing ass. Great. Great.
A male student left a poem called “Diggin’ In Dat Booty” on his desk when he left my classroom one day. I doubt that it was an accident.
Life in the desert
Lloyd’s mom sent us home with frozen casseroles. My grandma mailed us frozen steaks and twice-baked potatoes. We lived in a verifiable food desert. More than once Lloyd brought home milk that was spoiled but not expired. He brought home cereal sprinkled with bugs. After that, we only shopped at Walmart. The local grocery stores went out of business.
If I could get through these two years, it meant I was strong. It meant that the voice in my head telling me I was weak was wrong. Quitting was not an option. Steel wrapped in cotton. Steel wrapped in cotton. You know what happens to cotton after the harvest? The cotton that stays in the field, looking sparse and thin, stripped and stretched by the weight of the rain, cast off by the wind? My cotton wore away. I became steel.
First I felt everything. I cried as I drove to school. I danced when I came home. I cried again before bed. Then it was too much to feel everything. So I stopped feeling. At first I thought feeling could be isolated. I’ll feel at home, but I won’t feel at school. Not-feeling is a disease that spreads and penetrates every tip of your life. Either you feel everywhere or you feel nowhere. Choose carefully. I became steel.
I stopped wanting to go on evening walks. I just wanted to sit in bed and stare at a screen. Netflix made suggestions for me at the time that they categorized as “Dark and Cerebral”. I showed up in the emergency room more than once with rapid resting heart rates and shortness of breath. A series of other new health issues arose, as well.
“How is married life?” people would ask me. “Well…it’s a lot like life.” The question always seemed silly to me. I didn’t have the luxury of reveling in this other kind of life called “married life”. I was wrestling with scaly, fast-jawed, sharp-toothed life. A lot of times it felt like life had me pinned down and was winning. At the time, life hit me with isolation, failure, resurgence of painful memories, and stress-induced health problems. I began to awaken to body memory of my sexual trauma. This does not paint a portrait of happiness or wedded bliss.
I stopped believing we could change the world. If we could only save ourselves, I thought. That will be enough.
What felt like crisis
A few months into our marriage, Lloyd received an email from an old college friend, a girl who had disappeared from his life. They had been close before she transferred to a different school. She was the only girl he had fallen asleep next to, their bodies warming each other.
When he told me she had written to him, I didn’t think too much of it, but then one morning, I opened our laptop and found her Facebook picture still up on the screen. Her smiling face in front of mine at 5:30 a.m. as I drank my coffee. It freaked me out. What does this mean?
I confronted him over the breakfast he made for me. I knew I couldn’t stand to go the whole school day wondering. I wanted him to tell me that he had nothing but friendly feelings for her and that the photo meant nothing. That wasn’t what I learned. He admitted that, yes, he had some romantic feelings for her that never went away and that when he pulled up that photo, he felt them again.
This felt like a crisis to me. WELL, SHIT. My life is falling apart all around me. I am miserable at work, where everyone thinks I’m doing this noble thing for children, but they don’t know I’m actually a complete failure. Then I thought I had this great person as my life partner, and here he is desiring someone else right after we got married. Men are shit, and I am a fool. My life will just fall into this pattern of dysfunction that was laid down before I was born. What is wrong with me? Can no one love me without becoming a worse person than they were when I met them? It’s me. I am the problem.
We drove back to our college town that weekend. The priest we loved who had lead us through a process of valuable pre-marital counseling met us on a Saturday to talk.
We sat in the natural light of his office’s big windows that overlooked the Governor’s Mansion. His voice was calm, and his eyes still sparkled for us.
“Do you love Catherine? Are you committed to her? Is she who you choose to be with?” Yes. Yes. Yes. I answered the same questions about Lloyd.
Our priest said that what felt like a crisis now in our marriage would look like nothing but a small blip in our marriage when we looked back at it. He told us to go home, cook our favorite meal, light some candles, and sit down and talk with a bottle of wine.
We moved past it. Lloyd ended contact with his friend. That’s what I needed from him at that time in our lives. I don’t know if that’s the same thing I would need from him today, but I loved him even more for respecting what I needed and giving up a friendship that had been so important to him.
The crumbling and the cementing
Those two years broke me in many places. At times it was a sudden, dramatic collapse of emotional debris and dust, and other times it was a slow molding, rotting, and disintegration that I did not notice until I collapsed. This breaking down occurred alongside the opposite process of laying a strong foundation and constructing the frame of our marriage.
We were bound tightly together in our first two years of marriage. We grew up quickly as a couple. As someone who has a history of giving too much and carrying the heaviest load in relationships, I allowed Lloyd to truly take care of me. I was supremely vulnerable. He learned a lot about the forms of love that nourish and sustain me.
I learned that marriage doesn’t save you from loneliness, that we are still individuals who have solitary experiences and singular sorrows. There was no way to fully share the collection of sights, sounds, and thoughts that bombarded me every day when I walked into that school building. He could not take back what happened to me. He couldn’t protect me from the disrespect of finding a note on my floor that said, “Mrs. Gray is a bitch, and she can suck my dick.” He saw me in pain and turmoil knowing that he could not prevent it from happening again tomorrow.
I learned that there will be times when I can no longer recognize myself or my husband. Sometimes the darkness we see in each other flickers like the warped shadows that engulf you in a fun house. Sometimes what we’re seeing is our own frightening shadow image reflected back to us in our beloved’s darkness. I learned that when that happens, this is not the time to turn away from your spouse. This is not falling out of love. This is the time to turn on the lights and remind each other what is real.
This is what we have been doing for seven years. This is married life. Turning on the lights when the darkness obscures our faces. Holding each other’s faces in our hands, with our eyes locked, and saying, “I see you. I believe in you. I am still here.”
Those two years in the fog made us search for each other over and over again. We searched for ourselves, too. Sometimes we couldn’t see ten feet ahead of us the fog was so thick. We walked out hand in hand.
Our marriage is steel wrapped in cotton. Our steel has undergone slow processes of alchemy, phases of heating and cooling. Our cotton has lived and died in many growing seasons. When one harvest ends and the field is barren, the seeds of the next season have already been planted.
I asked Lloyd the other night if he still sees me as steel wrapped in cotton. “Yes, but I think your cotton has changed colors,” he said with a smile.
Some of my cotton got left spinning in the dryer in the laundromat in Holly Springs. Some is plastered to the bottom of the dumpster at school where we found a trash bag full of mewing kittens with their eyes still closed. Some of it still sticks to the bricks of the house where we started our marriage, and it flies like a white flag when the wind catches it.
Thank goodness. What I wore back then I won’t wear anymore.
Photo credit: Josh Hailey Studio
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