loyalty

I am loyal. This is not a good personality trait, but a personality flaw.

My loyalty kept me with my first boyfriend that I had in highschool. We were together from Freshmen year through some of my Junior year, even after he’d moved away to the great state of Colorado. We visited occasionally during the summer and we had big plans for our life after. He was a year older than me, so when he graduated he’d move back with me, and then once I graduated we’d go to Colorado, get married, I’d practice music since I didn’t want to go to college and maybe we’d have kids. He was going to be a writer and he was very good at writing. But about halfway through the middle of my Junior year in highschool and about six months after he moved away, he got weird and mean. He’d call me at 2 am just to play a prank on me where his friends would say something was wrong with him and they couldn’t get him to respond (diabetic) and they’d only fess up when I hung up to call his Dad. He would ignore my calls or just wouldn’t talk to me once he got me on the phone. Our ritual of me calling him in the morning before I went to school stopped because he just got mad at me when I’d call him. But none of that mattered because I was loyal to a fault. We were going to get through it. It was worth it to me.

It was not worth it to him. He apparently had been trying to push me away, and when that didn’t work because of my incessant loyalty, he broke up with me. I cried for two days.

As a side note: He and I do keep in touch now. After many years we reconnected and he shared an immense amount of regret for how he’d treated me. He’s a good guy, but he was 17 years old and had no idea how to be the good guy that he actually is. He is very supportive and helpful with TS, since he was diagnosed with diabetes when he was 3 as well and has lived with it his entire life.

I was with the older kids dad for seven or so years. I met him when I was 16 and then left him shortly before my 25th birthday. I don’t need to go into details of my life with him, as they are recounted in great, horrific detail in previous entries throughout the years here on OD but I can say some: Isolation, threats, sexual and physical violence, demoralizing, financial abuse, and on, and on, and on (I will someday write more in detail of how I remember the things that happened between me and him, but that’s for another day and only when it’s therapeutic for me to recall specific situations). But still… we were married. We had two children together. You stayed together. You made it work for the kids and for us. I didn’t get married just to get a divorce (though I did get married because I felt like I had no other choice) – you are supposed to work through your marriage and make it work because that’s what you do and I loved him.

Except I didn’t. But I was still loyal to him. Until I wasn’t.

Sometime in 2007 I made a friend. I was so isolated and alone that any friend would do, but this one was great. He liked to know about my life and was interested in the things that I was involved in at the time (which wasn’t a lot), we played some games together occasionally through the computer but our friendship stayed pretty casual and occasional. I remember at one point I even blocked him on all computer applications (remember AIM?) because I started to be annoyed by how much he actually wanted to talk to me, and I wasn’t really allowed to have friends that were of the opposite sex anyway, so it was dangerous for me anyway.

But I needed the friendship. I had one other friend and the only reason I even had her was because she worked with my then husband (she and her partner). But at one point we moved to another location that was far away from where she lived and I only saw her a handful of times over the course of a year because I was, as I had said, very isolated. The more isolated I physically became from my family and few friends, the more the new friendship grew. And then it grew into more than just a friendship.

At the same time I was seeing a counselor who was urging me desperately to make a safety plan to get myself and my children away from their Dad. It was a matter of physical safety and it was a matter of emotional health. I deserved better, I didn’t need him, teach the kids something better than this life, etc. etc. But I also had him – the one in the back of my mind and in my ear on the phone to remind me that there were better things. That if I left and removed myself from that situation then I he could move to where I was and we could actually be together without fear. It would be amazing.

This is, of course, a romanticized version of the real events. It was ugly and at times heartbreaking but the fact of the matter was I had this person who walked me through some of the darkest, scariest times of my life. Who stood by me time and time again when I was too afraid to leave and patiently waited for me to be in a position where we could be more than we already were.

I went and saw him once, before I left. It was the most stupid thing I’ve ever done because I truly believe if I had been found out, I’d be dead and my children would be orphans. Because I’m loyal to a fault, I needed to know that I could spent actual real time with this other person before I committed to leaving my situation, regardless of how bad the situation was. I needed to leave regardless of who or what was on the other side of life, but I needed something to push me there because my loyalty to that marriage, to that promise, was strong. It didn’t matter that he’d broken that promise time and time again by how he treated me. Our marriage was nothing more than a piece of paper I kept in the drawer, but I was so afraid of what was on the other side.

After spending two days with him, I knew that I couldn’t stay in my life as I knew it anymore. I couldn’t live knowing that there was more. There was plane rides and pleasant conversations. There was times out to dinner that weren’t stressful and ended up bitter. I remember on the ride home from the airport, he made me drive even though I’d been traveling all day long and he’d only had to drive to the airport. He was too tired to drive. I cried the whole way home.

The push to leaving him came when I believe he made a threat on my life one day, but I had a motivation I hadn’t had before that. I wish I could say my children were all that it took. I wish I could say that I was strong enough to leave just because I’m a strong woman – but that’s not true. My kids. My counselor (who I absolutely adored, even named TS after) … they mattered, but there was something more that I needed and he was it. Though, I feel incredibly guilty about it (another writing for another day).

The story after is here as well, but it’s mixed with a lot of struggle. My growth as a human adult was stunted and he was much younger, so we grew up together. He left his family suddenly one day after suffering a lifetime of physical and emotional abuse from his parents and his brother. He has literally built himself into the adult he is 100% on his own (apart from his parents, I mean). We built our life together from the ground up. We had nothing except for 80K worth of debt that I was left from my marriage that somehow was entirely pushed on me. But we persevered.

There are issues. There are certain problems we’ve had from the very beginning that, even after nearly a decade, we can’t quite seem to climb over the hump that makes us disagree. Abuse turns to abuse, manipulators make manipulators and I had to learn to not be those things anymore. He had to learn how to be responsible for himself and for another person and how he couldn’t just do whatever he wanted. I had to learn how to really show someone I loved them and to receive love. I expected the worst, he hoped for the best. It was messy but it was worth it.

The last three years have been incredibly hard on both of us. I deal with my stuff one way, he deals with his another way. The way he’s dealt has been hugely inappropriate and he has a lot of fixing to do. But I can talk to him and tell him I’m angry and he doesn’t lash out – he listens and he apologizes and he attempts to fix it. I have to remind him, occasionally, but he doesn’t blow me off and treat me like what I feel like doesn’t matter. He’s acknowledged his behavior as being wrong and he’s worked to make that better. That takes time. There is no window to perfection and my heart will have to heal from the damage as much as his mind will have to heal from the hurt.

He saved me. We grew up together. He has raised my children. We have moved across the country together. He saw me through nursing school (which would not have happened without him). I am not perfect at all, especially in the mental health department, and while his way of dealing with me in the past has been questionable, he’s always stood by me; he may not have known how to handle me or the situation, but he didn’t walk away. He knows me. He doesn’t ‘fight’ – we argue, but we never fight because it’s not a healthy way of communicating.

He is not perfect and right now I’m still bitterly angry with him for many things, but I’ve been through worse. I’ve stayed loyal through worse – which is not to say that I should stick through things that aren’t worth it, but to me, he is. He’s my teammate and, for a number of reasons, he forgot he was on a team. I don’t condone this, but it’s not condemning for me, as long as we make strides together to make sure it never happens again.

I am, after all, loyal to a fault.