How Did I Get Here?

Because I was still in pursuit of a good man to make up for the years of taking care and not being cared for, I would occasionally go to craigslist and post a personals ad.

One day I was contacted by a man named Bob.  Bob looked like the stereotype of a biker.  He had long red hair and sat on a Harley in his picture.  He owned his own business and after we exchanged an email or two, we decided to meet.  We met at Dave & Buster’s, which, if you’ve never been, is like Chuck E. Cheese for grown-ups.  We played games and it was fun.  I was impressed by his good nature and his insistence on paying for my game credits.

I ordered salmon for dinner and water to drink.  He asked if I drink alcohol and I told him that I did not.  I have always been very open about my history and have no problems sharing, so I told him that I’d grown up around drug and alcohol abuse and had no interest in going down that road.

Bob told me that he was a recovering addict/alcoholic.  He’d used hard drugs and drank like a fish, but one day he woke up to realize that he was going to kill himself if something didn’t change.  He told me that it was hard to find friends, now, because so many of the people he’d always been friends with were still partiers and he no longer found that fun.

I told him about Adina, and how we were soul mates.  He asked what happens if I end up finding a man I want to spend my life with.  I told him that he’d have to be ok with two for the price of one, but don’t get any naughty ideas.  He told me that he admired my loyalty.

Our relationship moved rather quickly, as mine tend to do.  I introduced him to Adina and they seemed to get along.  Before long, he was moving in with us, and I was happy as I’d ever been.

Adina had been having a really hard time with work.  Due to budget cuts, she had to cut back on staff hours which meant that she had to do a lot of the work herself.  This meant she’d often work from daylight to well after dark.  She was stressed out and exhausted all the time.  I tried to make her life a little easier by doing her laundry for her.  I’d tell her to put her laundry out before she left and I’d get it done.  I’d also usually make dinner for the three of us.

Bob began to tell me that she was taking advantage of me.  She was using me for a housekeeper and did so little when she was home.

Our house had never recovered from the unsupervised running of the dogs, and with people moving in and then leaving, there was a lot of stuff in my house and garage that didn’t really belong to me.  We started to look like hoarders.  Not to the point of filth and insects, but we had unopened boxes in the kitchen, and clutter in most corners and surfaces.  There was dust everywhere because we lived close to the highway, and when you have four dogs there is just a lot of dust.

Worse than the house was the yard.  It was overgrown and full of dog poo.  There was a dog flap so the dogs could come into the house from the outside, and when I’d had air conditioning installed in the house, we made sure that there were ducts installed in the laundry room.  The laundry room was where the dogs could hide out from the heat or the cold, even if no one was home.

Bob began to work on my property.  He had his own landscaping business, and I had enough property that he could see us with a garden and chickens.  I loved the idea of having chickens, so I went along with the plan.

It soon became clear that all of the things that Bob began to do around my house had price tags attached to them.  He built a dog house because he didn’t want my dogs in the house anymore.  He cleared the brush and set up a shed in the yard so he could grow marijuana.  He cleaned out the garage so he could park his motorcycle and store his equipment.  He left me with a sliver of space against one wall to store my Renaissance Faire stuff, but he stored his bikes against it so I had to move a bunch of stuff to be able to access any of it.

I honestly don’t know how it happened, but he was soon in complete control of my life.   He yelled at me a lot and said ugly things about my family.  Adina was afraid of him, but she didn’t tell me that until it was too late.  She was acting differently, but I thought it was because of her situation at work.

Bob had a way of making everything that had been important to me seem stupid.  He was always yelling at me to get my priorities straight.  Anything I wanted to do for myself was frivolous when there were more important things to be done.

I know part of why I took this was that I knew what his past had been like.  I saw him as a wounded child and thought that if I could just show him a healthy love, that he’d realize I deserved to be treated better.

My world grew smaller and smaller.  I stopped doing Renaissance Faire, and I rarely visited friends or family.  I wasn’t going to mass anymore.  Both of my cats disappeared.  My little girl dog was terrified of him.  If he spoke to her, she’d pee.

Adina and I had planned a Disneyland trip because Bob had never been.  The three of us had fun for a while, but then Bob had a tantrum one morning, so Adina and I went to the park alone.  We talked about his behavior but it was a light-hearted talk.  I told her I was going to go back to the hotel and see if I could get him to come back.  I don’t remember the details, but we didn’t come back until late, and Adina was angry with me.  The next day Adina flew back to Oregon to visit her family.  That had been part of the plan, but she posted things on Facebook that kind of hurt my feelings.

When she came back, she told me she was moving back to Oregon.  I was shocked and confused but at this point, I didn’t see the bully that Bob was.  I cried when she left because she just drove away without saying goodbye.  Bob wrote her a shitty email saying shitty hateful things.

I was completely lost.  For some reason, I really loved this man.  I felt so stupid that things were getting this out of control.  Why do I let men do this shit to me?

Believe it or not, it wasn’t all horrible.  We did have a garden.  My yard looked like a paradise.  We raised chickens and even raised rabbits.  For a while, we had a whole petting zoo.  That actually became something wonderful in the midst of all this ugliness.  My house was at the bottom of a cul de sac, and we were surrounded by small children.  When the baby bunnies and baby chickens were born, I’d knock on my neighbors’ doors and ask them to bring their kids over to see the baby animals.  I became a celebrity on that street.  The kids would ring the bell at our gate as soon as they saw me home.  They’d bring their friends.  They’d beg to look for eggs or give the rabbits carrots.  When they found an egg, they’d swear they could hear the chick trying to peck its way out.  I showed them what kinds of weeds the bunnies particularly liked so they’d go home and raid their own yards for “candy for the bunnies.”  Some of them were afraid of the roosters.  Roosters can be mean.  Bob would show them how to catch them up, and those boys would strut around with a chicken they’d caught and just be so proud of themselves.

These kids marveled at the fruits and vegetables growing in our yard.  We had a mint plant and they wanted to try it.  I gave them each a leaf to chew on and warned them that it wouldn’t taste exactly like the mint they were used to.  They were just ecstatic about it.

One particularly hot day, the sprinkler was on in the backyard.  Our mulberry tree was ripe, so I grabbed a bunch of baggies and gave about four or five kids and we played a game of racing to pick some mulberries off the tree before the sprinkler came back around.  There was giggling and screaming and blue fingers and mouths.  It was a joyful time, and it made the pain of losing Adina a little more bearable.   And all of this was made possible by that bear of a man.