Ambivalence

The one you miss being with, and the one you desperately want to leave behind, sometimes exist in the same person. 

Adam was my very first love, the man I thought I’d grow old with, the man who chose me, and the man who abused me. In the battle against his demons, he refused to allow me to fight beside him. Instead, he chose to pretend. He believed he knew the one true path, yet on his way he lost himself. He stole my innocence—not as a creepy euphemism for rape, but as I innocently believed he was who he’d said he was. I loved him. I tried to be the best version of myself for him. But we were never meant to be, at least not in the way I had imagined.

When planning our wedding, we wrote our vows together. I’d begun crafting the words long before meeting Adam, but his ideas commingled with mine into promises for a lifetime.

I will be your lover

Your best friend

The mother of your children

Your comrade in adventure

Your comfort in illness

Your companion in sorrow and joy

I vow to be your wife

By the grace of God

To the full extent of myself

Until death us do part

I hurt for the loss of Adam in my life. And I’m incredibly grateful he’s gone. It’s hard to resolve these coexisting sentiments. He said he would be my lover, and he was. My best friend, he was not, though I counted him as such. He indeed fathered my children, abusing them as well as me. We were once comrades in adventure, but as the years passed, he imagined adventures to distance himself from me, from our life, from reality. He did comfort me in illness, but autoimmune flares lasting for days wore his patience thin. I felt his companionship—both in sorrow and in joy—but not as a constant, consistent presence. I looked up the etymology of the word companion. It comes from two Latin words meaning “together with bread.” The irony is glaring. While I struggled to reinvent recipes to support my health, Adam preferred to do without bread than eat what I’d made. 

As I began to recognize his refusal to extend himself toward me, compassion sat opposite outrage. I was familiar with the pain, the shame, the terror he held inside. Even now, my heart aches for the young boy never fully allowed to grow into the man he might have been. The adult Adam, who regularly exhorted the rest of us to take responsibility for ourselves, did not practice what he preached. He blamed me and our children for his own shortcomings. He did not know how to love us as we were, only as he wanted us to be—the same way, the only way he thought he could love himself. 

That insidious manipulative control was the poor excuse for “love” Adam had been taught. It’s what I learned growing up, too. I reached my mid-40s before I began to understand the richness of truly loving others simply as they are. Adam died at 45. I think, in those last few months of life, he began to see love in full color. And that makes me smile, because I’ve always wanted the best for him. Dying revelations, however, don’t erase 15 years of mistrust, lies,and  manipulation. Loving Adam and losing him has left an awkward legacy in many shades of grief.

Conversation for this post hosted at facebook.com/ShamelessHonesty