Just a Waitress

It was an October afternoon in Detroit. The air had turned crisp, but the sun was still warm with the memory of a hot summer. The trees were vibrant in color…deep shades of red, orange and gold. They would soon fall to the earth and become a carpet of crackling corpses, but on this afternoon they blew in the breeze and brought the promise of cider mills, hot chocolate and pumpkin carving. Fall is the best time of year. It’s as if Mother Nature is giving us the most beautiful farewell before the harsh reality of winter descends. I should have known that it was too beautiful to last. But, oh how we all love to be deceived by pretty things.

David picked me up at my apartment at six to go to our weekly Bible Study. We had been dating for a few years and although we were incredibly young, just 21, we were seeking the counsel of our church leaders about whether or not to get married.

I loved this man. I loved him in a way that broke my heart on a daily basis. Just looking at his beautiful face and staring into his striking blue eyes, made my mind swim, my knees quake and stirred up a profound heat between my legs. I would have done anything to be with him. ANYTHING. I would have taken everything I believed to be true, packed it up in boxes and bags, put it in front of my apartment and lit it on fire. So, that’s what I did.

David was a Christian when I met him and I was…well…not. Not at all. Not even a little bit. When he told me that he was a Christian and a virgin, the taco that I had not-so-delicately shoved into my mouth threatened to become one with my lap. It was insane to me. No one this hot could be a virgin. No one this magical could be waiting for marriage before he has sex. No one. No one but David, that is.

It was in that instant, that precise instant of hearing this news, I made a vow to myself. I would become the woman I needed to be in order to make this man love me. Sad? Yes. Sad, but true. I would become a good Christian woman and David would love me and I would be happy and I would feel worthy.

And now 3 years later, I had done it. I have always been a goal-oriented person and welcome a good challenge. The fact that I was nearly unrecognizable as the person I had been just a few years prior, was beside the point. David loved me and we were happy. I was a strong woman of faith and we were on our way to our Bible Study. I had a great deal of joy.

The Bible Study, itself, was average. We read Scripture, had a good chat about what it meant and how to implement it into everyday life and then we closed in prayer. This was just like any other Wednesday in my life.

I bowed my head in prayer and almost immediately I started to hear a whimpering. Now, for anyone who is a person of faith, this is common. People are very often moved to tears and have grand epiphanies about their own personal walk or are convicted of sin. It happens. It is celebrated as a break-through. It wasn’t until the whimpers graduated to a full-blown wail, that I lifted my head to see who was being emotionally eviscerated. It was David. David, laying face-down on the carpet and convulsing in sobs. Hysterical sobs. The kind where hyperventilating is the only conclusion. I was shocked. People started to track the room to find my eyes, in order to suss out if I had any awareness as to what was happening to my boyfriend. I didn’t. He had been in good spirits on the drive over.

We all watched him lose his mind for about ten minutes. It was excruciating. I could feel his pain. I don’t mean that I felt sorry for him…I mean that I could, quite literally, FEEL his pain. His pain was bellowing out of him like a building engulfed in flames and I was breathing the plumes of toxic smoke. Breathing it until I was choking and nauseas. I couldn’t bear the pain. In that moment I prayed to God. I prayed like I had never prayed before. I prayed for God to take David’s pain away and give it to me. Give it to me. Give it all to me because I’m tough and I can take it. I can take it all, but what I can’t take is to watch the man I love suffer and not be able to do anything to help him. That, to me, is the worst pain of all.

After a few more minutes David started to calm and he slowly peeled himself off the floor and made his way into the bathroom to splash some cold water on his face. In those few tense minutes I was the uncomfortable star of a show that I hadn’t signed up to be in. All eyes were on me. The eyes of concern and love and confusion. I had no answers to those silent questions from my friends. I felt like a stranger in my own life. The only thing I knew for certain was that I wanted to go home. I wanted to hold David and give him my heart. I wanted him to have peace.

The drive back to my apartment was silent. Somehow, in the three hours we had been at the Bible Study, Michigan weather had come to betray us once more. It must have dropped twenty degrees and that crisp air had turned frigid and unforgiving. It stung the face and made the eyes water. The symbolism was not lost on me.

When we got back to my apartment, David asked if he could come up and talk to me. I knew that he wanted to tell me why he had shattered at the Bible Study and I needed to know. There was something in me telling me that I didn’t WANT to know, but that I NEEDED to know. Then came the slow walk up the stairs. The smell of old wood, mildew and food being cooked by my neighbors seemed more pungent…as if my senses had become supremely heightened by the events of the evening. The sound of music and laughter. Everything seemed to be as it should, and yet, the air was thick. There was a heaviness and foreboding. I knew that I needed to hear what David had to say, but at the same time I also knew that it would forever alter my existence.

My roommate had yet to come home from work so David and I had the apartment to ourselves. We sat on the couch and stared at each other for what felt like an eternity. I could still feel his anguish and I just wanted it to stop. I wanted to heal him. I couldn’t bear it any longer.

And just like that…the bubble burst. God answered my prayer. David began to tell me that he had been cheating on me for months. Months. My virgin boyfriend had been receiving blow jobs, regular blow jobs, from a woman he worked with. It’s hard to describe what I felt in the few moments following this confession. Confusion. Shock. Relief. Anger. Sadness. Jealousy. It’s like when you are in an accident and you don’t feel the pain right away because your body knows how to protect itself. It’s the same with emotional trauma. It doesn’t hurt in that moment. It takes a minute and then it all comes rushing in. The dam breaks.

It didn’t take long for me to be the one face-down on the floor sobbing uncontrollably. Convulsing in hysterics. Not only did I have David’s pain, but I had all of my own as well. It was so incredibly powerful that I can still feel that pain in my heart now…twenty years later.

I would love to write that David felt as I did…that he would do anything to take away MY pain, but that wasn’t the case. Once he had purged himself of this sin…this sin that he didn’t seem to realize had shattered my whole existence…his spirit was lifted. He was free. He breathed a large sigh of relief and said that he would talk to me tomorrow and walked out the door. Leaving me a puddle of quaking goo on the floor.

It would be days before I would see him again. And when I did he was playing a game of frisbee with his buddies…not a care in the world. I, on the other hand, was plagued with grief. I had changed who I was for him. I had become someone I didn’t even recognize in order to earn the love of this man. The idea that anyone could love me for me was completely foreign to me and I didn’t even question this notion that I had to work earn love. I truly believed that if you didn’t work to earn love that it wouldn’t last. And I wanted this love to last. I loved David more than I had ever loved anyone…including myself. Therein lies the rub. I was willing to do anything to get him to love me. And I did. I dissolved into David. I became invisible and I ceased to exist.

I would love for the ending of this story to be one of female empowerment. I would love to write that I let David go and forged my own path in the world and had a sense of strength and integrity that would make Gloria Steinem proud. I would love that. But, that’s not how this story ends. In fact, I married David. I loved him. I needed him to love me. I needed him to choose me and I was willing to sacrifice myself in order for that to happen. So I did and it worked for a time. It worked until I was so far gone, a shell of a human being, that David had nothing but disdain and contempt for me. It reminds me of a quote from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, “You can’t respect someone who kisses your ass. It just doesn’t work”. David didn’t respect me and I didn’t respect myself.

The divorce came seven years after the wedding. It was swift and painful. I had dissolved so fully into another human being that it would take years of healing in order to honor my own thoughts and opinions about…everything. I had to, essentially, start from scratch. As a thirty year old woman, I was making my way in the world…on my own. It was painful and awesome. I could be whomever I wanted to be…and the best part was that I got to decide who that was. I finally got to a place where I walked out of the marriage the way David had walked out of my apartment all those years ago…free.