One Year Ago Today, This Is What I Was Thinking

Sometimes I want him to hold me, smooth down my hair, kiss my face, and tell me that I will never have to know the terror, fear, shame, and uncertainty I knew as a child, again. I have a recurring fantasy that I am sitting close to him, and he asks me what it was like the first time I saw my step father hit my mother. My answer is always one word. Devastating. I feel very safe with him in this scenario, and I know that he is asking me this question because he wants to know what it meant to me to have my world fly apart at the age of 6, roughly 18 years before I met him.

He is the first man I've not wanted to impose a kind of perverse redemption on my childhood experience--or to be the upgrade template for all of the sociopathic, abusive men that have frequented my life. I used to want the guys I coveted to make me worthy by my association with them. I considered that they might be with me inspite of who I was--and when they didn't want to be, I attributed it to the heavy sense of degradation that always lingered around me.

Discovering that I had feelings for someone used to make me violently ill in the initial stages of the infatuation because I feared that I was sullying the person with my feelings for him. Everything I longed for, dreamed about, or thought of myself was informed by that one evening when I first saw my step father beat up my mother. He broke her ribs and blackened her eye. I splintered apart, and so learned to categorize and compartmentalize myself, so that what I would accept and what I hoped for were always at odds with each other. I was a study of hairline fractures.

I don't expect that he can change what happened to me, nor do I think that what happened to me and my family makes me unworthy of him.

On last wednesday night when my sister called me and said that her father had beaten her up, I found myself wishing I could hear his voice, wishing I could share with him what had happened... the way it is natural to want to tell the people you love everything. Normally, when something of paramount importance happens, I think "I need to e-mail him about this..."

And that is what I ended up doing. Sending out a mass e-mail to friends, on which he was included, because for as much as I've grown and matured, and for as much as I wanted him to comfort me that night, that is not the present reality of our understanding. It was close to midnight during the week, and there was no immediate need for his help, and we do not yet have it like that...

But it was good for me to be aware of myself wanting to have that with him, wanting to approach him as his equal, believing that he had some measure of strength to offer me--as my friend, whom I now know I trust.

Something small, but crucial happened on the day of our bike ride that let me know decisively that I can let him be a source of protection for me. His family has two dogs. One of these animals behaves erratically, and he informed me, has bitten people, unprovoked, in the past. And in the same breath that he very calmly shared that information with me he said "But as long as you stay with me you should be fine." I believed him. I was.