The Great Big Terrible: A Personal Essay

I don’t remember the moment I fell in love with him, or even why I loved him. I just knew in my little fifteen-year-old heart that I did, and that it was true, and that nothing would ever feel that good in my entire life. I don’t remember the date he proposed to me, only his mom driving us there in her beat-up blue minivan, me blindfolded in the back seat as if I was a hostage, and the geese squawking on the lake once we arrived like a foghorn, like a warning.

I don’t remember why we got married when I was just nineteen, only that I felt like I was supposed to. He’d asked, and I said yes, that’s what every girl dreams about— happily ever after and a huge white wedding. That was the day I learned that happiness actually comes in a tiny blue room with your entire family staring at you in your fifty-dollar Macy’s dress like you’ve made some big decision, done some great thing, when really you’ve just signed your entire life away, but you don’t know it. All you know is the Justice of the Peace telling you to say, “I do,” to commit to this person, this barely man, who you’ve known for three years of your teenage lives.

I don’t remember why we moved in together before I even graduated high school, combining bank accounts and bills. Only that I gave away my freedom, my independence, so willingly, I didn’t notice it leaving my fingers a little bit a time.

I don’t remember the excuse he gave a few months later, when I came home early from a family trip to South Padre, because my uncle had died, and found him next to a wet spot on the couch. I just remember our concerned neighbor knocking on the door, trying to tell me in broken English that a woman in a red car had just driven off after running out of my house.

There’s only the great big terrible that shadows over everything after that. Our future was doomed then, and I wish I could say that I wanted to leave, to be on my own, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t have anywhere to go.

“You lose them how you get them,” is what a bitch might say, or your friend at the time. She was right. I didn’t want to hear any of it though, not about how obvious it was that he was a serial cheater or the fact that I thought he would be different with me. I didn’t want to listen to my friends telling me that they’d heard things, seen things. It didn’t matter, because I wouldn’t leave him anyway. Every piece of me was already intertwined with him, my individuality and identity already one half of a whole. (Co-dependent, my therapist says.)

I became less after that. Somehow, less. Less innocent, less gullible, less hopeful, less of a woman and less of a child. I had been so sure of us. His lies rocked me, put a giant crack in the glass of the image I had of my life. I wanted to drop out of high school and get my GED. My grandmother refused and put me in a homebound program with my school where I would still be able to walk with my class. I did end up walking, throwing my hat, listening to my peers talk about our future and how we knew everything. But nobody knew that I wanted to die inside, that I felt a dark cloud over me always.

When he left for a work trip a few months later, I fucked his best friend. Rather, his best friend came to our house and fucked me. I don’t know why I did it, just that it happened. It didn’t really matter at the time. I was 18, didn’t know jack shit about anything. Childishly, I thought it would make me feel better. It didn’t. I kept that secret deep down inside me and held the shame of it in, for as long as I could. Until one day, a year later, I couldn’t take it anymore. I needed him to know, perhaps because I wanted us to move on and be happy, to start our family, or perhaps because I wanted to see him in as much pain as I was in. I expected him to cry, to yell, to be angry with me, but I didn’t expect him to confess to doing so much more.

We were toxic from the beginning, the both of us. It’s the truth, we never should’ve married or stayed married. I think the thing that kept pushing me towards him was the same thing pushing me away from home, the fact that I wanted a family. A real one, not the fucked up one I was given. But life doesn’t work that way, you silly little girl. You don’t pick and choose. You get the family you’re given, and you don’t ask questions. You plant your feet and do the best you can, take the abuse right to the chin just as your mother did and her mother before that. It’s what women do, we take it. We learn to take it. We are taught to take it. We become numb to it, normalize it. Downplay it. Told to be grateful for it. I was accustomed to toxicity, I lived it, thrived in it like black mold. My entire life had toxicity woven into it, had toxic men at the center of it, and I tried running. In reality, I was running straight into their arms.

I don’t remember the moment I was fed up enough to leave, four children and nine years later, but it wasn’t before becoming someone I didn’t recognize, someone else entirely. Someone whose choices, nearly two decades later, I am still governed by. A shell of a woman.