MaryElise.com :: Modern Woman > This Too Shall Pass

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not:
This Too Shall Pass
By: Andria Cole
Posted August 2007

"It was easier to deceive me than to leave me. I made a few false attempts at suicide, but I loved him too much to kill myself. If I allowed the pills to dissolve and become poison in my belly then I couldn’t hold him at night and spell Andria with my pointer finger across his back."

My mother is high-yellow, the color of cornbread, with lips full as a plum split in two. Her nose is substantial but not so much that you’d call it big. It’s no little thing. Her eyebrows are also substantial, my mother’s, before she calls herself an artist and plucks them into two number sevens. I told her there are some things we women cannot do. Plucking our own eyebrows is one. Lying down to die after loving a single man is another. I have just recently mastered the latter. My high-yellow mother with her plum beautiful lips and Mike, the father of my seven year old child and the sole reason I know pain and joy by name, are the reasons I am capable of writing an article on surviving low down dirty love. I’m talking collapse to your knees and stay there for twenty-four months love. That’s not love love. Pray this pregnancy keeps him home love. I don’t even remember myself before him, how in the world can I live without him love. And I owe them both—my mother and the man—my existence.

In 1996 I met a pretty man and fell in love with him as easily as thirty other women on campus. He was a mere nineteen and could not possibly have just one woman to last him to the morning. I was pretty too, but you learn, within days, that pretty means squat. It won’t save you anymore than money will or wishes on diminishing stars. That he ignored me in public, that I found telephone numbers littered like snow throughout his bedroom, that I said, “I love you,” and he just stared blankly in return didn’t stop me from memorizing his scent so I could smell him wherever I went. It did not stop me from making a few babies with him. Nor did it stop me from believing that one day, in the not so distant future, he would realize the extent of my love and fall into it with me. He tried the honesty route once. He said, “I’m not ready for this.” But he could not have prepared himself for all the snot and tears I produced. It was easier to deceive me than to leave me. I made a few false attempts at suicide, but I loved him too much to kill myself. If I allowed the pills to dissolve and become poison in my belly then I couldn’t hold him at night and spell Andria with my pointer finger across his back. If I cut too deeply and let flow the blood from my wrists then I couldn’t kiss his eyes shut or make his dinner and watch him eat it. I couldn’t know him anymore.

I stayed there—in that pitiful love—for more than a decade. Now, I am not a total wuss. I did not just mope around in week old pajamas and drink old man liquor and write ten page poems called Why?. Sometimes I dated. Sometimes I refused his calls. Occasionally, I said no to sex. But those things were fruitless. Reactionary. I didn’t do them because I wanted to. I did them to shake some sense into him—he was gonna lose me if he didn’t stop all this nonsense. Soon. Only deadlines don’t work either.

Thank God for my daughter. With her birth, I earned a bit of gumption. She made it so I had something beside Mike to live for. She was quiet from the moment she climbed free of my womb until about month four or five. I assumed she was sad. All that crying I had done during the pregnancy. All those thoughts of inadequacy surely found their way from my head to the fluid she developed in, and made her not want even to coo. I had made a miserable little baby. I got to work healing her. I moved back home to be under my mother and build some strength. I breast fed her till she grew three rolls of fat on each of her thighs and could hardly sit up five consecutive minutes she was so plump. I held her as often as possible, across my heart, so she’d know it belonged to her. I sang to her and showed her my crooked tooth smile as often as she needed.

By month six, she was all slobber and uninterrupted giggles. I was by no means safe, but things were far better. I still needed Mike to love me, and he began to try. It seemed the other women had hidden themselves well if not dissipated and perhaps he was interested in a life with me after all. He started returning my I love yous, if only sporadically, and seemed to at least acknowledge my hurt. And too, I was tougher. My wounds had formed a somewhat protective layer over themselves—I won’t pretend they had scarred, or were even on their way to being such—but I was on a path better lit. I was awake, if not fully aware. Still, for seven more years we played one terrible game. We fought. I might as well go on and tell you a good chunk of the battles went down in front of our daughter. You don’t know regret until you’ve raged with your child as witness. We argued; denied each other company; withdrew; abstained; dated other people—mere puppets; spent weeks apart; changed our phone numbers; told our daughter, “Tell your father you need sneakers,” and “Tell Mommy I can’t get you from school Friday.” Yes, all that adult weight put on four year old shoulders. The list of what was done is long and terrible. Fill in the blank with the worst possible thing you can think of and we have done it:______________________.

My tongue is slick and his composure magnificent —I was raised in a house full of smart-minded, smart-mouthed free black American women and thinking of the right thing to say, that thing that’ll take the listener to his knees, is as easy as breathing for me. So he experienced his own personal hell. I grew myself some courage and put false eyelashes on, too. I remembered I was pretty and figured that if this fool didn’t know what he had, somebody else could figure it out. Only love doesn’t work that way, and no man was ever him.

*Names have been changed for privacy.