Room for Improvement

I spent about 3.5 months bedridden and hallucinating wordless conversations with the Grim Reaper. I laid in my darkened room in my awful apartment in California waiting to die and fantasized about laying on a beach on a Pacific Island waiting to die, imagining that would be more pleasant.

And then I met Tom, a Guamanian man living on a Pacific Island. And he spoke of marrying me.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past."

-- William Faulkner,  "Requiem for a Nun"

I met some chick from Arkansas via Tagmax. She was a military wife homeschooling her kids at a remote duty station.

I was a military wife and probably in Fairfield, California already but had started homeschooling my kids at a remote duty station in the middle of nowhere. She was even more in the middle of nowhere.

Unlike most people, she was thrilled to listen to my unproven ideas about how gifted kids ended up neurotic. In a few short months, she was able to identify origin stories for some of the irrational fears her kids had, walk that back and get them more functional.

She wanted to get divorced and this was necessary groundwork for escaping a dysfunctional marriage that like my marriage was likely doomed from the start and for similar reasons.

When she was probably fifteen, her older sister got married. When she was sixteen, her sister had a baby and she went to visit and help take care of the infant and give support to her sister.

After about a week, her brother-in-law brutally raped her at gunpoint. The marriage was abusive and simply being supportive to her sister was a threat to his control over his wife.

This directly led to her sister's divorce which got her sister out of an abusive relationship. Shortly after that, probably at age eighteen or nineteen, she married a soldier and escaped her dysfunctional family.

The remote duty station was Guam. The brother-in-law who assaulted her had been Guamanian. She found herself surrounded by men who looked like her assailant and found herself involuntarily faced with ugly ghosts from her past.

She began sleeping with a Guamanian man and then she met me. Then her husband began going through her emails and she asked her lover to contact me and inform me I needed to stop emailing her.

That man was Tom.

She had told me nice things about him and told him nice things about me. One of the things she told him is I had been raped and was recovered, unlike her.

So we both knew intimate details about each other before meeting. He knew I was facing a divorce when that wasn't common knowledge. And we both had someone we held in high esteem speak positively about us.

He was intensely curious about her claim that I was recovered. After contacting me online to convey her message to me, he wanted to call me.

I'm a ninny and didn't think anything of it. After talking for half an hour, he said "I want you." and I felt that probably meant something different to him than it typically does in English. I felt something was likely lost in translation from Spanish or Chamorro.

He didn't seem to be saying "I would hit that." He seemed to be saying something more like "I feel for you."

I was DEATHLY ill. I hadn't yet filed for divorce. I tried to tell him I didn't want to get involved with him and I tried to insist he not hurt my best friend.

They were in Guam. I was in California. I had little information about what was going on and from what I gather he soon personally put her on a plane and sent her away.

Tom was a Vietnam vet. His mother died when he was five. I believe she had the same name as me, Doreen.

He was one of the youngest children of a large family and got sent to various relative's houses after her death, apparently without anyone taking official custody. He once said he was treated like a slave by his relatives.

He admitted to me he had been molested as a child. He told me his best friend didn't know and I shouldn't repeat it.

He began introducing me to various friends of his -- all of them well endowed -- and encouraging us to have a sexual relationship. He was angry if we did and angry if we did not.

He never told me he was well endowed. His best friend told me that. He once mentioned that he was a part-time sex therapist working with a couple's counselor.

Years later, I realized he probably had unilaterally decided without asking my permission to use his unusual skill set to help me get over baggage he felt would be a problem if he came to see me.

I broke up with him because he said he was going to buy plane tickets and come see me in June. By then, we had known each other like eighteen months and hadn't met yet. He wanted to meet me in person.

But I hadn't yet filed for divorce. We filed a few weeks later in July.

At the time, I thought "You are not knocking on my apartment door and telling my husband you have a date with his wife." I later revised my opinion and chalked it up to my medical condition ending the relationship.

My medical condition is why I hadn't yet filed for divorce. I decided I chose life, for me, for my kids, for Tom, rather than choosing to lay on a beach on a Pacific Island waiting to die.

I once wrote a piece elsewhere called Mistakes Were Made. It says in part:

My life was really screwed up in a "It is literally KILLING ME" kind of way. I decided I was going to fix my crap or die trying, so I sometimes found myself in some pretty emotionally uncomfortable situations.

I was very much in love with Tom and I have worked hard at trying to not speak ill of him. But the above paragraph was really written about Tom and him introducing me to friends of his and being angry if I got along with them and being angry if I didn't and me choosing to continue the relationship anyway for a time.

He did help me heal, but I didn't have the problem he seems to have thought I had and I wish he had handled it differently.

I think Tom thought that I was terrified of being hurt and afraid of someone well endowed because I was raped at age twelve. And that wasn't my problem.

I have a genetic disorder that causes vaginal dryness and I was molested as a child but had no diagnosis for my condition. I chalked it all up to emotional baggage from trauma.

I married my husband because he helped me get over a lot of that. So at some point during the marriage, sex got better for me and when that happened, I thought to myself without telling anyone "I wish he was bigger." 

And then I met some guy who was bigger and I couldn't figure out how that would work. I've written about that elsewhere.

So the information I needed was "Honey, your husband is a lousy lover. Some guys know what they are doing." And I did learn that, but I wish Tom hadn't decided unilaterally to "help" me with the problem he thought I had. I could have told him "Uh, dude, THAT is not my issue."

I have a history of attracting men with substantial baggage from traumatic experiences. Navarre was questioned under torture in prison. Jack put a guy in the hospital in his teens who was bullying him and given what I know of Jack, my belief is the guy desperately deserved it.

My ex-husband had issues of a sort that have me wondering here lately what the hell happened in his childhood and if it involved being sexually assaulted. No one but Tom ever told me they had been molested, so any speculation on my part would be exactly that: Speculation.

There is a dearth of resources for male victims of sexual assault. It is viewed as emasculating and more shameful than for women to be assaulted.

We desperately need more resources for men. A lot of existing resources are explicitly framed as if the victim is ALWAYS female, the perpetrator is ALWAYS male and those resources are typically openly man-hating, so it's problematic for a male victim to even read what does exist.

Tom was working part time as a sex therapist and was helping people with sexual dysfunction in their marriage or relationship and he helped me get over some of my issues, and yet at the time I kind of thought he was an asshole treating me badly.

So I got extraordinary support and yet it sort of incidentally resolved my actual issue because Tom's game plan was colored by his history of abuse and he kind of projected stuff onto me that wasn't really there.

I'm trying to say as respectfully as possible without maligning Tom that he was an extraordinary resource, but if this is the best there is, we have room for improvement.

And I'm trying to be someone making improvement possible.