My Story
When I first met my husband the summer of 1998, I was a 23-year-old English graduate recently returned to my native Grey/Bruce for a year of work till I applied to teacher’s college. I had just rented my own apartment in Sydenham where I worked at a health food store: arranging orders of gingko biloba, panax ginseng, melatonin and gleaming white-gold pyramids of proenzi99.
On lunch breaks, I’d try to make my apple cinnamon scone last as long as possible. I was making my way through Thomas Merton and Kathleen Norris, having just indulged myself in a reread of Madame Bovary under maple buds which always took forever to unfold in the cold little city of Sydenham on the shore of Georgian Bay.
In those days, I was lucky enough to have a car which dad had fixed up for me in university (Wilfrid Laurier in Waterloo) and every Sunday morning I’d drive it fifteen minutes out of town to the church we’d attended since I was a child; the church where my future husband manned the sound booth, though I hadn’t yet noticed him.
One day in June, this much older man of 39 approached me after the service during coffee hour. He’d been told I had a degree in English and wondered if I’d tutor him in a grammar course he’d just begun by correspondence.
Initially. we agreed to meet at Tim Hortons; later at his house. He was a single dad of a nine-year-old daughter: a former drywaller disabled by a car accident on the Queen Elizabeth Way. The incident had not been his fault. He’d been rear-ended by a drunk driver who’d promptly left the scene of the accident. As a result, he suffered severe myofacial pain; flare-ups which had (initially) left him bedridden for days. In the end, he’d realized that drywalling was no longer an option. He’d enrolled himself in Psychology at a local university (a program he was 2 courses shy of earning) after which he planned to write his LSAT for law school.
I was impressed. Here was a mature man who seemed to like me; a man with a car and a daughter and a colourful past which seemed so much more exciting than my own! It was also the first time I’d been found attractive by anyone; the first time a real man had actually pursued me. Nevertheless, he was slow and patient. We dated for more than a year and when I felt skittish or reticent, he’d back off until I felt comfortable.
I felt safe with Mike and treasured. He came vetted by church-members I’d known my whole life. He’d sat on the council for homeless youth in Sydenham; had given his testimony of sobriety at least twice in our church and once on the local radio. I had no idea that those beloved dog-eared books I’d so savour the summer of ‘98 would be my last for thirteen years; that the marriage I’d so idealized would actually become a torture-chamber from which it would take me years to escape.
The rest of my story is recounted in my yet-to-be-published book entitled: Lovebomb: A Memoir
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