My Boyfriend Hit Me. It Was the First Step Toward Learning to Love Myself.
When you grow up with low self-esteem because you were a fat kid who was often bullied, you tend to make bad choices in relationship partners.
This may seem obvious to any semi-enlightened person in hindsight, but no one had yet told me this when I was 29 years old in a bar called Chances in San Francisco’s Lower Haight district and I let Michael Duchamp buy me a drink.
He’d moved to San Francisco from New Orleans by way of Mississippi, and was handsome and confident. I was, at the time, new in town, not long out of my first long-term relationship and rude to any man who approached me. I suppose he liked the challenge.
I had gone to the bar so I didn’t have to watch the second half of my home team Philadelphia 76ers in an NBA playoff game alone. Michael liked basketball, too, but that’s not why he was there, his dress shirt half untucked as he hustled one after another hapless player at the pool table. Michael was at Chances because he was, even at the young age of 28, a total alcoholic.
That night was the first of what would be a nearly four-year relationship that nearly broke me. Michael died of complications due to alcoholism three years after it ended for good. On his way to his self-inflicted demise he fathered a child with another woman. The baby was not yet 2 years old when he passed away.
Michael was tallish, dark and handsome in a way that gave him his pick of women. He was an immensely talented sculptor and artist working as an interior designer, yet also had the raw masculinity of someone who grew up playing high-school football and hunting deer in Mississippi. I thought it was amazing that he picked me, and in his own way, he never let me forget it.
Michael used to tell me I was the biggest woman he’d ever dated, even though I was actually at one the most slender phases of my adult life during our relationship. His most significant relationship until me was with a petite medical student who weighed all of 100 pounds soaking wet, and his most previous girlfriend was a tall and slender aspiring model.
When we met, I was cycling to and from work on San Francisco’s unrelenting hills and an avid runner. I ran a number of 10ks and even a half marathon during our time together.
Yet still all my athleticism could not shrink my bones or my thick thighs and butt, or make my broad shoulders any slimmer. In bed when we would cuddle and I would back up into his embrace he would make the “beep beep beep” sound of a heavy truck backing up. It was a joke between us, and I know he didn’t mean it unkindly, even if he was making what seemed to me and unfriendly comment about the size of my backside.
I couldn’t disagree with him when he commented on my size because he wasn’t necessarily wrong. I was big, clearly bigger than other women he’d dated and many others around me — yet still, when I look back on it, a pretty normal and average size for women in the United States.
I accepted the offhanded comments he made about my size as part of his love for me, as if he was just being affectionate. I think in his way, he was, because he stayed with me and never left me, even though alcohol was his one true love. He drank a pint of Jack Daniels alone every day without fail, and much more on nights we drank together or went out.
I can’t remember the first time Michael hit me or held me down but I do remember that one time the police came. I don’t know what we were fighting about but I remember that he backhanded me across the room, nearly sending me face first into the mirror of an antique armoire I’d moved into his studio apartment on Divisadero seven months after we started dating.
I caught myself before I hit the surface and tasted blood in my mouth immediately. It was just a split lip, but it was enough for the police to photograph as evidence.
One of the policeman asked me how long we were together, and when I said less than a year, he tried to warn me. “If it’s this bad now, think about what will happen in the future,” he said.
They took Michael away in handcuffs, even though he was the one who called them because I wouldn’t stop screaming. I maxed out my credit card later to bail him out. Sitting in that bail bonds place on Folsom Street handing over my Visa card remains to this day one of the lowest points of my life.
He didn’t hit me much after that, but the emotional abuse never ended. I know looking back now that I was complicit. I had a lot of anger then, and I would scream and shout and throw things at him when he refused to stop drinking or got too drunk and embarrassed me in front of my friends.
I broke glasses and frames and antagonized him to the point of no return. It was a pattern I had learned as a child of a depressed and anxious mother and enabling father who both used corporal punishment as a way to control my willfulness.
Michael had been abused and beaten by his father and grown up in a violent household. My anger and yelling during our fights was a massive trigger, and his covering my mouth and holding me down was a way to block out the noise he couldn’t control.
I didn’t know much in the beginning of our relationship about codependency, but I learned quickly from a kind therapist named Wilma, who I credit for helping me leave Michael about three years after we met.
It was through her sessions that I learned that our dynamic was toxic and that you can’t save people, especially those who don’t want saving.
I never told her about the physical abuse, even though I had an appointment with her the day after the split lip. I thought I was lucky that it was on the inside of my mouth so makeup could easily conceal what happened.
Though we broke up officially in the beginning of 2004, Michael and I stayed in touch and had sex for nearly a year after that, even though he got involved with another woman, a tiny blonde he met in his recovery group, soon after we split up.
He spent the night at my place holding me the night before my mother died. I’d come home from celebrating my birthday, which was two days later, and had a flight early the next morning to say goodbye to her. She died in suburban Philadelphia while I was boarding the plane in Oakland one day before I turned 33.
While I was still with my family after my mother’s death, Michael went to rehab for the first and, as far as I know, only time. It didn’t take, and he started drinking again soon after until the end of his life.
One rainy day early the next year and several months after we stopped speaking he called me on my way into my office in downtown San Francisco. He was leaving to move back to New Orleans with his pregnant girlfriend, he told me. He wanted to see me before he left.
“No,” I told him. “I never want to see you again. Forget you ever knew me.”
When Hurricane Katrina hit later that same year, I couldn’t help but think of him. I sent him an email several months after the storm and found out they’d evacuated the city in time and were back safely with his family in Mississippi.
The last time I ever spoke to Michael was in early 2006. Again I was in downtown San Francisco, this time leaving my office. I was in love with someone new and at the time completely and blissfully happy. It didn’t last, but at the time I thought he was “the one.”
I could hear a baby cooing in the background of the call. Again I told Michael that while I’m glad things seemed to be working out for him, there was no reason for him to contact me anymore.
Two years later when I was living in New York City, both his mother and his longtime best friend contacted me. Michael was dying, they said.
His last call to me was apparently about the time he found out he was gravely ill with pancreatitis and other health complications, and that only quitting drinking might save him. He chose not to.
He had split from the mother of his child and had a new girlfriend; both stayed with him by his side until the end. Though his own interest in living faded over time, his charm with women apparently did not.
Michael knew he was dying long enough to plan his own funeral, and his mother asked me to send some photos of him from our years together for the ceremony. I was invited, but in the end I didn’t go.
I know leaving our relationship and cutting him out of my life was one of the best personal decisions I ever made. It was one of the first steps in a long road to loving myself and valuing my own self worth in all of my relationships, not least of all the one I have with myself.
I am with a tall, handsome and quiet man now who never speaks unkindly to me, never criticizes the way I look, and is as temperate a drinker as I am. Most of our shared activities are healthy, like swimming in the ocean, cooking vegetarian meals and walking our dogs on the beach.
Right after I met my current partner, I did an ayahuasca ceremony that changed the my life. During the session, I realized that there has never actually been anything wrong with me, and that I wasn’t unlovable — basically crushing two fundamental beliefs I had about myself up until that time. It was a revelation that gave me freedom and happiness to be authentic that I carry with me to this day.
Visions of Michael and his spirit visited me during the ceremony, and I came to the realization then that I’d been carrying his energy around with me since his passing.
Just as I told him the last time we spoke in life, I asked his spirit to leave me. This time I was kind, telling him it was also time for him to be free. In my own way, I honored the time we shared together.
I knew then with profound certainty what I know now — without our relationship, I might never have begun to heal.