Summer of the Bedwetter
When I was twenty, I had a boyfriend.
In and of itself, that doesn’t say much. Plenty of us had them when we were sophomores in college, but for me it was a pretty big deal.
Up to that point, the last real relationship I’d had that wasn’t glazed in cheap tequila and stale beer was a glorious four months my senior year in high school that made me feel so grown up and sophisticated. Until I dumped him. It’s who I was. A chronic dumper. I loved the beginnings of relationships but that drawn-out middle part got to be way too much work and I’d bounce. Ghost. Dip. Skedaddle.
But not with A. Something about A made me want to stick around and see how good relationships could be and how fun being grown and mature could be when you had someone equally grown and mature to do adult shit with.
In hindsight, we were both idiots. But I digress.
I met A in the ROTC program and like some idiotic, ill-fated bumpkin Romeo and Juliet, we’d quit the program and the scholarships within three months of dating and moved our shitshow to a couple of apartment complexes off campus, one for him and one for me that neither of us could afford.
By the time we’d severed ties with our scholarships and our peer groups, we were a mess. Unhealthy. Angry. In desperate need of therapy for our mommy (mine) and daddy (his) issues. We lacked coping mechanisms to deal with the trauma we caused when we rashly uprooted everything we had known to …what? Work minimum wage jobs at a deli counter and a buffet restaurant and fall further and further behind in school? To pretend to be adults living off campus with all the stress and stupid adult things like electricity bills and check-engine lights? Yikes.
The winter after we met, he was a raging alcoholic who would often decide halfway through a night out with our new, sketchy-ass friends, that I was untrustworthy, a sinner (he had really religious fundamentalist parents and deep-rooted daddy trauma) and most likely demon-possessed.
I’ll pause here and note that he was probably at least 50 percent correct on that last part. Poor guy.
He’d say nasty things and leave me in the middle of the night at a bar in a town with zero cabs and no way home. He’d talk shit about me and how I ruined his life to the bartender. To our waitress. With me literally sitting right there. Then he’d leave.
I’d get home, crawl into my bed and get woken up a few hours later to him banging on my door, sobbing that he was sorry, that he’d drive his truck into oncoming traffic if I didn’t answer and like the eternal moron that I was, I’d open the damn door. And the apologies were so sweet and such a balm, that I’d let him in. And he’d promise to make me pancakes in the morning, and that was all I needed.
I fucking love pancakes. I can’t help it.
It was during these cyclical bouts of insanity that we’d form a pattern. We’d drink, he’d snap, we’d fight, and I’d go home. He’d apologize, we’d sleep. And he’d…pee. Like, in the bed. I was young and naïve and had no clue that sometimes when some people got black-out drunk, that was a byproduct.
Sidenote: I really wish high school had better prepared me for the real world. Things like taxes, mortgages and nocturnal enuresis are major hinges in our growth as a species and I would have liked to have at least been moderately prepared.
The first time it happened, I was so confused, I thought my blue heeler puppy had crawled up and mistaken us for his favorite patch of potty grass in the parking lot. The second time it happened, he tried to blame me, but I wasn’t having it. The dark outline all over my comforter was like an incriminating chalk outline and he was the oddly contorted body lying in the middle of it.
The third time it happened? Sleepovers came to a halt and it was the beginning of the end for us. I’d get so frustrated with him that when he was mean to me, I’d tell all his new friends he was a bedwetter. I told his landlord. I told a coworker who told everyone at the buffet. I told my economics professor once out of sheer rage that I’d had to buy a new bedspread. Somebody had to hear about it and A and I weren’t speaking for those 48 hours.
I know, right? How the hell did things stretch out as long as they did? He was toxic. I was toxic. We were on a collision course for some sort of nuclear eruption that, thankfully, never happened.
We lasted a couple more weeks at most, and by then he’d “befriended” a fellow Golden Corral waitress with three kids and a trailer who happily made his life a living hell for the next year--something I was absolutely already willing and capable of doing and couldn’t fathom why he’d want that flavor of bullshit when we had something plenty fucked up already.
Oh, the drama.
I know, I know…20-year-old Megan should have been relieved (my poor mother sure was) but this was an insult that took me a long, long time to get over. I’d been cheated on and he’d ended up picking the East Texas version of Mimi from The Drew Carey Show, blue eyeshadow and all.
There were still two years of college to get through and while my life improved and my choices got healthier and healthier, his seemed to get worse. The last time I saw him, we locked eyes in the student union and I saw that he was with the long-time girlfriend of the one friend he’d managed to keep. Ouch. The story came out later that they’d randomly hooked up at a party and didn’t last long at all, the guilt apparently too much for him and there he was, no friend and no girlfriend.
The worst part of this stretch of time, was that even though I hated him with every fiber of my being, I was always sort of waiting for him to admit his mistake and choose me. Not for any real attachment or poetic reason, my ego just took a massive hit when he made his choice and I needed him to make it better.
Hindsight’s a bitch, really, and paints both of us in a less-than-favorable light. Yuck.
I graduated and the chapter closed for nearly two decades and the only time I’d ever bring him up, he was cast as the cartoony villain of my 20s and I’d get a good laugh out of the antics I tolerated (and caused) but mostly I’d poke fun at the peeing.
Until that fateful day Spotify served up a random, familiar Dixie Chicks song that brought me back to 1998 and I couldn’t help myself. He wasn’t on Facebook, the site that’s really taken all of the fun out of my internet ex-boyfriend stalking. But a google search with some very specific keywords landed me on a random self-help “podcast” hosted by a middle-aged woman clearly living her best life in suburban Houston with her oil exec husband who happily supports her “guru calling.” Groan.
Skimming past all the fluff, I recognized A’s name and our college as one of her random guests on a Tuesday in a random year. One click later and sure as hell, there he was. Twenty-some odd years older than the last time I saw him, but so much the same in his face and in the timbre of his voice, that I braced for the knee-jerk reactions that always followed any conversation that involved him.
Mostly, I was ready to mock whatever his phony “enlightened” ass had to say.
(Bitter, party of one?)
See, A had turned into some super sensitive, super in-tuned therapeutic life coach. Honest to God, I don’t even know what it means, but I was so ready to rip him to shreds that I let the video play out.
Hate. I wanted to hate him. I wanted to laugh at him, to poke fun at the loser who peed the bed, who chose a train wreck of a cheating cougar over me, who betrayed his best friend and let down everyone who cared about him.
He’d hurt me so deep that no amount of storytelling would ever undo the visceral scars he left behind and I was on a mission to mock the shallow, manipulating bullshit he was so famous for.
Except, he talked about his lowest moments that happened three years after I left the area. He’d gotten into hard drugs. He’d nearly died in a car wreck. He’d worked in a dead-end job in the same town we’d burned to the ground and he wanted to die, but instead of dying, he marched into a government contractor’s office and signed away two years of his life to be a food service worker in some random Middle East warzone in Iraq. He talked about watching his friends die. Watching civilians die and the profound burning away of everything he ever was and every awful decision he ever made.
How he returned from a warzone with nothing left and nobody to fall back into bad patterns with so he rebuilt himself by first going to therapy and looking right at the ugliest parts of himself with unflinching honesty, and holy shit--isn’t that the way we all managed to heal ourselves?
In the span of a thirty minute video, all the hate left my body. Now, I can’t say that it was replaced by anything more than a friendly-ish apathy, but the hate was gone. And it felt weird.
I’d been more than happy to relegate him to the role of major fuckup and villain in my life and in one stupid YouTube video, he proved that even he was capable of that soul-deep growth that 44-year-old me swears we’re all capable and deserving of and, holy shit, ain’t that a bitch?
The asshole went on to marry a really sweet flute-playing church wife and they have two kids somewhere in the suburbs and a life they love. Hell, I’m sure they even tithe on a regular basis.
Turns out forgiveness is so inconvenient when the truly unworthy manage to make themselves worthy of it, whether or not your lives ever intersect again. It takes the wind out of your sails when you’re so ready to crucify someone you deem so faulted and awful, only to find they’re really just another fucked-up human being like you and it’s not your job to keep judging people in the first place.
Okay, let’s not go that far.
I mean, I learned a lot in this archaeological relationship dig, but I’m still a fairly petty, amazingly capable digger-upper of the past who will venture down those forbidden catacombs now and then in my weaker moments to make sure I’m skinnier than the girl in my chemistry class who sold me out for a football player boyfriend or still funnier than that one girl from my first job out of college who got the reporter job I’d been gunning for. Because fuck them.
But as far as it goes for A and his wife and their adorable kids and their matching Christmas sweaters (yes, I might have found her on Facebook), I can truly say that I am happy for him. For them. For second chances and finding that worthy being underneath our shitty pasts.
And I’m actually sorry for telling anyone who would listen back in the day that he was a bedwetter--even if he kinda deserved it.