Lost and Found: Finding Hope in the Detours of Life (10 page)

Out of our insecurities we determine our needs. The person who doesn’t feel beautiful wants to think that she is, so we do anything for the person who makes us have that feeling, even if it’s fleeting. This is shaky ground. The difficulty of a relationship increases dramatically when it’s built on a deficiency. It’s like a vitamin deficiency, where you can eat every day and never notice what your body is missing until months into the problem.

I knew I was lost with Robert, but I didn’t know that I was in trouble. But it didn’t matter because I would have done anything to ease the constant reminder of my deficiency. I wanted to be enough, and not just for Robert. I wanted to be enough for Malachi, my dad, my mother, and my friends.

The things that I did to prove my worth—cooking, cleaning, helping with papers, and being a chauffeur—were all desperate attempts to get him to tell me I was enough. And somehow, despite the injuries to my ego, Robert rewarded me. He had the ability to make me feel I was enough, at least for that moment.

But such hindsight only comes with time. In that moment when I saw him, his former girlfriend, and her friends sitting in his apartment, I felt like their fingers were wrapped around my hope, determined to choke the life from it. I only had one thought: If I wasn’t enough, nothing I brought to the table would be enough, either. After seeing the photos, I quickly looked at the time. It was still pretty early in the evening, so I knew Robert had gone from practice to mandatory tutoring. I would have about two hours to use my spare key and empty out his apartment.

Since it suddenly seemed clear that I was going to lose in my attempts to win him over, I could at least try and take back as much as I could. I called some of the guys I knew on campus, mostly Robert’s teammates, and told them what happened. With my angry sister by my side and my son safely with my aunt, I made the drive to open the apartment and let the guys in. Within thirty minutes everything was gone.

I decided I would rather give the stuff to the guys helping me than have Robert and Ms. Double Ex make it their running joke. I felt like Robert had merely used me until she came home from visiting her family during the summer. Being angry was so much easier than admitting to being hurt, or worse, even lost. I hated her. I hated that I wasn’t her, and more than that, I hated that I wanted to be her. I hated that Robert didn’t forsake her for me and that when it came down to who was going to be hurt, me or her, I was chosen to bleed.

I didn’t realize that winning him would mean losing me. I had given so much of myself to him that losing him somehow felt worse than losing what little of me I had left. But in the heat of my anger that night, I felt vindicated. I had done what I could to make my message clear. Loud and clear.

Sure enough, once Robert returned home to his empty apartment, he knew I was the culprit. He called me enraged. Yelling at the top of his lungs, calling me every name in the book, he was upset because I had betrayed him. He was wrong, though. I hadn’t betrayed him. The cause of this mess was that I trusted him.

When he finished hurling every curse word in the book at me, he explained why he was so upset. In those first few months in his new apartment, he had felt like he had a home, more than ever before in his life. Now I had taken away that level of security he had always longed for and only recently found.

But I didn’t care.

It wasn’t enough for me, because he couldn’t see what I lost. He couldn’t see what I sacrificed on the altar of our love only to see it thrown aside without so much as a call. He would be all right. He and his former flame and all their friends could sleep on the floor for all I cared. I hung up, turned my phone off, and went to bed.

But it was far from over.

The next morning I woke up to a call from his coach. If I didn’t get the “gifts” back to Robert within twenty-four hours, they were calling the police. Talk about the last thing I needed to happen! If my parents ever found out, there would be nothing anyone could do to save me. I’d have to drop out of school and my whole dream of working at the church someday would dissolve.

So I got dressed as soon as I could and started calling the guys who had helped me the night before. A few told me I was on my own, while a couple offered to help move what they could. Soon chipped plates, dirty towels, an incomplete silverware set, and dozens of other items were returned in the worst possible condition.

Between the haste of the move and the frustration of their involvement, I wasn’t expecting stellar moving services. I apologized to Robert in front of his coach and headed home for the evening, defeated. Less than twenty-four hours before, I had felt completely justified; now I was just hoping that I could live this down on campus.

———

The incident with Robert was a momentary wake-up call. When I was on campus, wasn’t I supposed to be getting an education instead of a reputation? It wasn’t that I didn’t want to learn, but simply that I wanted time with Robert more.

On those rare occasions when I wasn’t skipping class with him or avoiding test days, I did okay. I had tried to keep up, but there were
at least two classes that even if I aced every assignment from that point forward, I would still fail. So I did all that I could to preserve the remaining three classes. With some focus and dedicated effort, I could get at least a B in each of them.

With a renewed commitment to my future, I immediately fell off the scene. I went to class. I went home. I didn’t want to see anyone who could have known about the apartment situation. I started making some headway in those classes. I even managed to put my phone down for hours at a time just so that I could play with Malachi. I showed my face at family functions more and even made it to church. I was finding my way back. Glimpses of who I used to be made me realize how far away I’d gotten.

And then Robert called.

“Sarah, it’s me,” he said. “Don’t hang up.”

“What is it?” I tried to sound tough, businesslike.

“I broke up with her. When I saw how much it hurt you, I just couldn’t stand the thought of you in so much pain. I’m . . . I’m sorry, baby. I told her that I don’t ever want to see her again, that we can’t even be friends.”

“Yeah, right,” I said, amazed at his ability to say all the right things.

“I wish you had let me explain the pictures on Facebook before you pulled your little stunt,” he said. “It was no big thing. We were just chillin’ and joking around. She didn’t mean anything to me, just an old friend, you know.”

“What do you expect me to say?” My voice cracked just like my defenses.

“I understand why you did what you did, though,” he said and chuckled. “I didn’t realize you cared so much.”

“Well, I shouldn’t have,” I said.

“It’s okay, kinda makes me feel special.”

Nothing but static on the line and tears in my eyes.

“Sarah,” he said, and his voice got softer, “I really miss you.”

Torn between a love that made me lose myself and a God who made me confront the truth I didn’t want to see, I chose Robert. I told myself I had time to better my relationship with God. Lots of time—the rest of my life. But I had already lost Robert and now could have him back. I didn’t want to lose him again. So I was willing to do whatever it took.

Including making his now ex my worst enemy. Robert and I could rebuild what was broken, but not with her around. That’s how you defend making the third party more important than the one you’re with. So I tore her down in any way I could. Tried to attack her with our differences and taunt her with moments he and I had spent together. I tried to break her because I was broken. I wanted to leave her with the same bitter taste that I had.

And she played back. She would tell me that he was only using me for money. Or that when I had to leave to go take care of Malachi they spent their night playing house. These games went on for months. After football games we would stand on opposite sides of the players’ exit. I imagine her heart, like mine, was in her chest each game, hoping as I was that she had done enough this week to earn the coveted place beside him.

Too oblivious (or too obsessed) to care what anyone else thought, we were both his willing pawns. We were eager, ready, and available at his whim. Once again, Robert was my only focus. When I got home I had my son, but I was on the phone or rushing through our
routine so that I could keep my preoccupation with the only person I thought had the power to validate me.

I had given myself away and lost him. Now I’d gotten him back and was determined to fight so that I’d never lose him again.

I still had no idea that it was a battle I could never win.

IN GRADE
SCHOOL
when it was time to learn about constellations, I dreaded every moment of it. In fact, when I enrolled at Texas Christian University and learned that one of the core science class options was astronomy, I immediately enrolled in sociology. I was never able to see the constellations in the sky. Even on the clearest of nights, as beautiful as the stars were, they just looked like stars to me.

The ability to look up into the sky and see the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, or Orion’s Belt would have seriously filled in some of the gaps in my childhood. I always felt so dumb when others could see them but I couldn’t. I truly did want to see the formations in the sky, and I got away with pretending. I’d nod my head, ooh and ahh, then direct the attention back to ground level.

Several years and many tears after that fateful phone call from Robert, I stepped out onto the porch of my home and sat on the front steps. This summer evening was such a nice break from the usual scorching temperatures of Dallas. Every few minutes the wind
would blow and the summer breeze danced across my face. I don’t think I’d ever felt so much peace in my life. Finally, I reluctantly stood; it was time for me to prepare for bed. But not before I took one last moment to catch a few more of the sweet summer drafts that had me in such a daze. I closed my eyes to take in the beauty of the moment. When I opened my eyes to the dark night sky, I saw it.

The Big Dipper.

Without even trying, I could see it clearly. It was as if it had been waiting there the entire time for me to see it. I wondered if it was just the area or the weather conditions or seasonal atmosphere that were more conducive to my seeing it. On the other hand, I think that maybe it was just the season of my life I was in.

After years and years of trying to force the stars in my life to align, I had given up. I had stopped trying to make people be who I wanted them to be in life. I had released people from the roles I wanted them to play in my life and instead let them define themselves. Just like the stars, everyone in my life had fallen into their divine design. I could see clearer than ever what God was trying to show me all along.

Each time I looked for a constellation in the past, I tried to force stars that didn’t belong into the picture. Silly, huh? How could I want things or people to just be who they are, but rush the process before they could truly show themselves?

Oddly enough, the realization that I could’ve seen the Big Dipper thousands of times before that moment didn’t bother me. I know that it probably should have, but there was something about the picture coming together when I least expected it that outweighed the lost time. My life was so drastically different between then and now. I felt like I had finally found my place in the world.

Maybe all this time God has been waiting for the stars to align in my life so that I could see how beautiful things can be made with dangerous material. As beautiful as the bright twinkles in the sky
are, they’re made of the most volatile combination of hydrogen and helium. In their simplest form, stars are explosions of energy. Isn’t it incredible that something so dangerous up close serves as one of the most reliable tools for navigation when seen from a distance? As a matter of fact, if you can find the Big Dipper, it is so much easier to find the North Star.

These little explosions that we could never touch or fully understand help us find our way. To the rest of the world the star is beautiful, but the star knows the truth. It knows that some beauty can only come from the process of combining the things that threatened to harm us.

I wanted Robert to be my North Star.

Sure, it was dangerous, but I could keep enough of my heart away to not get burned. He felt like the missing piece to my puzzle. If we could turn all of our fire, passion, and energy into a star, then maybe it would right all the things we thought needed fixing. Maybe our love would create a light so bright that neither of us had to be lost again. We could just depend on one another to create something dazzling, something that would help us find our way.

After our phone call, the one where he said all the right things and apologized and told me about breaking up with his “friend,” I gathered the bits and pieces of my heart, hope, and self-esteem and poured them into him. I knew that being with me meant taunting in the locker room about the girl who had his apartment cleared out. I could only imagine what kind of ridicule he would face. Although, to this day I think that many of his teammates understood that every action has a reaction. Still, I saw his willingness to undergo that level of ego-bruising as a sign that we were willing to take risks on each other.

Finally, after months of going back and forth, he was actually taking a chance on me, too. It crossed my mind that maybe she was just
finished with him and I had “won” him by default. But sometimes you have to choose between a scorned heart and a lying tongue.

I wish I could’ve seen choosing to protect myself as a viable option. What if I didn’t have to choose between trusting him or her and just left the entire situation alone? I could still stay low-key. I really didn’t have a big community of friends on campus. The ones I might have had either picked sides with Robert’s exes or didn’t want to be associated with my drama. And who could blame them?

To this day, Brittany, one of my dear friends who was at TCU with us, still laughs when she sees me. Although we knew each other then, we really only became close after our TCU days. Brittany always laughed at me for bringing my designer bag to football games. She had no idea I had more fake bags than real ones. We still laugh about the day I dropped my bag on the ground after a football game.

Outside of my own roller-coaster romance with Robert, other players on the team juggled groupies, ex-girlfriends, friends, and even wives—and many of us waited outside the locker room for the players to exit after a game. Most of the time it was easier to look like you weren’t trying at all than to wait at the front of the crowd with bated breath. Waiting on Robert became a war between me and whichever ex-girlfriend he was claiming to be “friends” with at the moment. After one game, Brittany was waiting with me. I saw Robert’s ex-girlfriend—the one whose pictures I’d seen on Facebook—standing on the opposite side of the door. The players came out one by one at first, but then several at a time. Robert came out with a few of his friends, and then I lost his head in the crowd. When the people
finally dispersed, there he was walking toward the dorms with his ex-girlfriend. Before I knew it, I was walking toward them at a rapid pace.

When I finally caught up to them, I dropped my purse, took my jewelry off, and prepared to brawl. In the middle of it all, I heard Brittany yell, “GIRL, PICK UP THAT PURSE. IT COSTS TOO MUCH MONEY!”

We laugh about it now, but I was too furious to laugh then. I’m not proud of it, but that’s all I knew to do in the moment. At heart I knew that fighting her wouldn’t fix anything, but I was tired of the back-and-forth.

He was mine, yet here he was walking away after the game with his ex-girlfriend? The dynamic had shifted yet again, but I wouldn’t be defeated. If the two of them were just friends, then we could all be friends. Somehow what should have been an issue between me and Robert became a battle between me and his ex. She was the new competition and he was the judge. I was intent on showing them both that I was confident enough to withstand their friendship.

And with that, another piece of me went on sale, marked down for final clearance.

I was too afraid to be honest, so I chose to live a lie. I was willing to play a game that would risk my facade becoming my painful reality. I wish I had been brave enough to admit that I was weak. Some months later into my relationship with Robert, I heard the saying, “You teach people how to treat you.” While I understood the basic fundamentals of that theory, I had taken on the task of learning how Robert wanted to be treated. The time would come when I would show
him my world and my definition of love, but right then it was about him. Instead of teaching one another how to respect ourselves, I was blindsided by my own insecurities. I had not taught myself how to treat myself yet.

Blame it on society, television, music, or the media, but from a young age girls are taught that a hero is coming to save them. Prince Charming has his choice of any woman in the land, and if he picks you, you’re the luckiest girl in the world. We learn that we may have to become someone we aren’t in order to win a man. At some point the clock will strike twelve; he’ll see our flaws but still love us. Underneath all the quick banter and coy smiles, there’s this little girl who’s dying to be loved.

We take the holes from our abandonment issues, hearts torn by neglect, and staggered tears of broken promises and dress them up in a ball gown and glass slippers. Ticktock . . . ticktock. . . . The clock strikes twelve and we are completely bare, fully exposing ourselves to a man we pretended to be a princess to attract, only to be met with the bitter truth that we never really had it all together.

We just wanted to be better for him. We wanted to stand out in the crowd. Then life forced us to reveal our harsh truth: We were never strong enough to play this game. How can we ever desire a healthy whole relationship when we begin by accepting things we know hurt us? I made the mistake of thinking I was strong enough to withstand the ticking of the clock.

And I’m not the only one.

Every situation is not the same, but I’ve encountered a version of this story, like the familiar fairy tale it’s based on, time and time again. Either we do all we can to keep him, or try to make him feel like we don’t need him.

My friends tried to coach my heart on how to win this game. If you want to get someone, make him feel as insecure as you feel.
Beat him at his own game. Wait to text him back, don’t pick up on the first ring, and definitely don’t go running whenever he calls. He has a friend so you get a friend. Tell him you’re going on a date, go a few days without talking, make him think that you’re tough and hard to get. The more I tried to be like him, the more I felt like I was losing him.

It’s incredible how we weigh our options. You can’t increase the level of infection and still expect a cure to the disease. We play by the rules of the love game, then cry when we lose.

I decided, as dangerous as it may be, to wear my rags to the ball. I knew he would still come dressed as Prince Charming, but I wanted to be the one he showed his rags to someday. In my heart, I felt that my love and acceptance of his rags would make him see that you can still be a prince even if the world doesn’t see your crown. I loved him the way I wanted to be loved, even though I knew he couldn’t give it back to me fully.

He hardly gave any of himself away, so I would treasure whatever he did give me. In time he would see that he could give all of himself to me.

He and his ex (and how many others?) would be friends, and I would pretend to be the completely confident girlfriend. I bit my tongue when I saw them interact on Facebook. When I saw them sitting together in the cafeteria, I grabbed my lunch and sat with them. I couldn’t let them know that they were getting to me. Each time I accepted something that bruised me but didn’t break me, I lost.

———

The temperature began to drop, making for perfect weather as the TCU football season began winding down. I was glad. Robert and I were completely different when the roar of the crowd didn’t drown my voice or blur his vision. Robert and his new friend had
cooled down. Growing tired of my bottomless pit of “I don’t care” shenanigans, she was moving on with her life.

I heard rumors on campus that she had someone new in her life. I wished them the best, too. I hoped that they went on to fall deeply in love, get engaged, have children, and move far away. As long as she left us alone, I didn’t care how it happened. She no longer waited at the end of games; she hardly even came to the games at all.

Finally, it would just be the two of us again. Or so I thought.

———

One Friday before heading into practice, Robert called and asked if I would pick up his mother and sister from the bus station for the next day’s game. I tried to act as casually as he was when he asked me, but I could hear the trumpets blowing. This was the next level and I wouldn’t mess it up. Of course I would pick them up! I’d make sure they were settled in, fed, and comfortable while they were with me. And then he dropped a bomb before ending the call.

She knew about my emptying out her son’s apartment, and she wasn’t happy about it.

Unsure of how I would handle the meeting now, I called Stacia. She always helped me figure out the best thing to do. Stacia says the things I think but would never say. I say the things she feels but would never reveal. We’ve always been one another’s ally. I don’t get angry often; it takes too much out of me. It’s not always healthy to just let things weigh on you either, though. With Stacia, I could be angry. I didn’t understand what Robert told his mother, but I was almost sure it wasn’t the full story.

I was stuck now. If I backed out, I would look like a coward. The way forward meant facing mama’s wrath. But he was giving me a chance to see a side of his world that not many had been privy to. I could do this. So when I asked Stacia how I should handle the conversation if it came up, she told me to tell the truth.

The reason Stacia and I are always able to laugh even in intense situations is because of how differently we communicate. I like to tell gentle truths, while Stacia likes to tell it like it is. So my plan was to approach the situation with Robert’s mom gently, and then if things escalated, I would bring out the Stacia in me.

Saturday morning, time sped by while I waited to make my way to downtown Fort Worth. I left early just to make sure I would be on time and wouldn’t risk traffic. I had never seen Robert’s mother before, but I was hoping that I would recognize her and his sister by his description. The moment the crowd dissipated I saw them. Had they all three been together they would have looked like triplets. I waved, purposely trying to not look either giddy or under enthused. As we approached each other, his mother forced a polite smile.