The Whole Woman
I Live My Life in Stories
Her name was Anna, and Anna no longer believed in love.
That was not how her story began. It was simply where the story had left her for now.
Anna had always suspected there was something strange about her. Other people noticed it too. She had quirks. She was a perfectionist. Her mind moved relentlessly, producing thoughts faster than she could organize them and ideas faster than she could bring them to life. She could be funny, brilliant, impulsive, exhausting and impossible—all before lunch.
She also had a temper. When pushed far enough, Anna could be mean. She was jealous. She overreacted. She said things she regretted and sometimes wounded people while trying to defend herself. She knew those things about herself better than anyone else did.
Years later, one of her doctors would tell her that she was unusually self-aware.
“I’m not perfect,” Anna replied, “but at least I know I’m not.”
Eventually, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Her doctor explained it to Anna and her mother one afternoon: the illness did not mean that Anna’s ideas were not brilliant. It did not make her work meaningless or every emotion imaginary. It meant that sometimes her mind accelerated and she could not find the brake. The thoughts kept coming, and once the current caught her, she could not always stop herself from being carried away by it.
But even before anyone gave her mind a name, Anna understood that she was different.
Beneath all that noise, she was remarkably softhearted. She cared more deeply than was probably wise. She was loyal like a damn border collie—sometimes long after loyalty had become self-destruction. If someone she loved needed something, Anna would stay awake until sunrise to provide it, even when the need was not truly urgent. It mattered to them, and therefore it mattered to her.
That was simply how Anna loved.
She learned very young that loving someone did not necessarily make that person safe.
For approximately six years of her childhood, Anna was sexually abused by someone she should have been able to trust. Her parents loved her. Nothing about what happened erased that truth or made them responsible for something they did not know. But little girls can be loved and still be frightened. They can be surrounded by good people and remain too confused, ashamed or scared to find the words for what is happening to them.
In the fifth grade, Anna tried.
She told a friend. The friend told a teacher, and Anna was summoned to the office. An adult asked her about it, and suddenly the truth became enormous and terrifying.
Anna panicked.
She said she did not know what anyone was talking about.
Nothing else happened.
It took twenty-two years for her to tell her mother. Her father still did not know. Over the course of her life, she told only a handful of people: the two men she married, perhaps one trusted friend and, eventually, a few women in her office.
The women there had become more like family than employees, and two of them carried versions of the same story. That was how Anna learned just how common these secrets were. Women could work beside one another every day, answering telephones, preparing files and laughing over lunch, while each quietly carried a childhood she had barely spoken aloud.
Anna grew up anyway.
She became an athlete, although that word hardly captured it. For several years, she was among the fastest girls in the state. She was a star cross-country runner who could sprint but could also endure the distance. On the basketball court, they called her Magneto Hands because it did not matter where the ball went. Anna would find it, and Anna would take it.
She was not naturally better at everything she attempted. She simply worked longer than most people were willing to work. Perfectionism can become an illness of its own, but it can also build an impressive life.
Anna followed her father into the law and then discovered that she loved it for reasons entirely her own. She became a lawyer, built a practice and found herself responsible not only for clients but also for employees, payroll, taxes, deposits, bills and every other invisible obligation hidden beneath the phrase “successful business owner.”
Twice a month, she sat down and wrote the payroll checks by hand. She made the deposits. She paid the bills. She managed one urgent client after another while carrying the knowledge that several other families depended upon the business she had built continuing to survive.
Naturally, Anna decided that was not enough.
She entered criminal law and served on both sides of it—prosecutor and defender, accuser and shield. Every week, she stepped into a world filled with dangerous people, devastated families and facts so absurd that fiction would have been more believable.
That work taught her how quickly a person could be reduced to the worst allegation ever made about them.
She should have remembered that lesson.
Anna was attractive, successful and visible in a small town. Her father was successful too. Those things did not always inspire affection, particularly among people who had already decided that her life must have been handed to her.
She had acquaintances. She had colleagues. She had people who smiled when they saw her. But she had very few people she trusted as friends.
Her first marriage left damage behind. For a while afterward, Anna stopped believing in love.
Then she met the man who made her believe again.
He told Anna that she deserved better than what she had accepted before. She deserved honesty. She deserved loyalty. She deserved a man who stayed through the difficult parts instead of loving only the polished version of her.
He made her feel chosen. He made her believe that she was the love of his life—the person he could not live without and the woman beside whom he would grow old.
For the first time, Anna believed she had found the golden kind of love people wrote about: the love that stayed through sickness, failure, age and all the ugly human moments that happened between the photographs.
But while he was teaching Anna what she deserved, he was hiding parts of his own life from her. Anna discovered conversations, other women and things happening in places she could not see.
She told him it was not acceptable.
He left her.
Eventually, he returned, and Anna forgave him. Not because the betrayal did not matter, but because she loved him unconditionally and believed forgiveness was part of loving someone for life.
Later, they had a baby. Anna had not yet been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. At the time, the explanations changed depending upon the day: anxiety, depression, postpartum depression or perhaps nothing at all.
Whatever name belonged to it, Anna was struggling.
He left her again.
This time, he remained gone for months. Anna lived those months alone, caring for the baby and trying to understand how the person who claimed he could not live without her appeared perfectly capable of doing exactly that.
When he returned, she forgave him again.
That became the rhythm of their love. One day, Anna was the love of his life. The next day, he was gone. Sometimes she would not see him for months.
Each time, she remained faithful.
Each time, she waited.
Each time, she found a way to believe that his return meant the leaving would finally stop.
Little by little, Anna’s bones grew cold.
Then came the final fight.
It did not begin on the night everyone would later discuss. It began during the weeks before it, when Anna repeatedly asked for open communication and ordinary marital boundaries. She was yelled at, dismissed and attacked. She absorbed it again and again until, finally, she fought back.
Anna overreacted.
Her mental condition contributed to the force of that reaction. She did not pretend that her behavior became acceptable merely because it had an explanation. She took responsibility for what she had done.
What she could no longer understand was why everyone else’s repeated choices deserved context and forgiveness while her single worst reaction deserved neither.
By the following day, her husband was gone.
Within hours, an account of the incident appeared online bearing Anna’s name, photograph and business. The story bore little resemblance to the events as Anna had experienced them, but hundreds of comments accumulated beneath it.
Strangers decided what kind of woman she was. They decided what kind of lawyer she was, what kind of mother she was and whether she deserved the life she had built.
No one wrote about the nights Anna remained awake until morning because someone needed her help. No one mentioned the employees whose checks she made sure cleared, the clients whose emergencies she carried home or the children she loved.
No one knew about the little girl in the school office who had become too frightened to tell the truth.
They did not know about the runner, the basketball player, the mother, the lawyer or the woman who had repeatedly forgiven the very things she had once been promised she would never have to endure.
They saw a snippet and mistook it for the whole woman.
People called government agencies. They questioned whether Anna was fit to be a mother. Her children were removed from her care for a month while strangers examined her life and weighed whether she deserved not merely motherhood, but humanity.
Her husband’s former wife sought restraining orders against Anna even though Anna knew that she posed no danger to her. To Anna, the proceedings felt intended to punish and humiliate her at the moment she was least capable of defending herself.
The man who had called her the love of his life did not stand beside her.
Anna had people who loved her. She had parents, children and women in her office who cared about her. But when the world turned against her, she did not have the one person who had promised to stand between her and the storm.
She faced Mother’s Day without him.
Their wedding anniversary passed without acknowledgment.
She survived the summer alone.
Then summer ended, fall approached and he was still gone.
The public humiliation was terrible, but the abandonment changed her more deeply. She had learned in childhood not to trust someone merely because that person was supposed to be safe. Somewhere between growing up, becoming successful and building an independent life, she had allowed herself to forget.
She trusted this man with all her heart.
When that trust exploded, Anna was the only person left standing in the wreckage.
Now she begins many mornings crying for the man she believed loved her. She ends many nights the same way.
In between, she puts on her Superwoman suit.
She answers the telephone. She walks into court. She advises clients, pays employees, raises children and manages illnesses that attack both her body and her mind. She carries the problems of people who will never know how difficult it was for her to get out of bed that morning.
Anna has spent her entire life fighting.
She fights autoimmune disease. She fights bipolar disorder. She fights deadlines, allegations, financial pressure, public judgment and the relentless demands of motherhood. She fights for clients, employees, children and people who call her when their own lives have fallen apart.
What Anna no longer has is faith that romantic love will ever fight for her.
She knows she loved him. There is no uncertainty in that. She loved him naturally, fiercely and unconditionally, even when loving him injured her.
Somewhere in the world is a man who may have no idea how completely he was loved by this extraordinary, maddening, beautiful and deeply flawed woman.
Or perhaps he knows and simply does not care.
That possibility hurts more.
Anna does not believe she can decide to stop loving him. To her, love has never been a switch. Either it exists or it does not. She may have to learn how to live without being loved in return, but she does not know how to command her heart to erase someone it once accepted as home.
She is not certain another great love is waiting for her. She no longer believes every wounded woman is promised a better man in the final chapter.
Perhaps one day she will find someone who loves her as deeply as she loves.
Perhaps she will simply find someone kind with whom she can share a day, a meal or a night without feeling alone.
Or perhaps she will build a life that belongs entirely to her.
For now, she will keep taking care of her children. She will try to correct her mistakes. She will continue building her business and searching for a life that fits the woman she has become.
Years ago, during one of Anna’s spectacular high-school fits, she announced that she was quitting.
Her basketball coach let her finish, then looked directly at her.
“Anna, I hear you say you quit all the time. But I have never actually seen you do it. Now stop mouthing off.”
Her coach knew her.
The people around Anna still hear her say it. She says she is finished. She cannot take another thing. She cannot survive another season, another accusation, another empty morning or another night spent grieving a man who left her alone to face the world he once promised to help her carry.
She says she quits.
She cries.
She rages.
She collapses.
Then morning comes, and Anna gets up.
This is not the end of her story.
How could it be?
Anna has never actually quit.
Judith L. Hampton
Attorney-at-Law
Hampton Law Firm
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