In this article, we hear from Clint Doran, his experience, and his pain with Ashley Kidwell. His devotion to their love and the trials of her addictions and mental health issues.
Clint and Ashley met on New Year’s night of 2018. Clint describes it as nothing but fate. He was going to get a pack of cigarettes when he saw Ashley walking into his neighborhood, and she asked him for a light. From that very spark, they both saw possibilities for their future in each other’s eyes.
Ashley stayed with Clint, and they spoke until 10 am. Ashley began telling him everything about her life: her abuse, her fears, her love for her children. Listening to Ashley talk about her children, Clint realized that his oldest son was best friends with Ashley’s son. Both Clint and Ashley have stated how their boys called themselves brothers. It was as if Clint and Ashley were being guided to each other.
“I couldn’t get this feeling out of my head that something had drawn us together.”, stated Clint. “We were so comfortable telling each other everything.”
Clint, being a coffee drinker, had always had one rule: No one drank from his cup. “Ashley just picked it up out of the blue as we talked that first night, and turned the cup to the side, I drank from and simply began drinking. Normally, this would have sent me crazy, but as she was doing it, it felt natural. As if she had been doing it forever.”
When we realized that our kids were so close, it all began to make sense to us in a way. Ashley would always come over late at night and stay till early morning, and we would simply sit outside and talk. We noticed that we had begun holding hands without even realizing it. After a few weeks, I told her that I had fallen in love with her, and she simply replied, “I feel the same.”
From that moment, Ashley and I began simply holding each other. We felt complete!
It wasn’t till Ashley told me her mother wanted to meet me and speak with me about what Ashley had to do to leave her husband that problems started. Her mother, now in hindsight, wanted to see what changed Ashley so quickly in wanting to leave the abuse, and how her mother could have prevented it.
While speaking that night, Ashley’s mother saw what everyone else saw between us… simple love. Ashley had become upset, and I held her hand to calm her; that simple gesture caused her mother to begin her attempts at separating us.
A couple of weeks later, when Ashley came back by, she had told me her mother suggested she not see me anymore. But she couldn’t stop herself from wanting to see me or speak with me. Our routine of sitting and talking, and drinking coffee continued.
At one point, I was gone for a few months, and when I came back from getting cigarettes that very night, I saw Ashley pacing in front of my house. I was on the phone with a friend, and Ashley heard me and came running to me and placed her arms around me as if she would never let go.
I had noticed a change in her, which I later found out was caused by her mother insisting that she stay in her toxic marriage. Ashley told me she could not stop thinking about me and wanting my arms around her the whole time I was gone.
After I moved to Columbia, Ashley called me and said she was finally ready to leave her toxic marriage and for me to come get her. I, along with a friend, drove and picked her up. She moved in with me in Columbia, and we began working on getting her help.
Ashley tried for six months, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, to get help to protect herself and her children, but was turned away due to COVID-19 restrictions at the time. We had been able to get Ashley medical insurance for her heart, and it also covered mental health, which she tried to seek counseling for. During that time, her mother made multiple attempts to cause friction between Ashley and me. This ranges from filing false police reports to bringing Ashley prescription drugs and alcohol.
Ashley began going back and forth between her mother’s home and ours. And each time she returned, I noticed more issues with her sobriety and mental health. Her mother would give her what Ashley called “Mommie’s Medicine” to keep her controlled. Once she realized Ashley was growing in strength, her mother began promising help in finding a lawyer, but had no intentions of doing so.
She would insist on Ashley staying at her home, or she would not help Ashley. While there, she began filling Ashley’s head with stories of Clint’s unfaithfulness, making statements that Clint was sleeping with other women when Ashley wasn’t at their home. When Ashley told Clint this, he reassured her that he was completely in love with her and had never betrayed her. It’s why he fought so hard for her to always come home from her mother’s.
At one point, her mother took her to see a lawyer in Chester and left her there with a complete male stranger, whom Ashley admitted she had slept with. This person was a known pedophile and drug dealer. When Clint found this out, he retrieved Ashley, and she informed him that she was pregnant with her and Clint’s child. And after a few days back at her mother’s, she told Clint she had had a miscarriage. This occurred 3 more times after her telling Clint they were pregnant and her losing the child. Each time it was while she was at her mother’s.
The last year of our being together was the hardest. Ashley kept acting strangely at times, from having hallucinations to full self-medication. When Ashley first moved in, she had night terrors for months, and all I could do was hold her to let her know somehow she was safe and that I was next to her. After a while, things were good, but every time her mother entered, it went back to chaos.
Ashley and I went to Colorado for a week so that we could cover a Parental Alienation Conference there. While there, we were amazing, and everyone commented on how perfect we seemed with each other. Ashley had told everyone there of her troubles and her issue with her mother. I had hoped she would be able to get help at this conference and advice on how not to lose her children in the process.
Upon our return, we chose to stay at Catawba Falls for a few days. Ashley wanted to go to the waterfall there. But it was then that Ashley began drinking uncontrollably. It always seemed the closer we got to her mother, the more it got out of control. Ashley began insisting that we stay with a cousin of hers. I explained to Ashley that her family didn’t seem to be people who truly wanted to help her. And that we needed to start building things for ourselves.
I dropped Ashley off on her insistence, only to find out 2 days later that she had been returned to her mother. Ashley would call me and state her love for us, but I found out that she had slept with another man while at her mother’s. Another drug dealer.
3 days later, after confronting her with this, I received a phone call from the Kershaw County Detention Center informing me that Ashley had been arrested and that she stated I was her boyfriend and I would pick her up. Which I did without hesitation.
Ashley was released in nothing but a bathrobe, and when she got into the car, she didn’t even know where she had just been released from. We drove to Florence, where I got us a hotel room, and not having spoken on the drive, she began stating that she had been dead for 6 months and that she fell out of the sky, but she didn’t know why. I told her she had 2 options: allow me to get her help or contact her ADA Representative and allow her to get Ashley help. At that point, Ashley kept going downstairs and attempted to enter the locked vehicles. I got her to stop for a few seconds when asking her if all we were to each other was an escape and sex? Her reply was calm, and she stated we are more than that to each other. Then began her rhetoric again.
As I was still the person of contact on her MyChart account, I found out she had been placed in a Mental Hospital and evaluated. And that she had large amounts of Adderall and Bensodiazepine in her system. I attempted to contact the hospital to let them know Ashley’s history, but no one there would speak with me due to her family having blocked me.
A month after her release, Ashley began calling me again, and we began talking about her coming home. But then she stopped after a video call between us, and I could tell she was extremely intoxicated and had been with someone else.
I know most people would have simply walked away from her. But Ashley and I always said we were each other’s halves, and when you love someone so completely, you can’t walk away. Knowing why Ashley does what she does and not knowing how to truly help her hurts in a way I can’t explain. Ashley herself told me once that she was scared of our love because it was so easy and perfect, and that it made her run sometimes because she didn’t know how to deal with those feelings. That was all she knew was abuse and everyone always had a hidden agenda.
When Ashley would have these guys call me and threaten me because of the stories her mother told them, and Ashley would confirm to appease her mom. Clint simply told them the truth and told them where they could find him. “I never backed down from any of these individuals, if it would protect Ashley.”, Clint stated. Ashley always had this habit while at her mother’s of going with whatever her mother stated. It was a control you would only see in extreme cases of kidnapping or abuse.
“Yes, all this hurt in ways you can’t describe, but what was more important was the love she and I felt. I told her a million times she had to close that door on the past and begin moving forward for us and the children, but she always stated she needed to keep one foot in the doorway.”
Ashley always joked about how we would chase each other in wheelchairs when we got old. Not in a funny way, but in a way that stated our future. She stated, “We would never be done!” with such conviction. I’ve never given up on her, and I will always be there for her, despite the pain.
Even though Ashley is once again connected with a drug dealer and has called Clint, their connection can not be ignored by either one. Clint has stated that even with her last arrest, I was going to post her bond after I was contacted again.
“There will always be bad times, but you have to remember all the good times that outweigh the bad. Ashley and I know each other completely to the point that we can finish each other’s thoughts, sentences, and actions. You only find that once in a lifetime!”, stated Clint.