Monday 27 August 2007
In a Daze
Sorry to everyone who checked in and thought I had gone and started another project and not followed through. My internet was down all weekend. So I'm back at work and blogging again. I was hoping that today I would tell you about the really good stuff that has happened in my life because there's tons of it. Unfortunately, that's not the case. I woke up to a ringing phone this morning at 1:30. I thought it was strange when my husband hurriedly got off the phone saying "I love you" to someone, which they don't say very often in his family. I sat up and asked him who it was and he said it was his mom. A feeling of dread came over me as I contemplated what could bring on this early hours phone call. So what's wrong? My brother in law has passed away. Even as I write this, I feel as though it's all a really bad dream and I'm going to wake up soon. I hadn't done laundry since before we moved so Rich had no clothes to wear. We decided that he would go into work and get all of the paperwork done while I would stay home and get his laundry done and pack for him so I haven't slept yet. Having gotten up very early yesterday, I am going on my 30th waking hour hoping I can sleep soon. We cover so much stuff in training at work that I don't dare miss a day that I don't have to. So here I sit. Desperately wanting to be at home comforting my hurting husband (which would consist of sleeping and holding him when he wakes up). The police don't have any information for us yet, so we wait. i will be alone this week. My first test with my new attitude. Can I be strong when my husband cannot? I hope God will give me the strength to make it. I will continue to update during this time, but I hope you can appreciate that this news sent me into shock. I am still quite numb. I am feeling the fear and confusion in waves. A couple of hours of stability then it hits me again and I start asking God why? How can this make sense? I start thinking about the questions my husband's family must have and how I would answer them and frankly, it's not looking good. How can I, as an aspiring spiritual leader, not have the answers? I know I can't know everything right now, but I wish I had some answers for them. I will write more later.
Friday 24 August 2007
FYI
Just in case anyone is wondering, I will be leaving this blog alone for one more day. I want to make sure that everyone who needs to gets to read these before they are hard to find. After that I will be blogging on a regular basis.
Wednesday 22 August 2007
The Truth revealed
When I first created this blog, I thought I would be sharing all the exciting things God is doing in our church. It turns out, this is where if you are okay with the real me, you can see it. You need to know before you keep reading that I am doing this blog as no holds barred. If I am thinking things that may freighten you, I will not warn you. this is where I take down my walls and let you see the real me. The purpose of this is not a pity party. I have realized over the years that I am better at writing than I am at talking. If you are okay with all of these then please keep reading as I would love for you to know the real me. This said, I am not going to try to be politically correct when I am writing. I will write about my initial reactions the way I have them. I will usually not apologize for any of this, but I know some people in my family will be hurt so I am apologizing in advance. I have to start being honest with myself and God about my life.
My Story - Rated R with no apologies
I haven't been as forward with my story in the last few years as I used to be. There are few people left in my life who know the whole story of what has hurt me. Here it is so you can understand. I will warn you ahead of time, it is honest. I have not sugar coated anything and it is not for the weak hearted.
I didn't get a childhood with any innocence. I was born into a family that was divided before it even started. My parents weren't lovey dovey with each other or my brother and me. For the most part, I remember my parents yelling at each other. I don't remember what about, but I always thought it was my fault. If I could work harder, if I could be a better child, maybe they would start to like me. The harder I worked, the worse I did. We moved around so much I never got to know my friends. In my little 5 year old brain, I thought my parents were punishing me. Every time we moved, I wondered what I had done wrong. I had to say goodbye so many times, I never really got to know anyone. I got to the point I could tell when we were about to move and I would lash out at my friends so they wouldn't like me anymore. One less goodbye to say right?
To this instability, you add the stupidity of an older man. When I say stupidity I am being nice. He molested for the first time when I was 5 years old. To this day I am stilled ashamed of this. I've always felt like I had to pretend I had gotten over this, that I wasn't allowed to be ashamed of it, but I can't anymore. It has caused problems in my relationship with my husband, my dad and every male leader I have ever been in submission to. I cannot trust men for anything because they are going to hurt me.
It might have been tolerable if this was the only thing I had to deal with, but there are several hot tempers in my family, including my own. I am a really bad liar so if I had done something wrong, my parents would know right away. I remember more than one occasion when I wasn't going to change my story because I knew that would give me away as a liar, but my dad wasn't going to let me be a liar. He would try harder and harder to get me to tell the truth and eventually he would snap. It didn't happen often so he wasn't "abusive", but it happened, so I was abused. I have never wanted to admit that because of the stigma it would put on my dad, but now I can't look out for other people anymore. They have made their decisions.
Again, you would think the heap is heavy enough, but I was molested 4 times before I was 12. In Saskatchewan, there was no training on what to do if someone touches you inappropriately in our school. I didn't know I had been violated until we moved to Calgary.When I came forward about it, there was a very strong reaction. I didn't know why people reacted that way at first, but thought "I guess I should be ashamed of myself". Some people in my family haven't spoken to me since, my dad has been adament that if I was going to say I was a Christian, I had to forgive the man who molested me. I can honestly say that I have forgiven him. God said He would deal with this person and, since I have seen how the repurcussions have destroyed his life, I believe God already has.
At that point in my life, my teachers were the only people who hadn't hurt me. They would shower me with praise and tell me how smart I was. In the classroom, I was good enough. The other side of that door was a dangerous place, though. People didn't like me and I didn't know why. I had to assume that there was nothing likeable about me since no one could find anything to like about me. The girl I thought was my best friend would trick me into meeting her at the park where one of her other friends would come beat me up. To this day I don't know why she did it and I could really care less.
At this point I began to detach emotionally from my life. the pain was overwhelming and if I continued to feel everything in my heart, I thought I would collapse. You'll notice that things become less emotional and more practical after this point.
In Junior High, I would stay in the solace of the classroom as long as I could. I would be in the library volunteering as early as I could every morning. My lunches were spent in the safety of the office, volunteering on the phones, and after school I would stay as long as I could to help my teachers clean up at the end of the day. Unfortunately, the school could only save me from the pain until 4:30 at night. Being turned out into the world was inevitable. Why didn't God let me have something to save me at night too?
My heart was aching by the time I was 14. I blossomed early and had no one in my life that would speak to me about boys and what they really wanted. When boys started paying attention to me, I thought "Finally God is changing my luck. Someone likes me." You know that line in that movie where someone says in a really high pitched voice "He likes me. He reeaally likes me." That was the theme song of my puberty years. I just wanted someone to say I was good enough for them. As you can guess, my boyfriends were using me. They would take what they could get and when they found my boundaries they would leave. After a few boyfriends left for the same reason, I would assume my morals were too high and I would relent. With each boyfriend I would go a little further, but I knew in my heart that sex was not a good thing so I wouldn't go there. By the time I hit high school, things were changing. The students in my school started getting vicious. They would spit on me, lock my stuff in lockers when I left it alone, push me out of my seat on the bus. There's no end to what they would do to say "I DON'T LIKE YOU!"
I eventually realized that I could please my teachers all I wanted, but it would still hurt every time I walked down the hall. I gave up on pleasing anybody. I would stay out as often as I could and started exploring other things. I was in Pathfinders by this time (The next level up from Girl Guides) and the rumour was going around that I was a lesbian. Of course it wasn't true, but that didn't stop them from saying it. I started wondering if they were right. One night during camp, the meanest girl lured me into her bedroom and pretended she was interested in me sexually. She wasn't; she just wanted to demean me yet again, but I didn't know that. I decided to try what she was talking about and needless to say, it didn't go over well. The leadership never found out, but everyone in the troop knew. No one ever spoke to me again.
By the end of grade 10, I had started skipping class to hang out with the druggies and the smokers, also known as the "dirties". I failed a couple of my classes and got in huge fights with my teachers. At the start of grade 11, I started dating the leader of one of the gangs in my school and ended up in the crosshairs of his ex-girlfriend. She decided to make my life a living hell, pardon the expression. She started beating me up as often as she could and by the fifth time, the school police officer got worried. You'd think he would be worried about my safety, but no. He was worried about the balance that had been established at the school. I was asked to transfer schools.
Around the same time I started hanging out downtown with the drug dealers. When I was asked to change schools, we did all the paper work, but I didn't see a reason to continue going to school. I would tell my parents I was going to school and I would go downtown. this didn't last long as my parents said I was going to school as long as I lived under their roof. This is when I ran away for the first time. I spent a month at a time living on the street and then a c-train cop would pick me up and send me home since I was a missing person or I would get frustrated with the absolute lack of direction my life had and I would go home. That would only last a day or two and then I'd be on the street again.
It was during this phase of my life that I realized the evil that I was capable of. One afternoon, a friend of mine called. We were close, but he was not my boyfriend. We just understood each other. I had given him a ring that I made in high school and he had given me a ring that he got from his dad. He decided he had had enough of Calgary and he was leaving for Los Angeles. He phoned me at my parents' house to tell me he was going. I didn't want to lose the ring I had made and asked if I would get it back and he said I had to come get it. My parents overheard the conversation on the phone and thought I was leaving to go be a prostitute for him. They thought they had to stop me at any cost.
My mom showed up at my bedroom door with a rope. She told me she was going to tie me up so I couldn't leave. I felt like I was being treated like an animal. All I wanted was for one person to love me and I couldn't even get that. She realized she couldn't tie me up so she went and got a broomstick and said I'd have to get by her first. I took the broomstick and hit her in the knee as hard as I could. The stick broke and she grabbed one end of it. We started whacking each other as hard as we could and I ended up with my scalp split open and she ended up with a gash in her hand. She wanted to goad me into slugging her so she could have me arrested. During the fight, she started saying I was acting like a schizoid. She danced around shaking her hands going "schizzy, schizzy, schizzy!" Do you know how badly that hurt?
I finally got sick of playing games and wrapped my hand around my mom's throat and held her up against the wall and started choking her. I told her I was leaving and there was nothing she could do about it. She called my dad to help her and he started coming for the stairs. I knew I was done and bolted for the door. Just the fact that I could hit my mother and wrap my hand around her throat makes me feel like a worm.
By this point, I thought I would never live up to the expectations of anyone. Anyone who would try to kill their mother is not worth the breath in their lungs. I was suicidal. My life wasn't going anywhere. There is a bridge downtown in Century Gardens, a park on 7th Avenue and 8th Street, where I had been hanging out. I usually sat in the corner of the park and smoked pot, but this time, I didn't even want to do that. A walking bridge went over the park and I would sometimes stand on this bridge and watch people. Not in a creepy way. I was just interested in how people interacted and fascinated by the diversity God had put in human life. That day I wasn't interested in either. I wanted God to squish me like a bug. I stood on the overpass looking at the brick path below and tried to contemplate the odds of success. I tried to calculate the distance from where I was to the ground, wondered if I would fall far enough to definitely be fatal. Just as I thought I would jump, the man who had been looking out for me while I was living on the streets showed up. Understand that this was the first man that didn't ask anything in return from me. It was not an inappropriate relationship. He had been living on the streets for more than a decade, knew the ropes and had seen too many kids die from stupid mistakes. He wanted to make sure that didn't happen to me. I wonder if God put him there for a reason, but only God knows. I didn't jump, but neither did I feel any better. I was still a lowly bug forced to live with the lowest in society.
I think I should interject here and give you some time to process. As you can see, there has already been a lot of terrible things happen to me. At that point in my life, I felt unimportant, useless, thought I was a nuisance, and felt like no one would see anything in me that was worth loving. I was facing a lifetime alone and couldn't see anything within me that was worth loving. I tried more than once to kill myself, but felt even more useless when I failed at that. Take a moment to put yourself in my shoes. This is what this site is about. To try to let people understand just where I began, because without the beginning, there is no middle and no end if you know what I mean. Instead of seeing the mistakes I make and thinking "What a weirdo. What would make her do that?" and leaving me alone again, try to understand why I fear everyone. Try to see how badly I hurt.
I will try to slow down for you since I am still processin the things that happened next in my life. I think it is obvious that while I was living on the street, I started having sex. I was not carried away in a romantic fairy tale where sex was an intimate, emotional union between a man and a woman. Sex was my currency. It was the only thing I had that had any value and I would give it ou very freely. I lost my virginity when I was 15 years old. I didn't even know the guy's real name. It felt dirty and wrong, but it made him want me more. It made him think about me all the time. Think of the power I had. I could make a man leave his friends and family to spend time with just me. As an added bonus, I also got a bit of an adrenaline rush out of it. I wielded the power I realized I had as often as I could. People thought I was just a weak little girl and they were taking advantage of me, but it was I who was taking advantage. Men would hang on my every word, waiting for the chance to be with me. I wasn't only liked, I was needed! Wouldn't you take advantage of that?
I took advantage of it. As often as I could. I would try to see how many people I could manipulate. How many relationships could I tear apart? How many men could I have under my control? I would tease some men and make them think they had a chance with me when I knew they really didn't. They would hang on my every word.I would soon find out that this power I now wielded had a down side. Before I was 16 I was pregnant for the first time. I actually kind of liked the father, I would have stopped the power trip for him. Of course, he said he would only take responsibility for it if I had a paternity test done. I agreed, but stalled as long as I could. Before I was actually able to have the test done, I had my first miscarriage. There aren't many 15 year old girls actually able to carry to term.
For most girls, this would have been the message from heaven to mend their ways. They would have at least started being cautious. Not me. I saw the way my boyfriend reacted and would actually start trying to get pregnant without the guys knowing. Now, I don't know what it is with me, but I must be extremely fertile. It wasn't long before I was pregnant again. This time, I didn't know who the father was. I took my best guess and told him about my predicament, thinking he would feel obligated to take care of me. What more could I ask for? I would have the guy I chose and he would be forever forced to bend at my will or he would lose his child.
Well, this time, I wasn't running with such an upstanding crowd. He wanted nothing to do with the baby and didn't care what people thought of him. I realized at this point that I had to be choosier about my targets. I was still only 16 years old and had a fairy tale of a life planned out in my head. I wasn't thinking I would have such a wonderful life with me and my baby. I wasn't even thinking of the baby at all. I just wanted to find my "Prince" Charming and get on with my perfect life. I continued on with business as usual.
After about another month I miscarried for the second time. If you have never miscarried before, this is an excruciating experience. I was in so much pain I couldn't get out of bed. I had no friends so I couldn't rest or I wouldn't eat. I had to travel from the Mustard Seed to CUPS to the Drop In Centre while still recovering. I was told by a nurse at CUPS that I didn't need to go to the hospital because it was so early in the pregnancy. She said my body would just treat it like a really severe period. Either I lucked out or someone was saying some prayers, because I recovered safely. Now, you would think again that there might be some revelation of a different path here, but the only situation I had ever been in that benefited me in any way was this one. It was going to take more than 2 early miscarriages to get me to change my ways. I went back to business as usual.
In the midst of all this, I went home for a whole month. I taught myself math 20 and physics 20 both in that time. I got 84% in math and 96% in physics. I was a rather intelligent person and knew that these marks would be more useful to me than anything the men I was hanging around could give me. I started going to school once in a while. I still got in trouble for attendance problems, but I started to remember what it was like when the teachers liked what I was doing. Needless to say, the way I was treating the men in my life was having an impact on the way they were treating other women on the streets. Other women were being treated horribly when they had done nothing wrong. This one will be strange for you, but do you remember the girl who would beat me up when my "best friend" would trick me into coming with her? Well, apparently old grudges die hard, because she was on the street with me and still did not like me. I tried to ignore her, but when you are the most powerful pimp's girlfriend and main hooker, you get some priviledges on the street. She got to pick on whoever she wanted and you were dead if you ever ratted her out.
Well, I was still on her bad side. I managed to mostly stay out of her way until Aug 17. I will remember the day for the rest of my life, because it was the day that I should have died. She found me at the park and accused me of stealing $200 from her. She took me to Prince's Island Park and proceeded to beat the snot out of me, quite literally. On the way there, we had picked up 2 of her hooker friends, so it was 3 of them against me. I had no chance. I knew the kind of horrors prostitutes had to survive and I didn't think I was capable of enduring them. I knew they were tougher than me and I submitted to their punishment. They told me to get on my knees and one of them kicked me as hard as she could in the nose.
This is why I say I should have died that day. The way she kicked me, my nose should have been broken and the pieces forced back into my brain, killing me instantly. I should be so lucky. My nose didn't break and I didn't die. I did fall over on my side though and that's when they started kicking me as hard as they could in the ribs and spine. They were wearing hefty boots, so if nothing else they should have broken a bone if not causing internal damage. Neither of these happened. they continued to beat me to a pulp, kicking me in the ribs, back, face and knees waiting for me to say I would turn tricks to get their money back.
I wouldn't cave. I think the girl who had a beef with me got sick of waiting. She told the other girls to back off. I prayed they would go away and I could get back to life as usual. They didn't. Brandy picked me up by the hair and dragged me over to a rock the size of a basketball. She took the back of my head in her hands and drove it as hard as she could into the rock. The pain was almost unbearable. I started crying and covered my head as she continued bashing my head against the rock. After three or four hits, she realized I was cushioning the blow and told me to move my hands. I don't know why, but I did. She pulled my head back further than any of the other times and as hard as she could, smashed my head against the rock.
This time, whether I was smart enough or tired enough, I lay still on the ground. The girl said "I crushed her skull!" and they ran. I waited about 20 seconds. You'd think I would be thanking God at this point, but I was hoping there was brain damage and I would soon die, instead. There wasn't any. A few seconds later, I stood up. Wearing clothes that hadn't been washed in weeks, having not showered in quite a few days and covered from head to toe in blood from the blow to my nose, I stumbled out of the bushes. I had never been hurt this bad in my life so I thought I should probably try to get to a hospital, but my face was swelling up so I couldn't see. I could see a man standing by the fence about 50 metres away, talking on a phone. I went and asked him - quite politely, I might add, considering my condition - if he could please call me an ambulance.
He immediately ended his call and told me to sit down on the bench that was nearby. A guy who introduced himself as Guy was rollerblading by at the same time and stopped to keep me awake while the other man called 9-1-1. If I could ever find them I would thank them from the bottom of my heart, but I never knew the first man's name and the rollerblader's name was Guy. What do you think the chances of finding him are?
Anyway, to sum up what the doctors said, the bruises on my body matched up with the story I gave them, but if the story was true, I should have been dead. It's a miracle I'm alive and for that reason, when it's going well for me, I praise God every day. When life hurts I get mad at God for rescuing me. Either way, I know that I am here because He wants me here. My job is to find out what He wants me to do and do it.
I don't think I have to say it, but I realized I couldn't go back to my old life. I had to try to change something. My parents said I couldn't live with them unless I went to school, so I spent the next few weeks recovering and mentally preparing. I was determined to not fit in. I don't know why. While I was on the street, I hung out with some people who practiced Wicca, Vampirism, and Satanism. They had tried to teach me some things about their religions, but they never stuck. I decided to use what they had taught me to not fit in at school. In Drama class I would do skits about casting Wiccan spells and Satanic cults. Everything weird got pulled out of the bag.
What I had succeeded at doing was alienating the whole school so I could justify still hanging out with the few people I still knew from the street. I wasn't as powerful as I had been before, but I still got to pick my friends. In October, I found out I was pregnant for a third time. I was despondant and didn't care what happened to me. My life wasn't worth anything. My parents told me that if I wanted to live with them, I had to get an abortion. No other options. They weren't having a baby or a pregnant girl in their lives.
I couldn't have cared less about what happened to me at that point. I went along with it. My dad drove me to all of the appointments and it became the little black thing that got swept under the rug and never talked about. My family wouldn't mention it for any reason. Most of my extended family still doesn't know about it to this day. It's not like I want to announce from the rooftops that "I HAD AN ABORTION!" but the fact that my family doesn't know about it makes me feel like I can't talk about it. In my world the only things you don't talk about are things you should be ashamed of. So here is yet another thing to add to the heap of shame I was already feeling. I recovered quickly and was back to school within a week.
In the midst of this, I was still doing drugs. I started dating my drug dealer and he would give me free pot if I would have sex with him. The arrangement worked. We never said it out loud, but I believe that was the arrangement. I started losing interest in the power I had once found in using sex and drugs against people and started taking an interest in school. The teachers at my new school could see that I was in trouble and made an effort to get me to be there regularly. I started to remember what it was like when people with real influence noticed me.
Here, I have to tell you about Mr. Globa and Mr. Bennett. They were two of the most amazing teachers I have ever had. I didn't appreciate Mr. Bennett until later, but he was just as important. Mr. Globa knew the crowd I hung around with at school and deduced that I was a smoker. It probably had nothing to do with the fact I wore my military style bomber jacket through the entire class and had a pack of cigarettes in the sleeve pocket. I would ask to leave his class to go to the bathroom and go out to the smoke pit behind the school. It took him a while to catch on, but when he did, he would start coming out to the smoke pit to get me. He never rubbed it in, he just told me to get back to class. I later found out that he played sax and wouldn't you know it, I started getting interested in his class. (For anyone who is just getting to know me, music is my life. If I had created the universe, people who play music would exist on a higher plane than others. :-P) Mr. Bennett would phone my dad every time I missed a class and my dad would get pissed. I didn't like it when my dad was mad, so I made sure I never skipped Mr. Bennett's class. I got a 74% in grade 11 English and I think the effort he put in was the only reason I passed.
Anyways, back to the story. My drug dealer was getting frustrated that I wasn't at his beck and call, but he still had to get me drugs whenever I wanted them. He left in February of grade 12 for Vancouver. Personally, it was all I needed to get me back on track. I was frustrated with the life I had been living. This was a perfect opportunity to turn it around.
I actually managed to focus enough in school to get some decent grades. Nothing spectacular, but it was something. I graduated from grade 12. My grades were nothing to be proud of, but I had graduated. I started thinking that maybe I could make my life worth living. I started thinking about my future and who I wanted in it.
I was finally starting down the right road. I was working with counsellors to straighten out my relationship with my parents and my grades were on the rise. My parents would get messages at home that I was skipping classes quite regularly, but I was there enough to start turning things around. I started entertaining the idea that I might be capable of something. I was starting to think that maybe there was a purpose for me. Maybe I was more than just a piece of meat. That was when the crushing blow came. I had spent the last semester of grade 12 trying to be on my best behavior. It was nothing to be proud of, but I was trying. I found out in April of grade 12 that even though I had been abstinate since my drug dealer left, I was pregnant again.
I couldn't go through another abortion so I hid the pregnancy from my parents as long as I could. When I was past the point of no return, I told my next door neighbour and she let it slip to my parents. Needless to say they were pissed. My mom thought I had thrown my life away and for the first time in my life, my dad was dangerously quiet. They knew there was nothing they could do about it, but they made sure I knew I wasn't living under their roof with a baby. Soon after they found out, my parents realized their parents would be here for grad.
I already had my dress (which was quite trashy if I can reflect from a more mature standpoint), but I wanted the boys to see how "beautiful" I could be. The dress had a long, sheer triangle down the front which meant I would not be able to wear a normal bra and the back scooped down to the small of my back so I would have to wear an expensive backless bra even if I changed the front. My dad made me alter the dress to put a solid piece of fabric in the front at least. He couldn't change how low the back was or how tight it was, but he was not having me out in it the way it was. On top of all that it was skin tight velvet and would show lines where most kinds of underwear stopped.
My mom spent somewhere in the neighbourhood of $200 on girdles, bras and alterations so her parents and my dad's wouldn't know I was pregnant. That was when she said what could have been the most painful thing she has ever said to me. She said My life would go nowhere with a baby and that I would never become anything. She said my graduation was a sham because I would never do anything with my diploma if I had a baby. Those words stayed with me for a very long time. I felt like she didn't believe in me. All of the trials I had already been through meant nothing. I was used to being the exception to the rule. She didn't see it that way.
We got through graduation without anyone finding out. I was nearly hospitalized from the girdle I was wearing, but I made it through the night. After a few days, my grandparents went home and were none the wiser. I started trying to figure out what I was going to do. I looked for a job, but I was starting to show and it really is true. No one will hire someone who's 5 months pregnant. I also started looking for an apartment. I was determined to not use welfare. My baby would be spoiled rotten and that couldn't happen on welfare.
I spent 2 months trying to find a place and a job, but couldn't find anything. In my head, the world was out to get me. They just didn't want someone else to have a story of triumph like the one I was going to end up with. In reality, a pregnant 17 year old with no place to live just doesn't have a lot of chances at success. I started contemplating adoption. This began the hardest, most painful struggle of my life. I wanted to fix all of the mistakes my mom made with me by raising my daughter right. I wanted a little doll that I could play dress up with and use to get attention from people. How often do you see a baby and have to stop and coo?
This is the turning point of my life. The pain didn't stop coming, but it changed. Where people would make seemingly direct attacks on me in the past, from now on the pain came from my walk with God. I released the power the world had on me and decided they weren't worth it. I told God He could have my life. All of it. My self, my soul, the pain and the misery. I asked Him to bring me some happiness. I just wanted to smile once and remember it for a while. Is that too much to ask?
That's when it happened. I found the family that would adopt my baby. They had been married 12 years and had already adopted once. They couldn't have kids of their own and wanted one more. They lived on a farm in northern Alberta surrounded by family. She was musical to some degree and he was working on a degree in psychology. It was more than I had ever dreamed my daughter could have. I got to know them over the next few months and decided yes, they were the right parents for my little girl. They loved each other very much and wanted to share that with their family.
Enter the most amazing thing in my life. My daughter was born on November 1, 1998, also known as All Saints' Day. I had never celebrated it before, but thought it was at least a little ironic that the baby that would change my life was born on the same day we celebrate the saints. I don't need to go into detail on this one. There was a lot of pain involved in this one, but it was good pain. Labour pains and the pain of giving up my daughter were enough to make me realize I wanted something different for not only my daughter, but myself as well. I finally decided I wanted to live and I wanted my life to matter. In spite of all of the wounds in my heart, I wanted to heal and learn how to love the way God loves.
You see, while I was pregnant, I learned a few things. I got to take part in a little piece of creation. I thought I had all the answers before, but as this little person grew inside me and started to make her presence known by rearranging certain organs, I got to touch God. It's hard to explain. I realized that I, in my feeble existence, did not know more than God like I thought I had. No matter how hard I tried, I could never have come up with a more amazing way for life to begin. I wondered at the future of my little girl and whether she would know heartache like I had and that's where the realization came to me. I didn't learn it from someone else or something I experienced, I just knew it. God was the only way to give my daughter a decent life. I realized that if I prayed for her very hard, and thought if I could show God just how much I loved her, He might show her new parents how to do it too. Little did I know it was actually God showing me how much He loves me. But that's for another post.
You're probably wondering how that last story fits in with everyhting else here. Well, I started trying to relearn how to live and love. I started trying to figure out what God wanted from me. I still don't totally know what that is, except that He wants me to worship Him. In spirit and in truth and all the time.
The journey to that place has caused some problems, though. I have always known that my life was different than a lot of people's. I thought I needed to share my story with the world and use it to convert people. Usually when people heard it, they would get scared and never call me again. I started to learn what phrases scared people. I would stop saying them when I could and find better ways of saying them when I couldn't.
At church, I learned that there were some things you could say and some things you couldn't. I knew what not to say, I just didn't know why I shouldn't say it. What I mean is, people would tell me when I had crossed the line, but they didn't tell me what was wrong with what I had said. I was alienated from the world because of my love for God and I was alienated from people because of I don't know what. It was a very lonely place to be. It got so people wouldn't talk to me anymore and I realized something had to change.
Since no one had really taken the time to teach me how to hear God's voice for myself, I didn't know what to listen for. Now, I have a bunch of rules in my head and don't understand any of them. There is confusion between which groups of rules apply to which people and it is very frustrating. All I want to do with my life is to love God. I think there was some damage done when I got beaten up, because no matter how hard I try, I cannot remember things like scripture verses and song lyrics.
This blog is a place where I can fulfil that dream. You can feel free to read my posts and come on this journey with me, but I am not apologizing for wrong words. I will struggle with things and try to understand them and in the process I may say something wrong. Please don't hold it against me. Tell me what is wrong with what I am thinking, but do it lovingly. I am tired of hurting. I just want to do what God asks of me.
I didn't get a childhood with any innocence. I was born into a family that was divided before it even started. My parents weren't lovey dovey with each other or my brother and me. For the most part, I remember my parents yelling at each other. I don't remember what about, but I always thought it was my fault. If I could work harder, if I could be a better child, maybe they would start to like me. The harder I worked, the worse I did. We moved around so much I never got to know my friends. In my little 5 year old brain, I thought my parents were punishing me. Every time we moved, I wondered what I had done wrong. I had to say goodbye so many times, I never really got to know anyone. I got to the point I could tell when we were about to move and I would lash out at my friends so they wouldn't like me anymore. One less goodbye to say right?
To this instability, you add the stupidity of an older man. When I say stupidity I am being nice. He molested for the first time when I was 5 years old. To this day I am stilled ashamed of this. I've always felt like I had to pretend I had gotten over this, that I wasn't allowed to be ashamed of it, but I can't anymore. It has caused problems in my relationship with my husband, my dad and every male leader I have ever been in submission to. I cannot trust men for anything because they are going to hurt me.
It might have been tolerable if this was the only thing I had to deal with, but there are several hot tempers in my family, including my own. I am a really bad liar so if I had done something wrong, my parents would know right away. I remember more than one occasion when I wasn't going to change my story because I knew that would give me away as a liar, but my dad wasn't going to let me be a liar. He would try harder and harder to get me to tell the truth and eventually he would snap. It didn't happen often so he wasn't "abusive", but it happened, so I was abused. I have never wanted to admit that because of the stigma it would put on my dad, but now I can't look out for other people anymore. They have made their decisions.
Again, you would think the heap is heavy enough, but I was molested 4 times before I was 12. In Saskatchewan, there was no training on what to do if someone touches you inappropriately in our school. I didn't know I had been violated until we moved to Calgary.When I came forward about it, there was a very strong reaction. I didn't know why people reacted that way at first, but thought "I guess I should be ashamed of myself". Some people in my family haven't spoken to me since, my dad has been adament that if I was going to say I was a Christian, I had to forgive the man who molested me. I can honestly say that I have forgiven him. God said He would deal with this person and, since I have seen how the repurcussions have destroyed his life, I believe God already has.
At that point in my life, my teachers were the only people who hadn't hurt me. They would shower me with praise and tell me how smart I was. In the classroom, I was good enough. The other side of that door was a dangerous place, though. People didn't like me and I didn't know why. I had to assume that there was nothing likeable about me since no one could find anything to like about me. The girl I thought was my best friend would trick me into meeting her at the park where one of her other friends would come beat me up. To this day I don't know why she did it and I could really care less.
At this point I began to detach emotionally from my life. the pain was overwhelming and if I continued to feel everything in my heart, I thought I would collapse. You'll notice that things become less emotional and more practical after this point.
In Junior High, I would stay in the solace of the classroom as long as I could. I would be in the library volunteering as early as I could every morning. My lunches were spent in the safety of the office, volunteering on the phones, and after school I would stay as long as I could to help my teachers clean up at the end of the day. Unfortunately, the school could only save me from the pain until 4:30 at night. Being turned out into the world was inevitable. Why didn't God let me have something to save me at night too?
My heart was aching by the time I was 14. I blossomed early and had no one in my life that would speak to me about boys and what they really wanted. When boys started paying attention to me, I thought "Finally God is changing my luck. Someone likes me." You know that line in that movie where someone says in a really high pitched voice "He likes me. He reeaally likes me." That was the theme song of my puberty years. I just wanted someone to say I was good enough for them. As you can guess, my boyfriends were using me. They would take what they could get and when they found my boundaries they would leave. After a few boyfriends left for the same reason, I would assume my morals were too high and I would relent. With each boyfriend I would go a little further, but I knew in my heart that sex was not a good thing so I wouldn't go there. By the time I hit high school, things were changing. The students in my school started getting vicious. They would spit on me, lock my stuff in lockers when I left it alone, push me out of my seat on the bus. There's no end to what they would do to say "I DON'T LIKE YOU!"
I eventually realized that I could please my teachers all I wanted, but it would still hurt every time I walked down the hall. I gave up on pleasing anybody. I would stay out as often as I could and started exploring other things. I was in Pathfinders by this time (The next level up from Girl Guides) and the rumour was going around that I was a lesbian. Of course it wasn't true, but that didn't stop them from saying it. I started wondering if they were right. One night during camp, the meanest girl lured me into her bedroom and pretended she was interested in me sexually. She wasn't; she just wanted to demean me yet again, but I didn't know that. I decided to try what she was talking about and needless to say, it didn't go over well. The leadership never found out, but everyone in the troop knew. No one ever spoke to me again.
By the end of grade 10, I had started skipping class to hang out with the druggies and the smokers, also known as the "dirties". I failed a couple of my classes and got in huge fights with my teachers. At the start of grade 11, I started dating the leader of one of the gangs in my school and ended up in the crosshairs of his ex-girlfriend. She decided to make my life a living hell, pardon the expression. She started beating me up as often as she could and by the fifth time, the school police officer got worried. You'd think he would be worried about my safety, but no. He was worried about the balance that had been established at the school. I was asked to transfer schools.
Around the same time I started hanging out downtown with the drug dealers. When I was asked to change schools, we did all the paper work, but I didn't see a reason to continue going to school. I would tell my parents I was going to school and I would go downtown. this didn't last long as my parents said I was going to school as long as I lived under their roof. This is when I ran away for the first time. I spent a month at a time living on the street and then a c-train cop would pick me up and send me home since I was a missing person or I would get frustrated with the absolute lack of direction my life had and I would go home. That would only last a day or two and then I'd be on the street again.
It was during this phase of my life that I realized the evil that I was capable of. One afternoon, a friend of mine called. We were close, but he was not my boyfriend. We just understood each other. I had given him a ring that I made in high school and he had given me a ring that he got from his dad. He decided he had had enough of Calgary and he was leaving for Los Angeles. He phoned me at my parents' house to tell me he was going. I didn't want to lose the ring I had made and asked if I would get it back and he said I had to come get it. My parents overheard the conversation on the phone and thought I was leaving to go be a prostitute for him. They thought they had to stop me at any cost.
My mom showed up at my bedroom door with a rope. She told me she was going to tie me up so I couldn't leave. I felt like I was being treated like an animal. All I wanted was for one person to love me and I couldn't even get that. She realized she couldn't tie me up so she went and got a broomstick and said I'd have to get by her first. I took the broomstick and hit her in the knee as hard as I could. The stick broke and she grabbed one end of it. We started whacking each other as hard as we could and I ended up with my scalp split open and she ended up with a gash in her hand. She wanted to goad me into slugging her so she could have me arrested. During the fight, she started saying I was acting like a schizoid. She danced around shaking her hands going "schizzy, schizzy, schizzy!" Do you know how badly that hurt?
I finally got sick of playing games and wrapped my hand around my mom's throat and held her up against the wall and started choking her. I told her I was leaving and there was nothing she could do about it. She called my dad to help her and he started coming for the stairs. I knew I was done and bolted for the door. Just the fact that I could hit my mother and wrap my hand around her throat makes me feel like a worm.
By this point, I thought I would never live up to the expectations of anyone. Anyone who would try to kill their mother is not worth the breath in their lungs. I was suicidal. My life wasn't going anywhere. There is a bridge downtown in Century Gardens, a park on 7th Avenue and 8th Street, where I had been hanging out. I usually sat in the corner of the park and smoked pot, but this time, I didn't even want to do that. A walking bridge went over the park and I would sometimes stand on this bridge and watch people. Not in a creepy way. I was just interested in how people interacted and fascinated by the diversity God had put in human life. That day I wasn't interested in either. I wanted God to squish me like a bug. I stood on the overpass looking at the brick path below and tried to contemplate the odds of success. I tried to calculate the distance from where I was to the ground, wondered if I would fall far enough to definitely be fatal. Just as I thought I would jump, the man who had been looking out for me while I was living on the streets showed up. Understand that this was the first man that didn't ask anything in return from me. It was not an inappropriate relationship. He had been living on the streets for more than a decade, knew the ropes and had seen too many kids die from stupid mistakes. He wanted to make sure that didn't happen to me. I wonder if God put him there for a reason, but only God knows. I didn't jump, but neither did I feel any better. I was still a lowly bug forced to live with the lowest in society.
I think I should interject here and give you some time to process. As you can see, there has already been a lot of terrible things happen to me. At that point in my life, I felt unimportant, useless, thought I was a nuisance, and felt like no one would see anything in me that was worth loving. I was facing a lifetime alone and couldn't see anything within me that was worth loving. I tried more than once to kill myself, but felt even more useless when I failed at that. Take a moment to put yourself in my shoes. This is what this site is about. To try to let people understand just where I began, because without the beginning, there is no middle and no end if you know what I mean. Instead of seeing the mistakes I make and thinking "What a weirdo. What would make her do that?" and leaving me alone again, try to understand why I fear everyone. Try to see how badly I hurt.
I will try to slow down for you since I am still processin the things that happened next in my life. I think it is obvious that while I was living on the street, I started having sex. I was not carried away in a romantic fairy tale where sex was an intimate, emotional union between a man and a woman. Sex was my currency. It was the only thing I had that had any value and I would give it ou very freely. I lost my virginity when I was 15 years old. I didn't even know the guy's real name. It felt dirty and wrong, but it made him want me more. It made him think about me all the time. Think of the power I had. I could make a man leave his friends and family to spend time with just me. As an added bonus, I also got a bit of an adrenaline rush out of it. I wielded the power I realized I had as often as I could. People thought I was just a weak little girl and they were taking advantage of me, but it was I who was taking advantage. Men would hang on my every word, waiting for the chance to be with me. I wasn't only liked, I was needed! Wouldn't you take advantage of that?
I took advantage of it. As often as I could. I would try to see how many people I could manipulate. How many relationships could I tear apart? How many men could I have under my control? I would tease some men and make them think they had a chance with me when I knew they really didn't. They would hang on my every word.I would soon find out that this power I now wielded had a down side. Before I was 16 I was pregnant for the first time. I actually kind of liked the father, I would have stopped the power trip for him. Of course, he said he would only take responsibility for it if I had a paternity test done. I agreed, but stalled as long as I could. Before I was actually able to have the test done, I had my first miscarriage. There aren't many 15 year old girls actually able to carry to term.
For most girls, this would have been the message from heaven to mend their ways. They would have at least started being cautious. Not me. I saw the way my boyfriend reacted and would actually start trying to get pregnant without the guys knowing. Now, I don't know what it is with me, but I must be extremely fertile. It wasn't long before I was pregnant again. This time, I didn't know who the father was. I took my best guess and told him about my predicament, thinking he would feel obligated to take care of me. What more could I ask for? I would have the guy I chose and he would be forever forced to bend at my will or he would lose his child.
Well, this time, I wasn't running with such an upstanding crowd. He wanted nothing to do with the baby and didn't care what people thought of him. I realized at this point that I had to be choosier about my targets. I was still only 16 years old and had a fairy tale of a life planned out in my head. I wasn't thinking I would have such a wonderful life with me and my baby. I wasn't even thinking of the baby at all. I just wanted to find my "Prince" Charming and get on with my perfect life. I continued on with business as usual.
After about another month I miscarried for the second time. If you have never miscarried before, this is an excruciating experience. I was in so much pain I couldn't get out of bed. I had no friends so I couldn't rest or I wouldn't eat. I had to travel from the Mustard Seed to CUPS to the Drop In Centre while still recovering. I was told by a nurse at CUPS that I didn't need to go to the hospital because it was so early in the pregnancy. She said my body would just treat it like a really severe period. Either I lucked out or someone was saying some prayers, because I recovered safely. Now, you would think again that there might be some revelation of a different path here, but the only situation I had ever been in that benefited me in any way was this one. It was going to take more than 2 early miscarriages to get me to change my ways. I went back to business as usual.
In the midst of all this, I went home for a whole month. I taught myself math 20 and physics 20 both in that time. I got 84% in math and 96% in physics. I was a rather intelligent person and knew that these marks would be more useful to me than anything the men I was hanging around could give me. I started going to school once in a while. I still got in trouble for attendance problems, but I started to remember what it was like when the teachers liked what I was doing. Needless to say, the way I was treating the men in my life was having an impact on the way they were treating other women on the streets. Other women were being treated horribly when they had done nothing wrong. This one will be strange for you, but do you remember the girl who would beat me up when my "best friend" would trick me into coming with her? Well, apparently old grudges die hard, because she was on the street with me and still did not like me. I tried to ignore her, but when you are the most powerful pimp's girlfriend and main hooker, you get some priviledges on the street. She got to pick on whoever she wanted and you were dead if you ever ratted her out.
Well, I was still on her bad side. I managed to mostly stay out of her way until Aug 17. I will remember the day for the rest of my life, because it was the day that I should have died. She found me at the park and accused me of stealing $200 from her. She took me to Prince's Island Park and proceeded to beat the snot out of me, quite literally. On the way there, we had picked up 2 of her hooker friends, so it was 3 of them against me. I had no chance. I knew the kind of horrors prostitutes had to survive and I didn't think I was capable of enduring them. I knew they were tougher than me and I submitted to their punishment. They told me to get on my knees and one of them kicked me as hard as she could in the nose.
This is why I say I should have died that day. The way she kicked me, my nose should have been broken and the pieces forced back into my brain, killing me instantly. I should be so lucky. My nose didn't break and I didn't die. I did fall over on my side though and that's when they started kicking me as hard as they could in the ribs and spine. They were wearing hefty boots, so if nothing else they should have broken a bone if not causing internal damage. Neither of these happened. they continued to beat me to a pulp, kicking me in the ribs, back, face and knees waiting for me to say I would turn tricks to get their money back.
I wouldn't cave. I think the girl who had a beef with me got sick of waiting. She told the other girls to back off. I prayed they would go away and I could get back to life as usual. They didn't. Brandy picked me up by the hair and dragged me over to a rock the size of a basketball. She took the back of my head in her hands and drove it as hard as she could into the rock. The pain was almost unbearable. I started crying and covered my head as she continued bashing my head against the rock. After three or four hits, she realized I was cushioning the blow and told me to move my hands. I don't know why, but I did. She pulled my head back further than any of the other times and as hard as she could, smashed my head against the rock.
This time, whether I was smart enough or tired enough, I lay still on the ground. The girl said "I crushed her skull!" and they ran. I waited about 20 seconds. You'd think I would be thanking God at this point, but I was hoping there was brain damage and I would soon die, instead. There wasn't any. A few seconds later, I stood up. Wearing clothes that hadn't been washed in weeks, having not showered in quite a few days and covered from head to toe in blood from the blow to my nose, I stumbled out of the bushes. I had never been hurt this bad in my life so I thought I should probably try to get to a hospital, but my face was swelling up so I couldn't see. I could see a man standing by the fence about 50 metres away, talking on a phone. I went and asked him - quite politely, I might add, considering my condition - if he could please call me an ambulance.
He immediately ended his call and told me to sit down on the bench that was nearby. A guy who introduced himself as Guy was rollerblading by at the same time and stopped to keep me awake while the other man called 9-1-1. If I could ever find them I would thank them from the bottom of my heart, but I never knew the first man's name and the rollerblader's name was Guy. What do you think the chances of finding him are?
Anyway, to sum up what the doctors said, the bruises on my body matched up with the story I gave them, but if the story was true, I should have been dead. It's a miracle I'm alive and for that reason, when it's going well for me, I praise God every day. When life hurts I get mad at God for rescuing me. Either way, I know that I am here because He wants me here. My job is to find out what He wants me to do and do it.
I don't think I have to say it, but I realized I couldn't go back to my old life. I had to try to change something. My parents said I couldn't live with them unless I went to school, so I spent the next few weeks recovering and mentally preparing. I was determined to not fit in. I don't know why. While I was on the street, I hung out with some people who practiced Wicca, Vampirism, and Satanism. They had tried to teach me some things about their religions, but they never stuck. I decided to use what they had taught me to not fit in at school. In Drama class I would do skits about casting Wiccan spells and Satanic cults. Everything weird got pulled out of the bag.
What I had succeeded at doing was alienating the whole school so I could justify still hanging out with the few people I still knew from the street. I wasn't as powerful as I had been before, but I still got to pick my friends. In October, I found out I was pregnant for a third time. I was despondant and didn't care what happened to me. My life wasn't worth anything. My parents told me that if I wanted to live with them, I had to get an abortion. No other options. They weren't having a baby or a pregnant girl in their lives.
I couldn't have cared less about what happened to me at that point. I went along with it. My dad drove me to all of the appointments and it became the little black thing that got swept under the rug and never talked about. My family wouldn't mention it for any reason. Most of my extended family still doesn't know about it to this day. It's not like I want to announce from the rooftops that "I HAD AN ABORTION!" but the fact that my family doesn't know about it makes me feel like I can't talk about it. In my world the only things you don't talk about are things you should be ashamed of. So here is yet another thing to add to the heap of shame I was already feeling. I recovered quickly and was back to school within a week.
In the midst of this, I was still doing drugs. I started dating my drug dealer and he would give me free pot if I would have sex with him. The arrangement worked. We never said it out loud, but I believe that was the arrangement. I started losing interest in the power I had once found in using sex and drugs against people and started taking an interest in school. The teachers at my new school could see that I was in trouble and made an effort to get me to be there regularly. I started to remember what it was like when people with real influence noticed me.
Here, I have to tell you about Mr. Globa and Mr. Bennett. They were two of the most amazing teachers I have ever had. I didn't appreciate Mr. Bennett until later, but he was just as important. Mr. Globa knew the crowd I hung around with at school and deduced that I was a smoker. It probably had nothing to do with the fact I wore my military style bomber jacket through the entire class and had a pack of cigarettes in the sleeve pocket. I would ask to leave his class to go to the bathroom and go out to the smoke pit behind the school. It took him a while to catch on, but when he did, he would start coming out to the smoke pit to get me. He never rubbed it in, he just told me to get back to class. I later found out that he played sax and wouldn't you know it, I started getting interested in his class. (For anyone who is just getting to know me, music is my life. If I had created the universe, people who play music would exist on a higher plane than others. :-P) Mr. Bennett would phone my dad every time I missed a class and my dad would get pissed. I didn't like it when my dad was mad, so I made sure I never skipped Mr. Bennett's class. I got a 74% in grade 11 English and I think the effort he put in was the only reason I passed.
Anyways, back to the story. My drug dealer was getting frustrated that I wasn't at his beck and call, but he still had to get me drugs whenever I wanted them. He left in February of grade 12 for Vancouver. Personally, it was all I needed to get me back on track. I was frustrated with the life I had been living. This was a perfect opportunity to turn it around.
I actually managed to focus enough in school to get some decent grades. Nothing spectacular, but it was something. I graduated from grade 12. My grades were nothing to be proud of, but I had graduated. I started thinking that maybe I could make my life worth living. I started thinking about my future and who I wanted in it.
I was finally starting down the right road. I was working with counsellors to straighten out my relationship with my parents and my grades were on the rise. My parents would get messages at home that I was skipping classes quite regularly, but I was there enough to start turning things around. I started entertaining the idea that I might be capable of something. I was starting to think that maybe there was a purpose for me. Maybe I was more than just a piece of meat. That was when the crushing blow came. I had spent the last semester of grade 12 trying to be on my best behavior. It was nothing to be proud of, but I was trying. I found out in April of grade 12 that even though I had been abstinate since my drug dealer left, I was pregnant again.
I couldn't go through another abortion so I hid the pregnancy from my parents as long as I could. When I was past the point of no return, I told my next door neighbour and she let it slip to my parents. Needless to say they were pissed. My mom thought I had thrown my life away and for the first time in my life, my dad was dangerously quiet. They knew there was nothing they could do about it, but they made sure I knew I wasn't living under their roof with a baby. Soon after they found out, my parents realized their parents would be here for grad.
I already had my dress (which was quite trashy if I can reflect from a more mature standpoint), but I wanted the boys to see how "beautiful" I could be. The dress had a long, sheer triangle down the front which meant I would not be able to wear a normal bra and the back scooped down to the small of my back so I would have to wear an expensive backless bra even if I changed the front. My dad made me alter the dress to put a solid piece of fabric in the front at least. He couldn't change how low the back was or how tight it was, but he was not having me out in it the way it was. On top of all that it was skin tight velvet and would show lines where most kinds of underwear stopped.
My mom spent somewhere in the neighbourhood of $200 on girdles, bras and alterations so her parents and my dad's wouldn't know I was pregnant. That was when she said what could have been the most painful thing she has ever said to me. She said My life would go nowhere with a baby and that I would never become anything. She said my graduation was a sham because I would never do anything with my diploma if I had a baby. Those words stayed with me for a very long time. I felt like she didn't believe in me. All of the trials I had already been through meant nothing. I was used to being the exception to the rule. She didn't see it that way.
We got through graduation without anyone finding out. I was nearly hospitalized from the girdle I was wearing, but I made it through the night. After a few days, my grandparents went home and were none the wiser. I started trying to figure out what I was going to do. I looked for a job, but I was starting to show and it really is true. No one will hire someone who's 5 months pregnant. I also started looking for an apartment. I was determined to not use welfare. My baby would be spoiled rotten and that couldn't happen on welfare.
I spent 2 months trying to find a place and a job, but couldn't find anything. In my head, the world was out to get me. They just didn't want someone else to have a story of triumph like the one I was going to end up with. In reality, a pregnant 17 year old with no place to live just doesn't have a lot of chances at success. I started contemplating adoption. This began the hardest, most painful struggle of my life. I wanted to fix all of the mistakes my mom made with me by raising my daughter right. I wanted a little doll that I could play dress up with and use to get attention from people. How often do you see a baby and have to stop and coo?
This is the turning point of my life. The pain didn't stop coming, but it changed. Where people would make seemingly direct attacks on me in the past, from now on the pain came from my walk with God. I released the power the world had on me and decided they weren't worth it. I told God He could have my life. All of it. My self, my soul, the pain and the misery. I asked Him to bring me some happiness. I just wanted to smile once and remember it for a while. Is that too much to ask?
That's when it happened. I found the family that would adopt my baby. They had been married 12 years and had already adopted once. They couldn't have kids of their own and wanted one more. They lived on a farm in northern Alberta surrounded by family. She was musical to some degree and he was working on a degree in psychology. It was more than I had ever dreamed my daughter could have. I got to know them over the next few months and decided yes, they were the right parents for my little girl. They loved each other very much and wanted to share that with their family.
Enter the most amazing thing in my life. My daughter was born on November 1, 1998, also known as All Saints' Day. I had never celebrated it before, but thought it was at least a little ironic that the baby that would change my life was born on the same day we celebrate the saints. I don't need to go into detail on this one. There was a lot of pain involved in this one, but it was good pain. Labour pains and the pain of giving up my daughter were enough to make me realize I wanted something different for not only my daughter, but myself as well. I finally decided I wanted to live and I wanted my life to matter. In spite of all of the wounds in my heart, I wanted to heal and learn how to love the way God loves.
You see, while I was pregnant, I learned a few things. I got to take part in a little piece of creation. I thought I had all the answers before, but as this little person grew inside me and started to make her presence known by rearranging certain organs, I got to touch God. It's hard to explain. I realized that I, in my feeble existence, did not know more than God like I thought I had. No matter how hard I tried, I could never have come up with a more amazing way for life to begin. I wondered at the future of my little girl and whether she would know heartache like I had and that's where the realization came to me. I didn't learn it from someone else or something I experienced, I just knew it. God was the only way to give my daughter a decent life. I realized that if I prayed for her very hard, and thought if I could show God just how much I loved her, He might show her new parents how to do it too. Little did I know it was actually God showing me how much He loves me. But that's for another post.
You're probably wondering how that last story fits in with everyhting else here. Well, I started trying to relearn how to live and love. I started trying to figure out what God wanted from me. I still don't totally know what that is, except that He wants me to worship Him. In spirit and in truth and all the time.
The journey to that place has caused some problems, though. I have always known that my life was different than a lot of people's. I thought I needed to share my story with the world and use it to convert people. Usually when people heard it, they would get scared and never call me again. I started to learn what phrases scared people. I would stop saying them when I could and find better ways of saying them when I couldn't.
At church, I learned that there were some things you could say and some things you couldn't. I knew what not to say, I just didn't know why I shouldn't say it. What I mean is, people would tell me when I had crossed the line, but they didn't tell me what was wrong with what I had said. I was alienated from the world because of my love for God and I was alienated from people because of I don't know what. It was a very lonely place to be. It got so people wouldn't talk to me anymore and I realized something had to change.
Since no one had really taken the time to teach me how to hear God's voice for myself, I didn't know what to listen for. Now, I have a bunch of rules in my head and don't understand any of them. There is confusion between which groups of rules apply to which people and it is very frustrating. All I want to do with my life is to love God. I think there was some damage done when I got beaten up, because no matter how hard I try, I cannot remember things like scripture verses and song lyrics.
This blog is a place where I can fulfil that dream. You can feel free to read my posts and come on this journey with me, but I am not apologizing for wrong words. I will struggle with things and try to understand them and in the process I may say something wrong. Please don't hold it against me. Tell me what is wrong with what I am thinking, but do it lovingly. I am tired of hurting. I just want to do what God asks of me.
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