My father was in the nightclub business, and that pretty much took up all his time. Back in our hometown, after he and my mom divorced, he opened a little honky-tonk on the outskirts of town, and the few times I got to see him, he was always driving a cool car with a gorgeous girlfriend in tow. People gravitated toward him, and from what I could gather, he was the life of the party. In Illinois, he’d opened a nightclub, and running it kept him busy seven nights a week. Unfortunately, that put us on completely different schedules. On weekends I’d go with him to help clean up the club, because it was a way for me to spend some time with him. But, for the most part, I was on my own.
Still, I jumped right into my new life, joining the cheerleading squad at my new school and making friends in my seventh-grade class. For a while everything worked out fine, and my dad did his very best to be a real father to me. He’d turn up at some of my cheerleader meetings, or he’d drive me and my friends to games and even take us out for ice cream or to Burger King afterward. I remember my father bringing me to a school mother-daughter banquet and him being the only dad there. Once, when I was at school, I had a little female emergency. Normally I’d have called my mom, and she’d have discreetly shown up and brought me what I needed. But this time I had to ask my dad. A short while later, a school administrator called me to her office. I walked in, and on her desk I saw a giant brown paper bag stuffed with boxes and boxes of every conceivable feminine hygiene product ever made. The administrator noticed my horror and let me keep the bag in her office rather than having to tote it around.
Later that day when I got home, my father looked at me and said, “Please don’t ever make me buy that stuff again.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I won’t.”
If there was an emergency, my father would spring into action—like the time I tried to make my bangs look really poufy and dropped a curling iron into my eye, burning my eyeball; my dad rushed me to an optometrist, who gave me a cool eye patch to wear. Or the time I tried to cook him bacon one morning and burnt it so badly, the fire alarm went off, and my dad rushed down and slipped on the stairs, tumbling all the way to the floor. I just stood their holding my spatula, horrified, though we both laugh about it today.
The problem was, I didn’t see my dad nearly as much as I wanted to. Out of all the birthdays I had as a child and a teenager, I can only remember him being with me for two of them. And I can’t remember us ever sitting down and having a serious talk. And you know how much I like to talk. As a result, I had no one to confide in about my fears and insecurities and the gnawing sense of self-hatred I had always felt.
No one, that is, except God.
It was during the time I lived with my dad that I first developed what I would call a good prayer life. My mom had made me say my prayers every night, and long after I stopped listening to her I kept on praying. And when I was with my dad, I prayed even more. Mind you, I didn’t suddenly start believing that God was real, and even if He was, I still didn’t think He was listening to me. But because I was alone most of the time—and because, as I might have mentioned, I really like to talk—I found myself talking to God just about every night. I prayed for the homeless, I prayed for my family, I prayed about boys. As a teen I suffered from horrible acne, so I prayed a lot about that. I asked God to fix everything that was broken in my life.
The acne, for one thing, wasn’t getting fixed, so I begged my dad to take me to a doctor to get acne medicine. But for whatever reason, he didn’t. Some school nights he’d come home from the club at 2:00 a.m., and I’d be waiting for him so I could plead my case. He just kept saying he didn’t have the money. So I woke up each day looking—and feeling—worse.
I decided to step up my prayers to God. They became simple and specific—I asked Him to please make my father take me to a doctor. Night after night, week after week, I prayed. But, to my dismay, nothing changed. I concluded that if God was real, He wasn’t interested in my problems.
When you’re a teenager, your feelings are magnified, so if you’re feeling alone and damaged, you can really start to think of life as hopeless. And that’s what happened to me. I’d run away from home to escape the abuse, but when I lay in bed and closed my eyes, I could still see it all happening plain as day. I went from one parent whom I fought with constantly to another who was never around. At school, kids were making fun of me because of my acne, yet I had no way of making it go away. I felt like I had no control over anything in my life—like I was powerless to stop all these things from happening to me. Not even God, who I prayed to so hard, could help me escape my life.
And so after a while I decided the only way to escape it was to leave it.
One particularly miserable night, when my father was away at work and I was home alone, I went into his bathroom and opened the mirrored door of his medicine cabinet. I grabbed several bottles off the narrow glass shelves and poured a few pills from each of them onto his bed. Then I went to his liquor cabinet and came back with a quart of vodka. I swallowed all the pills and washed them down with two big swigs of vodka. For some reason I carefully refilled the bottle with water so my dad wouldn’t see the missing booze—as if that would be the first thing he’d notice when he came home.
After taking the pills I sat on the carpeted stairs and waited. Suddenly I felt scared, and I curled into a ball and started crying and whimpering, “Oh God, oh God.” Still, I didn’t regret what I’d done. More than anything, I just wanted the pain and the sadness to be over. I was a broken girl, and there was no way to fix me. This was the only way I knew to make it all stop. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to escape life. It’s that I wanted to escape me.
And so I went to bed and closed my eyes and let sleep take me away.
WHEN I WOKE up, it was morning and I was still around. Other than feeling really queasy, nothing was different. My dad had come home and found nothing out of the ordinary—not the emptier pill bottles, not the watered-down vodka (well, he did notice the vodka, but only weeks later after a guest complained his drink had no taste). I didn’t really think too much about what I’d done and why it didn’t work. I just sighed and picked up where I’d left off, resuming my miserable life.
It wasn’t too much later that my mother came up to Illinois for my eighth-grade graduation. When she saw my face covered with acne, I could tell she was shocked. I’m sure she could also see that my spirit, which in her experience was impossible to suppress, had been all but crushed. My mother glared at my dad and did what she always did in times of conflict—she yelled.
“I trusted you to take care of her!” she berated my dad. “Look what you’ve done!” It was just another fight with my mom on one side and my dad on the other, and me in the middle not knowing whose side to be on.
But that fight made me realize one important thing—I missed my mom. I might have felt grown up, but the truth is, I wasn’t. I needed my mother’s hands-on attention more than I knew. My mom looked at me and said, “I need to take you home right now.” Without hesitation, I agreed.
And so I went back to Oklahoma to live with my mother after two years with my father, and for the first time in a long time I felt optimistic. I believed that things would be different between us—that my mom and I were finally going to get along. After all, I needed her, and she needed me. We both knew that now. We were a team again, us against the world, looking out for each other.
Sure enough, the first thing my mother did was take me to a dermatologist, and my acne disappeared.
At the time, I didn’t see God’s hand in anything that was happening. I didn’t give Him credit for my father’s taking me in and stopping the cycle of sexual abuse in my life, or my mother’s coming to get me just when I needed her most, because I didn’t yet realize God sometimes puts people in your path to help answer your prayers. And I didn’t wonder why I survived after swallowing all those pills. I guess I just chalked it up to dumb luck. Looking back, I’m sure that in the chaos of pulling down pill bottles, I grabbed a lot
of fairly harmless stuff, like aspirin and who knows what else. But looking back, I also know it wasn’t dumb luck.
It was God glorifying Himself through the garbage of my life. It was God chasing me down in one of my bleakest moments—something that He would do time and time again. It was God taking the very things the enemy used to try to destroy me—anger, bitterness, self-hatred—and instead saving me and showing me He is real. Only many years later would I realize that the God I worship now had found me in my darkness. And it was in the darkness that was to come that I would finally see His light.
BEFORE LONG I would need God’s help again, and this time more than ever. Because no sooner had I come back to live with my mom, she brought a monster from my past back into my life.
Within days of my return, my mother began seeing Hank again. The story I heard was that she was at church one day, and Hank came by and slipped her a note. The note said, “I love you and I love my children, and I want you all with me.” So she took Hank back.
This was a devastating blow for me. The man who fired a gun over my head and beat my mom bloody was suddenly taking my little brother to school and hanging around the house again as if nothing had ever happened. Even worse, because my mother wanted us to be one big happy family, she decided to become a strict parent again. My defiant streak flared back up. The old push-and-pull between us picked up right where we had left off—with screaming and shoving and constant aggravation for us both. It all came to a head on my fifteenth birthday.
As always, I expected my mom to make a big fuss for my birthday. That was something she could be counted on to do—to make me feel special on my special day. But that year, just before my birthday, my mother announced we were all going to Texas for Hank’s family reunion. She didn’t know about the hell I had endured for years at Hank’s mother’s house, so she couldn’t have known what a monumental betrayal this felt like to me. But even planning the trip on the weekend of my birthday was hurtful. I flat out told my mom I wasn’t going. She and Hank and Jayson went without me, leaving me with my Aunt Bridget.
Staying with Aunt Bridget wasn’t the problem. In fact, I loved being with her and her husband, Al. They were the ones who took us in after Hank fired his gun at me and we had nowhere else to stay. But as much as I loved Bridget and Al, it was my mom who’d always made my birthdays special. And now, as I was turning fifteen, she wasn’t even around. My aunt and uncle brought me a chocolate cupcake with a single candle—a sweet gesture, but not enough to make up for what I felt I was missing.
Instead of getting something wonderful on my birthday, I lost something instead—I lost any belief that I mattered. I just gave up on the idea that I counted as a human being. If my mom didn’t care enough about me to choose me over a violent ex-husband, then I certainly wasn’t going to care about myself, either. The sense of self-hatred that had been seeping into my soul was taking over. I blamed myself for all the bad things that had happened, and I believed the reason people didn’t put me first was because I didn’t deserve to be first.
I began to believe I was worthless, and I decided if I wasn’t worth anything, I was going to act that way.
NOT LONG AFTER I turned fifteen, I started high school, and that’s when I began hanging out with boys. It was innocent at first. I’d meet a boy, and we’d drive around in his car and stay out as late as we could. I remember going to a party with an old childhood friend, catching the eye of a tall, cute teenager, and wanting so much for him to come up and talk to me. Thrillingly he did, and we got in his car and drove around and finally parked in an alley so we could talk. I had a curfew then—I think it was 11:00 p.m.—but I’d long since blown past that. Around three in the morning, a car screeched to a halt just in front of us outside the alley. It was his mother, and she wasn’t exactly happy.
I don’t remember if he got punished, but I know I didn’t miss a beat. Not much later I took a fancy to the grandson of an elderly couple my mother knew from church. After the service, he and I got together, then drove around town and hung out all day and most of the night. This time it was a police cruiser that found us parked somewhere. An officer took me home, where my mother had my bags packed and waiting for me by the front door.
“You’re going to Safe House,” she told me. Safe House was a home for juvenile offenders.
After years of fights and hair-pulling brawls, my mother and I were hopelessly deadlocked. We spent 90 percent of our time waging battle against each other with no end to the hostilities in sight. It got to where I challenged her authority even when I knew she was right. I wasn’t so much rebelling against her as rebelling against the world. The less control I felt over my life, the more I lashed out in anger and frustration. Finally my mom had had enough. She was ending the fight by shipping me away—and the truth is I was happy to go.
“Fine,” I told her, “but don’t ever come get me. I’m never coming back.”
At Safe House, they told me I could stay for thirty days, and that sounded great: a whole month on my own without my mom around. The next morning, though, reality set in. A counselor woke me up at dawn and sent me to clean the communal bathroom. I was scrubbing filthy floors and toilets at 6:00 a.m. Another young girl who was there cleaning asked me what I was in for.
“I stayed out late,” I answered. “What about you?”
“I stabbed my mom with scissors,” she said.
That evening I called my mom and apologized and asked her to please, please come get me. And she did.
But if I was supposed to have learned some great lesson from my day at Safe House, I certainly did not. After that I became friends with an older girl from school, Jennifer, and she introduced me to real partying. She took me to the Air Force base, where some military guys were throwing a party, and I drank my first beer . . . and drank a few more . . . and got so drunk I finally passed out. Jennifer drove me home, but the next day I was so sick, I couldn’t stop throwing up. I told my mother I had the stomach flu.
I wound up staying the night with Jennifer a lot, because she had no curfew and because she was always going to parties on the Air Force base. I liked hanging out with these cute young guys in their dorms. Before I knew it I was madly in love with one of them. He was darkly handsome with smooth tan skin and deep brown eyes. He was also incredibly sweet and attentive. On my birthday he gave me a bunch of beautiful long-stemmed roses, and I just about swooned. I was turning sixteen. He was twenty-two.
It was my first love affair, and I threw myself into it wholeheartedly. I was completely caught up in the sweeping passion of being in love. It felt like something that was all mine—something that no one could take away from me. Not long after that birthday, I willingly gave myself to a man for the first time.
Two weeks later, he dumped me. He said I was too young.
The euphoria of my first love was replaced by the utter despair of my first broken heart. Through all of the harm and hardship I’d endured in my childhood, I’d never felt anything so totally devastating. I lay in bed for hours and hours, listening to love songs and sobbing to my friends on the phone. My mother happened to be standing outside my bedroom during one of these calls, and that’s how she found out we had slept together. When she came in to confront me, I expected her to really let me have it. So I was surprised when she sat on my bed and hugged me close. I guess I kept forgetting my mom was capable of great kindness.
It took me months to get over it, but slowly I got back in the rhythm of my regular high school life. Soon enough, a cute senior boy caught my eye. Phillip was one of the most popular guys in high school. He was tall and broodingly handsome, and he drove this awesome red truck. Everything about him was slick. We started hanging out and spending most nights cruising up and down Main Street in his nifty truck. That was what we did back then, when gas was around 82¢ a gallon—we’d drive down the street, turn around, and drive back, and do that all night long, honking at friends, jumping out and getting in different cars, stopping at Sonic for milk shakes, or p
ulling into parking lots just to horse around.
With Phillip, I tried marijuana for the first time. Then Phillip moved on to even harder stuff. Now, I wanted to be a bad girl, but I didn’t want to be that bad. Sure, I drank too much now and then, but I had no interest in hard drugs. This caused problems for us, and Phillip and I started fighting pretty much every night. I was used to screaming matches as a way of life, so I didn’t think this was all that unusual, or even unhealthy. But Phillip was beginning to treat me badly, blowing me off and calling me names and disappearing so he could hang out with his druggie friends.
Then, after one of our fights, Phillip picked me up and threw me through his screen door, and I tumbled down the front steps to the ground. He threw my purse at me and slammed the door, and I lay there crying and scooping up stuff that flew out of my purse. When my mom found out what Phillip had done, she took me to get a restraining order.
Another broken heart, another bout of wallowing. My self-esteem, which had always been bad, was hitting an all-time low. I dropped out of the high school dance team, because I believed I was too fat to wear the short-skirt uniform. In reality, I was a tiny thing, maybe five foot two and 110 pounds, but I was sure I was hideously fat and unattractive. The truth is, from the age of twelve and all through high school, I suffered from bulimia. It was another one of my dark secrets, and it was my way of exerting at least a little control over my life. One day my brother found out and ran to tell our mom. My secret was out, but it would be many more years before I finally put the demons behind that secret to rest.
Things spiraled downward from there. I dropped out of high school and got my mom to enroll me in an alternative school for students with social and disciplinary problems. Some of the students were kids who thought they were too cool for regular school and liked to party and drink and smoke pot, like me. Some of them had horrible home lives and just didn’t fit in at regular schools. This school had no set hours; you just dropped in when you wanted to and studied what you liked. There were a lot of pregnant girls there and a lot of girls cradling their tiny brand-new babies. I think all of us were just searching for a better way and a brighter future. In a world where most of us had labeled ourselves failures, our new teachers were trying their best to make us realize we weren’t.
Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again Page 6
