Trying to Stay Saved

by E. N. Joy

  Mother Doreen’s hand had been forced at giving an ultimatum. “I can’t stay in that house knowing dog on well the living arrangements go against everything the Word of the Lord says. Next you’ll be moving Hudson’s baby’s momma in there too.”

  “If she needed a place to stay,” Bethany said smugly.

  “Umpf, umpf, umpf. Not under my watch,” Mother Doreen scolded. “You might not mind blocking your blessings, but I’ve been trying to stay saved far too long to allow him to just stroll up in there and get to blockin’ mine. And trust me, it ain’t been easy trying to stay saved either. So the ball is in your court, Sis.” Mother Doreen crossed her arms and lifted her chin with a smug look on her face.

  She knew that after all she’d done for her sister, all she’d given up to come to Kentucky to look after her sister and her children, that Bethany would never choose that man over her.

  “Then let me make it easy for you now, Sister.” Bethany walked up to Mother Doreen and stood eyeball-to-eyeball with her. “Call me when you get back to Malvonia.” Bethany stormed away as she called out over her shoulder, “And be blessed while you’re at it.”

  Mother Doreen couldn’t believe the words that had just come out of her sister’s mouth. Surely she hadn’t just been, in so many words, kicked out of her sister’s home. Mother Doreen had the mind to get to marching right behind her sister and tell her that she wasn’t going anywhere. “I’m not going.” She’d sing the words more powerful than either Jennifer Hudson or Jennifer Holiday could ever spit them out. She had the mind to threaten and see the threat through, to put Pastor Davidson’s stuff right back on the lawn before she packed up her own things and moved out. But she didn’t. Instead, she just took a few deep breaths and tried to calm down. She figured that’s something both she and her sister needed to do; calm down. That way, they’d be able to discuss the matter levelheaded.

  Besides, they were in a hospital. It wasn’t the time or the place to be cutting up. They had a baby they had to get ready to help pack up to go home. This was supposed to be a happy and special occasion. Hudson needed them. He was a teenage father now; a seventeen-year-old child with a child.

  To some people, it was such the norm nowadays that they never even looked twice at a teenager strolling around with a baby. But Mother Doreen refused to be conformed to those things of the world. She’d made it up in her mind that now her assignment was to minister to Hudson so that he didn’t think that the situation he was in was okay and ended up finding himself in it again. She also had to minister to Sadie so that she didn’t look at her brother and think that it was okay to follow in his footsteps and become a teenage parent as well. Brittney Spear’s little sister might have been pregnant on the cover of OKAY magazine, but the way Mother Doreen saw it, it still wasn’t all right. And she’d see to it that her young niece and nephew, and even her new great-niece, didn’t think it was okay either.

  Yes, indeed, she was sure that was her assignment now, and she wasn’t going to allow the devil to use her sister and interfere with it. Unbeknownst to Mother Doreen, though, she’d been wrong about exactly what her assignment there in Kentucky had been before. And she was wrong again. Dead wrong.

  Chapter Ten

  “I still can’t believe Sister Deborah is gone too,” Lorain said as she and Unique straightened up the classroom after the Singles Ministry meeting. They’d had a brief meeting after Sunday church service so Lorain could apologize to the members for failing to show up for Friday’s meeting. It had totally slipped her mind. And although she hadn’t planned on really going over anything on the agenda, the members did discuss a couple of matters.

  “At least she was here long enough to help you out with the Singles Ministry while I was gone,” Lorain told Unique.

  “Tuh! Yeah, right.” Unique sucked her teeth. “Some little baller she’d dated back in the day strolled back into town, and he had her nose wide open. The last thing on her mind was this Singles Ministry.”

  Lorain thought for a moment. “Well, I know the affect of how something from your past can change your life completely.”

  “Oh, yeah? How so?” Unique asked, sitting down in one of the chairs. In all honesty, she really wasn’t all that interested in Lorain’s theory; she was just tired. This was her opportunity to take a rest while pretending to be interested in what she had to say. After all, sometimes the Singles Ministry meetings could be draining. Today’s meeting, although not nearly as long as the regular ones, had been equally as draining. The topic of discussion had been how people’s relationships with their parents affected the type of relationships they got involved in when it came to the opposite sex.

  It was Lorain who’d added this topic to the agenda. Little had Unique known, it was part of Lorain’s hidden agenda. This was another reason why Lorain had called the brief meeting; she needed to get the ball rolling on her plan.

  Lorain wanted to find out all she could about how Unique felt about her own mother; both the mother who raised her, and, according to Unique, “the mother who threw her away.”

  “Well, I know there must be some things in my past that were life changing, so much so that my own mind doesn’t even want to keep company with the memories. Hence, it blocks out things.” Lorain sat down for a brief moment too. She needed the rest, considering she hadn’t been getting much rest these past couple of days. “I’m sure there are some things from your past that affected you in such a way that it changed your life completely.”

  Unique thought for a minute. “Hmm. No, not really; nothing besides the fact that my no-good biological mother threw me away like trash so that she could go on and live her life la vida loco.”

  Unique’s words stung Lorain. She’d heard of children being estranged from their parents going through family matters, but she herself could never imagine speaking so ill about her own mother. Not even as a child did Lorain ever say anything against her father for abandoning his family the way he did. Now it’s not to say that she didn’t think up a whole lot of stuff in her mind, but neither she nor her mother ever badmouthed that man for the decisions he made in life. “God’ll get him,” Lorain’s mother used to say, and leave it at that.

  “Now that I think about it,” Unique said, “I guess you could say the effect of that changed my life completely. Since she threw me out like trash, then I was blown around the system like a dirty fast-food wrapper in the wind. I suppose you could say I grew up with the concept that I was trash. That I was litter on God’s green Earth that nobody cared about or even noticed. So when guys started noticing me, girl, I lost my mind, right before I lost my virginity.”

  Unique stared off into the past. “I was twelve years old. I had just gotten my very first training bra for my birthday. You couldn’t tell me nothing.” Unique stood up and began strutting while poking her chest out. She laughed, and then sat back down and got serious. “My mother’s boyfriend had some friends over—”

  Before Unique could even finish, Lorain interrupted, horrified. “Oh, God. Don’t tell me. He molested you, didn’t he? Your mother’s boyfriend? Or one of his friends?”

  Unique rolled her eyes and shooed away Lorain’s words. “Child, no. Ain’t no man never took this right here or even tried for that matter . . . shooooot.” Unique swished her hand again. “Child, besides, I was too busy giving it away.” Unique burst out laughing. “Not to no grown men though. I’ve been blessed in that area, because I know a lot of girls I hung with that suffered incest, rape, and abuse; some at the hands of their very own fathers. I’m talking about full-blown sexual relationships with their father. Mackenzie Phillips, that chick from the old sitcom One Day at a Time, ain’t the only one. But you know we black folks don’t like to talk about that.” Unique winked. “Incest and molestation don’t exist in the lives of black people.” Unique was being sarcastic.

  Lorain nodded in agreement. She recalled watching the Oprah Winfrey Show one time as a little girl and seeing sisters on the stage describing how they’d been be
ing molested by their father for years. The sisters were black. Lorain remembered brushing it off as a talk-show junk episode. Everybody knew that type of thing didn’t go on in black households. Black women were supposed to be wiser and on top of things than to allow such a tragedy to go down in their own home. A black mother was more aware of her children and knew when something wasn’t right. At this very moment, Lorain had to silently repent for turning the channel, thinking that had it been a white family on the stage she would have believed it. Only a couple years later, the irony of it all would display itself in her own life.

  “But anyway,” Unique continued, “my mother’s boyfriend had some friends over, and one of them had a son he’d brought along. Mama was at bingo and all the fellas were upstairs watching the game. All the kids were in the basement playing video games on the little television. The boy . . . Jay-Jay was his name . . . he kept wanting to play against me. Stupid me was thinking it was because he liked me. He kept wanting to play me because I was the only one he could beat. Eventually the other kids got bored of watching him whoop my butt and decided to go out and play tag. Jay-Jay wanted to stay in the basement and play video games . . . against me.

  “Now you know I thought I was the stuff. Had just turned twelve the day before, was wearing a bra. I was grown and someone noticed. Jay-Jay noticed me . . .” Unique’s thoughts trailed off for a minute on how good it felt to be noticed for the first time in her life. “I won’t go into details. We are in God’s house. But we ended up having sex right there in the basement. The physical aspect of it hurt, but the mental aspect of it felt good. I liked feeling good, so from that point on, any boy who noticed little ol’ Unique here . . . well, let’s just say that I got three sons to show you what happened any time a boy noticed me. So feeling like trash and allowing boys to just lay me down and treat me like trash, we have my biological mother to thank for that.”

  Unique stood and rubbed her hands together. The so-called break was over. “But thank God I have Jesus in my life. Nobody makes me feel as good as He does.” Unique looked around the room. “We better finish up. Sister Helen was kind enough to let my boys stay with her while she got the children’s classroom back in order. Besides, I feel good after that Word Pastor preached. The last thing I want to do is ruin this feeling by talking about someone who I couldn’t care less was dead or alive. Not Jay-Jay, but the woman who gave birth to me. I know that sounds harsh, but why should I care? Evidently she didn’t care about me, but that’s all in the past. I’m good. I’m over it. Like I said, I have Jesus in my life now. Who needs her?”

  Lorain could barely stand. It pained her to see Unique in so much pain. Yeah, Unique played the hard type, like she was over everything and had moved on in life. But Lorain knew that wasn’t the case. She didn’t know how she knew; perhaps some might refer to it as a mother’s instincts.

  Upon arriving home after church, Lorain had attempted to lay down just to take a catnap. A guest pastor was speaking at a special evening service tonight at New Day, and Lorain was going to try to make it back up there. But she’d been so mentally and physically drained lately, that besides forgetting all about the Singles Ministry meeting this past Friday, she still hadn’t gotten around to cleaning her house.

  Fifteen minutes into her nap, Lorain had done nothing but toss and turn. She barely got any sleep at all. It wasn’t because that instead of being in the comfort of her own bed she was on the couch. It wasn’t because she couldn’t drift off to sleep with the sun peeking through the blinds of the living room. It was because she really didn’t want to find herself in a deep sleep. Every time her eyelids threatened to stay closed for longer than a few minutes, she’d subconsciously force them back open again. She was afraid that the visions and nightmares that had brought her to a full sweat the last couple of nights, causing her to have to shower in the middle of the night and abandon her bed, would return.

  That peace she’d prayed for had not come instantaneously. Chalking her attempt for a catnap as a lost cause, Lorain now stood in the kitchen sipping on a bottle of mineral water. She prayed that it would at least give her the strength to clean her house. After taking a sip of the flavored beverage, Lorain set the bottle down, walked into the living room, over to her stereo system.

  “I know just the trick to pump me up,” she said to herself as she flipped through her CDs. “Bam,” she replied after finding exactly what she’d been looking for. She took the CD out of its case and popped it into one of the compartments on her changer. Within seconds, the intro of Tye Tribbett’s “Victory” CD had her on her way. She danced to her cleaning cupboard and gathered the supplies she’d need for the next couple hours or so. Her condo wasn’t that big. It was a nice two-bedroom with two full baths and a basement. But it had been unattended to for three months. And even before that, Lorain hadn’t done any full-blown cleaning.

  “Lord, while you clean the cobwebs out of my mind, I’m gonna clean this nasty house,” Lorain stated. She decided to start with the bathrooms. That was always her least favorite task; that, and putting away a white load of laundry. All that sock matching and whatnot was tedious and boring. Laundry wasn’t one thing she had to worry about today. She washed all her clothes after returning from her sabbatical.

  The CD had managed to get Lorain through the cleaning of her kitchen and two bathrooms. Next, she decided to get all of the dusting out of the way. She put in Fred Hammond’s CD and listened to him tell her to wait on God while she dusted down the living room. Next, she knocked her bedroom out, and then, lastly, her computer room, which she’d made out of the second bedroom.

  She walked over to her computer desk and ran her hand across it. She could see the dust particles getting their praise on to Fred Hammond as well, as they danced through the air. “Lord, this place is a mess,” she said. She then chuckled. “Just like my life.” She thought for a second. “No, I take that back. My life is not a mess just because I can’t remember some of it. Lord, I accept remembering only what you want me to and not what I want to. I know what I think I remember, Lord. One of those things is that I might be the mother of Unique and that Broady might be her father. But unless you confirm it, Lord, I will not dwell on it or let it take over my life. In Jesus’ name.” Lorain smiled, realizing she’d been making everything about her. And one thing she did remember was her mother once telling her that it wasn’t about her. “It’s about you, Jesus!” Lorain declared. “Yes, it’s all about you.”

  A sudden peace swept over Lorain. An unexplainable peace. As she dusted, now, instead of thinking about her situation, she thought about the goodness of Jesus. She began to think back on and thank Him for all the things she did remember Him doing for her. “Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Jesus,” Lorain cried out as tears of joy dampened her cheeks. She’d managed to dust off and organize her entire desk before she even realized she’d done it.

  “All finished,” Lorain said as she kneeled down to get the dust rag she’d just dropped. Her eyes spotted some papers that looked as though they’d fallen behind her desk. “What’s all this?” she grunted out as she reached back and began to pick them up. Among the papers was also a blue, three-prong folder.

  She stood after gathering up the folder and the papers. As she looked at the label on the folder, she read it out loud. “MY LIFE.” Quickly, she sat down in the chair at her desk and began reading through them. And good thing she’d sat down too, especially after reading the contents of the folder.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God,” Lorain whispered as she read through every single document contained in the folder. The more she read, the more she was able to piece together what was in black and white with what had been periodically popping up in her head like an 8 mm film.

  Lorain had no clue how much time had gone by as she sat there in her computer room remembering, thinking about, and reliving the past incidents she’d suppressed. And no wonder. Who wouldn’t want to forget being molested by their middle school counselor, becoming pregnant, hiding the pr
egnancy, going into labor, and then throwing the baby out in the dumpster? Not only that, but thinking for years that the baby had died in that dumpster, only to find out that someone had found the baby, turned the baby over to Children’s Services, and that the baby had been placed in foster care.

  But as if that weren’t enough to put a person in a straitjacket in a room with rubber walls, to then find out that the father of the baby, the molester, is engaged to her mother. “Oh, God!” Lorain shouted. “Mother! No! I can’t let her marry that man!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Mother Doreen flung open the front door with suitcase in hand. She was so fired up that before exiting the house, she still had one last thing to say. And she was so glad the kids were at Hudson’s baby’s mother’s house, so that they didn’t have to be there to witness all the drama that was unfolding.

  Marching right over to Bethany, Mother Doreen told her, “I pray to God that you open up your eyes and see what you’re doing to this family. If you choose to live in sin, then so be it, but how could you be so selfish as to force your children to be a part of it? But like I said, I won’t be a part of this nonsense—you shacking up with your former pastor, the man whose child you were carrying before your poor husband met his Maker. You’re a saved woman of God, Bethany. I’ve heard of backsliding, but this takes the cake.”

  Mother Doreen looked over at Pastor Davidson who had insisted that he leave instead of Mother Doreen. Bethany wouldn’t hear of it, though.

  “And you . . . I don’t even have the words,” Mother Doreen spat out to him. “Well, I have them, but they ain’t fit to be coming out of a Christian’s mouth, so I’ll keep them to myself.” She turned her attention back to Bethany. “God’s will will be done. I’m here for a reason, and no devil in hell, nor preacher man, is going to keep me from doing God’s will. I might be leaving your house, but I ain’t leaving your life.” And on that note, Mother Doreen turned around. But before she could take a step, she froze dead in her tracks, as if she’d seen a ghost. Had she not been a God-fearing woman, she just might have thought it were a ghost. After all, just months ago, she’d been to the funeral of the very person who stood in the doorway.