Come Home

 

 “Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul” (Psalm 66:16).  

 

     I couldn’t fall asleep the other night. That never happens. Wide awake, I couldn’t tell if God was readying me for what would happen in the near future or if He was calling up my past …or both. The pieces started connecting. Not much of my childhood remains in my memory, and I have no particular family history to draw from.

      My father and his two brothers were adopted (without their sister) by a couple who divorced. His biological mother left them, married another man, had five more children, then killed herself, all before the age of 27. My mother was an only child of sharecroppers. Her father was killed when I was 4 years old, and her mother died when I was 24.

      Not from one grandparent did I ever have a talk about the Lord, not aunts, not cousins. I had no sisters and no Godly friends. We went to church, but I don’t remember any Christians who took an interest in me.

      It might not have helped that we moved when I was 8, 9, and 12. From Alabama to North Carolina and finally to Georgia, we wound up in an affluent town below Atlanta where I immediately “fit in” and we “fell out” of church. I was already sneaking out at night before we moved there that summer. By fall, I was pregnant after having sex for the very first time. It was terminated at a clinic in Atlanta. There isn’t a lot to remember from that experience; it’s a quick, impersonal in and out, hush-hush except for the one remark I never forgot, that my pretty eighth grade PE teacher might know from where my doctor’s excuse came.

      I was par for the course after that, high achiever by day, life of the party by night. By the time my father left home when I was 15, I had been with as many young men. I remember confessing to my flabbergasted mother. My confession was some of the only evidence of the decision I made at the altar when I was 9 years old.

     When I was 16, I met my husband at a graduation party. He was drunk, and so was I. We went out the next night, got drunk again and had sex. For whatever reason, he wanted to stay around and before long said he loved me. I remember the day I told him I loved him. I shook all over.

     We decided we’d get married as soon as I graduated. My parents reluctantly agreed to pay for it. So, rather than on prom and senior parties, I spent my time planning a wedding at no less than First Baptist Church.

     The first week of marriage I was introduced to porn. I had come across it years before and never gave it a second thought. But this time it took, not that I wanted to see it as much as I wanted to be it, not a porn star, just to possess sexual prowess.

     Two months later, I started college in downtown Atlanta and landed a position at the National Archives because of my father-in-law. In four more months, I was not faring well on the birth control pill, and my husband got baby fever. When I thought I was pregnant, a classmate told me about a women’s clinic where I could get tested. After I tested positive, it was exactly then I realized I was again in an abortion clinic. They did all they could to convince me, although I was married, that I was too young and had too much in front of me to carry a pregnancy. I remember sitting in class afterwards, dumbfounded at such advice, dumbfounded as my mother was when I told her I was pregnant again.

     The pregnancy was uneventful, except for my husband’s first kidney stone attack, until I found out after the delivery that I had dormant herpes, thankfully not in an area that would have complicated things. I went back to school after I gave up on breastfeeding at 5 months. I was late to class most days watching her through the one-way glass. Then one day her shoe fell off, and she was going from worker to worker for help, but they were all busy. And that was it. I knew I had to have her home with me. I started night classes at a satellite school. When I finally decided to quit for good, I didn’t tell my mother for six months.

     I sold make-up and worked on the weekends in the office of a nursing home. That was a mistake. There I was with a little time on my hands and an attractive man checking in now and then. I didn’t plan for anything to happen, but I didn’t plan for it not to either. It finally overwhelmed me, and I did the reprehensible by having him in our home while my husband was gone.

     Six months later with our marriage in shambles, my mother-in-law insisted we go to a Christian counselor and paid for it herself. My husband went one time. But I went back, and one evening there alone, my counselor asked me if I was saved. I must have given every answer under the sun, so he finally asked me what would happen to me if I left the parking lot and was hit by a dump truck. That was it. That’s all it took. I broke down. And I surrendered to my Lord.

     I can’t remember the exact sequence of events, but a few months later I decided I needed to confess my affair to my husband. When he got home from work, I told him I had to tell him something. I think I remember his head on my lap. I definitely remember his leaving as an emotional wreck then returning home after having been to his mother’s. She told him that I had changed. And that was that.

      I took our first born, Megan, to church on Sundays. And I still needed to work if we were to keep the house his parents helped us buy thinking I would graduate from pharmacy school one day. I started a home daycare. For the most part, I had great kids and was able to stay home with my Megan while my husband worked second shift. He often brought home friends who played cards and drank. I had a book called “Beloved Unbeliever” and tried to see the best in the situation, that he was home and not out with the guys.

      We decided to get pregnant again, and taking care of everyone else’s children was no longer conducive. Then, my husband had a brainstorm to open a brick oven pizza take-out place. He convinced a friend from high school to endeavor with him. They set up in a good location and got up and running. It was good pizza, too good, I guess. They couldn’t keep up with the demand. His partner quit, and an employee threw him under the bus for something he didn’t do and reneged later, but it was too little too late.

     In the fallout, my husband returned alone to the camp where he was baptized as a child and was baptized again. His hope was renewed. He had signed up to join the 88 Mike as a Motor Transport Operator, which he had gone to school for. It was not to be. He was hit by a car that ran a stop light and had to have knee surgery.  

     In the meantime, I had another healthy baby girl but at home this time. On purpose. We had hired a midwife, who also happened to homeschool. I had heard about it from a friend. But the midwife gave me information. I bought the Charlotte Mason series but never read more than a few pages. I did go to my first home school conference though, at Truett Cathy’s church no less. I was mortified by how many choices there were. I gratefully landed on Ruth Beechick’s material and bought Schoolproof by Mary Pride. Then, I made friends with a home schooler who gave me the best book I ever got, To Train Up a Child by Mike and Debi Pearl.

      My husband got a job as a dump truck driver where he met another driver and decided to go into the trucking business. It wasn’t long before they had seven tractor trailers and I was pregnant again. And he was drinking again. He was driving one of the trucks and was out of town when I went into labor with our third daughter. I was on medication to accelerate healing from my herpes outbreak when I began to deliver three weeks early.

     We had picked a midwife who was with a doctor, thank God, so they were ready for me at the hospital. But not really; we found out later that the doctor was in no big hurry to get to the operating room. Yes, herpes outbreak means automatic C-section. But I was in active labor. It was as close a call as it gets.

     So were my husband’s decisions to go beyond the law and not only when he got a DUI. When he thought he might have to serve time, he panicked and said he was going to end it. He left the house with a gun and said he wasn’t coming back. I remember being on my knees in front of our bedroom window pleading with God.

     My husband came back and with a pregnancy test. He knew I thought I might be pregnant again, not on purpose of course. No one would do that after having had a C-section three months earlier.

     There were no charges, and he decided we should move. So we did. We were headed for Maine but stopped to see family in North Carolina and stayed. We rented long enough to put up a mobile home on his uncle’s property on the Blue Ridge Parkway. He worked for another uncle. And we had our first son. But the past caught up with my husband. I recall sitting with a one year old on one leg and a baby on the other, talking to him through the visitor’s glass at the county jail. 

     Miraculously, he was given probation. For 20 years. He got another tractor trailer and set out to pay the restitution and before long was hauling other trucks, the Cadillac of trucking jobs. We decided to have another baby. And it was another girl. He made a lot of money, bought his mother’s inheritance but lost it before we could build on it. The timeline is unclear to me now, but within a couple of years we were in a three story house on the other side of the county, tucked away in the mountains where it snowed every few days in the winter. I loved it. But I always knew we’d have to move because it was bought under false pretenses.

      What I didn’t know is HOW it would be lost. Five years after the fifth baby, he asked me, in a precarious position, if I wanted another. He always said I was happiest with a baby on my lap. He was right. I got pregnant in May again, and he bought a pool membership. He was gone a lot and very distant emotionally and often erratic. And there was a very attractive man who thought the same of me. We actually “made it” through the summer, but my error was in accepting the membership our insurance paid for to the pool he moved to when the summer was over. One occasion alone was all it took. We didn’t go the distance in the condition I was in, but some things that shouldn’t have happened did.

     I heard a sermon that night that was meant for teenagers but spoke straight to me as it literally resonated through the gymnasium. I was scared and ashamed out of my mind and let that be known to the other man, in no uncertain terms. And that was it. It was over.

     I enjoyed a healthy pregnancy and one afternoon was helping the family load three truck beds of firewood. I had compression stockings for varicose veins that had been developing since my second pregnancy. But one leg had bound up behind my knee and begun a blood clot in my inner thigh that by the end of the week reached my groin. I immediately became a high-risk pregnancy and was assigned two self-administered blood thinner shots a day while on bedrest.  

      Before our perfectly healthy, 10 pounds 3 ounces, second son was born, my husband was in a head-on collision. It was only when he was homebound in a wheelchair and our daughters found porn while they were cleaning his truck that he confessed not that he was distant because he was seeing someone but that he had been on meth for 4 years. I was destroyed, not from the drugs, but from the porn. I was his porn. I was with him almost anytime he asked, 3 times a day when he was home sometimes. And apparently even that wasn’t enough.

      What was I going to do? Leave a man in a wheelchair having suffered his fate already? And with a brand-new baby and five children in tow? His parents stepped in as they had so many times and loaned us the money to get by for several months until he could get back on his feet.

      What happened the following couple of years is still a blur. But on a good day, he asked me if I wanted one more baby?

And there I was pregnant for the 4^th time in the month of May. We had hoped the blood clot was a fluke. But by half-term, I had already developed another large thrombophlebitis, inflammation of a blood clot, which called for bedrest, blood thinners, and automatic induction again.

     Our last child was not born before her Daddy suffered not one but three aortic aneurysms as complications of his 14^th lithotripsy, breaking up of kidney stones. There I was again with a new baby and an injured husband. He was flown to Baptist Hospital and endured a half-day surgery to replace his abdominal aorta and upper iliacs with Kevlar.  With a loan from my parents, we managed to hold onto the house long enough to sell it. This blog post recounts both the gory and glorious details: https://morethanjustliving.blogspot.com/2013/03/resurrection-easter-morning-march-23.html.

(Originally written as some sort of intro in 2022 or so)