I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part 55

The best thing is the changes that have happened in me. As I’ve learned who I am, I’ve become more self-confident. I’m more confident in the choices I make as a parent and for myself personally. There have been times when I’ve bought skirts or pants or even two piece outfits because my mother insisted I had to have them. I even tried telling her that I would prefer basic colors such as navy or black for ease of dressing, but she insisted that I just had to have the print skirt/pants and outfits, even though in one case I only wanted the top. Looking back on this, I think she may have wanted them for herself, but couldn’t afford them. So, if I bought them, she could at least enjoy them vicariously. Now I follow my own inclinations in clothing. I wear what I want without hers or anyone else’s influence.

I’ve discovered that while I still like dresses of all lengths, I want my shorter ones to have straight skirts and the longer ones can be straight or fuller, but not too full. I’m also not afraid to enhance what I have with my clothes and that on occasion, it’s okay to wear something, which tends to be a little revealing, but still leaves more to the imagination than it shows.

Even now, I find my tastes changing. For years when I bought new jeans, I would buy two pairs of black ones and two pairs of blue. To me, the black ones were a bit dressier.  Now I’d rather just have blues ones. Then I don’t have to worry about what shirt I’ll be wearing. With blue jeans, I can wear a navy colored shirt, whereas with black ones I can’t. Not to mention I don’t like wearing purple with black. Makes me feel like a walking bruise.

I also like clothes I don’t need to fuss with.  I want to put them on and go.

I’ve gone back to the kind of jewelry I wore when I was younger. I always had a preference for smaller earrings. As some of my college classmates could tell you, I had earrings that hung down to my shoulders. When I was younger, I wore big earrings on occasion, but always had a preference for small, delicate earrings. It was with the encouragement of a woman whose fashion sense I respected that I started wearing really long earrings. I re-discovered that I still prefer smaller earrings. If I do wear larger earrings, they generally don’t hang past my jaw line.

In recent years, I had cut my hair short; so short at times that if I hadn’t been as well built as I am, I could have easily been mistaken for a man. In fact, one night I was mistaken for a man.

 In the course of pursuing my paralegal degree, I took a class in legal investigation. One of the assignments for this class was to do a ride along with a police officer and write a report on the experience. At one point during the ride along, a man was put in the back of the car with cuffs on. A minute later, he said, “Sir? Excuse me, sir.”

 He must have spoken at least half a dozen times before I realized he was talking to me. I quickly set him straight about my gender and the fact that I couldn’t do anything for him.

Shortly after I moved into David’s house, I decided to allow my hair to grow out. Just over a year later, my hair went from being short layers at the top of my ears and the top of the back of my neck to just about my shoulders. I never had the patience to allow my hair to get any longer than shoulder length before cutting it. This time I let it grow as long as possible. It took about four years, but it got down to around my hips when I decided I’d had enough. I was having to pull the hair up as I combed down to insure it all got combed. Not to mention having to constantly tie it back to keep it out of whatever I was doing.

I’ve come to realize that while makeup is nice when I dress up to go out, I don’t really care to wear it daily. I have better things to do with my time and energy than stare at my face while applying foundation, eye makeup, etc. When I did wear makeup while working, I wore dark, dramatic colors. If I were to wear makeup now, I’d choose more natural colors for my skin tone.

The other major change in me is connected to my overall possessions. When I first moved into David’s house, my stuff filled his basement, took space in the attic and I still had about a dozen or so boxes stacked in the living room and more under my bed. This was just my personal stuff. I only had a couple of boxes for Caleb and that was mostly clothing that had been given to me for him. Sometime after moving in, I went through everything I owned and sorted it out according to what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to get rid of. The stuff I wanted to get rid of I would haul to the swap meet in my car and sell. When I got done sorting, I realized I needed a pickup truck to haul everything to the swap meet. I couldn’t believe it. I had gone through all my stuff a few years before and a friend of mine had taken my stuff and me to the swap meet in his little pick up. But how in heaven’s name had I managed to keep so much and acquire so much more that I needed a pickup truck again? I’d been trying for years to unclutter my life, so this was quite a surprise. Some of the stuff I could tell you exactly why I had it in the first place and why I had hung onto it. Some of it though was like, where did this come from and why in the world did I keep it?

A couple of years after taking stuff to the swap meet, I went through my stuff again. This time I organized it and made inventory lists of everything stored in the basement. I still found a couple of boxes of stuff to get rid of.

I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part 54

I don’t fully know how to explain this, but when a woman becomes intimate with a man, she can sense how he really feels about her and just how safe she is with him, whether she realizes it consciously or not. From the start of our intimacy, I knew at some level that I was loved, cherished, respected and safe with him, even though it took me a while to realize that consciously. Knowing those things had a lot to do with my ability to trust him enough to become fully open about the emotional pain and junk in my life.

Now, I don’t want to give anyone the idea that our relationship has been trouble free. Believe me, it hasn’t. We’ve had arguments and a couple of times we’ve yelled at each other. But, we worked through the problems and are better off for it. The key here though, is that we were both willing to work through the problems and forgive each other.

The one really big argument we had occurred on a night when David went out with a friend, Karen. I had told him before he went out that I needed him that night. He told me he’d be home by a specific time and we would be able to spend some time together then. I had a feeling before David walked out the door that he wouldn’t be home at the time he said. He was originally supposed to just take her out for coffee, but Karen called him at the last minute and asked if he’d mind taking her to a shelter where some people she knew held a service and they might need her to play the piano.

When David didn’t come home within 15 or 20 minutes of the time he said he’d be home, I tried to call him on his cell phone. When he didn’t answer, I started to get upset. By the time David got home, over an hour after he said he would, I was furious. I waited up for him in his bedroom and confronted him the instant he walked in. David tried to explain, but I was too angry to really listen. Finally he told me that if I was so needy I couldn’t wait, then I might as well walk out the door and not come back. As a man, he could not handle that kind of neediness on a regular basis. That’s when I told him that I had been sitting on my needs for a few days because every time I’d thought we were going to have time together, something interfered. He understood and I finally calmed down enough to be reasonable about the situation. Since that night, I have not allowed things to interfere with getting my needs met, unless I truly have no choice. I also learned to express my needs to David, even when we couldn’t be together for some reason. I learned to tell him what I’m feeling and to express my emotions. This all helped prevent the kind of buildup of emotional need, which fueled our biggest argument.

There have also been times when we’ve argued because no matter how hard we tried, we seemed to be misunderstanding one another.

Sometimes David chewed me out for things I should be doing. For instance, I never asked him to pray for me when I had a headache. Given that God had not healed me when people prayed for me before about my headaches; I never thought to ask David. I do now.

A lot has happened since the day I decided to move into David’s house. I’ve changed and in the process, I also learned about living with a man who knows who he is and is capable of being the man of the house; not a wimp who can’t stand on his own two feet, much less be a tower of strength for a spouse. I learned that even that kind of man has his own set of pressures and weaknesses, which means there are times when he needs someone to lean on, but this isn’t an all the time thing. I learned the reality of the line in the Wedding Song, which states “woman draws her strength from man and gives it back again.” For that is one that has been happening for me since I moved in. It’s been difficult at times, but it’s also been wonderful.

I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part 53

One of the most continually amazing things to me about living with David is our physical relationship. The wonderful thing is how much it has helped me to be with someone who is more concerned about me and my needs, even though his are not completely fulfilled. David and I can be physically intimate, but not have sex and my need for intimacy is met. He never expects me to fulfill his needs or desires. Not that he isn’t tempted and not that I haven’t offered, there are times when we both would have liked nothing better, but we know it isn’t right so we’re careful about how far we go, David more so than me. My experience with men has been that they want their needs and desires fulfilled, period. They may try to fulfill mine, but they are always concerned with theirs.

One man in particular, Randy, got upset with me one night when I was too tired to have sex with him. We’d had sex that morning, even though I had a bad headache and by the end of the day I was exhausted. So much so that the mere thought of having sex was tiring. After I refused, he thought about it for a while and finally realized that I’d given all I had to give that morning. He apologized, but it still hurt. That wasn’t the first time he’d insisted on having sex when I was too tired. That was simply the one time I truly put my foot down and said, “No, I really am too tired.”

David is the exception to the rule when it comes to his needs and desires. He is almost always there for me when I need him. If something makes it impossible for him to be there, we talk about it. It’s also surprising to me just how important our intimacy is to me. The intimacy that happens between us is more than a physical thing; it is an expression of my emotional state. It almost always happens as something new in me opens up and becomes free. Being intimate with David means being free to be me and express myself in ways I’ve never been allowed to. If that means I need to lay in his arms and cry, then I lay in his arms and cry. If I need to be physically intimate, then we’re physically intimate except for having sex. By giving me the emotional freedom to be me, David unlocked the door to my real self, which had been locked up for way too many years. I used to wonder if I would ever find out what was really under all the emotional junk I’d gotten buried under.

I’ve also learned that just cuddling with David can make me want to be more intimate with him. There have been times when I’ve gone into his room and laid next to him in bed, solely for the comfort of cuddling. As I lay there with him, I will feel my desire flare up. It surprised me the first couple of times it happened as I wasn’t expecting to feel that way.

Another interesting thing to me is that as I’ve opened up and allowed all my emotional stuff to come to the surface and be expressed (even when I don’t understand it or know what it is), I’ve become less needy. This means I don’t have such a strong need or desire to cuddle or be so intimate with David because for the first time in my life, a lot of those needs are being met. Not that the physical side our relationship is any less important: I still want and need to be hugged and kissed on a regular basis, it’s just that I don’t need as much of the more intimate type of touch.

Another thing about being intimate with David is that we almost always talk afterwards and sometimes during our intimacy, about what being intimate does for a woman and how it affects her overall. It was during one of these discussions that I fully realized that Dennis, the young man I had once had a crush on, had raped me as child. For years, I thought that because I gave in to him, I had “consented” to having sex with him, even though I felt pressured and didn’t really want to. David and I were lying side by side on his bed one afternoon talking after being intimate, and he asked me an interesting question. He asked what it was like for a woman to freely give herself to a man for the first time. I started to cry because it was then that I realized I had never been allowed to freely make that choice. David just held me and let me cry it out. I will someday know what it means to give myself freely without reservation both physically and emotionally to my next husband, but unfortunately, the first time I gave myself physically I didn’t make the choice freely.  

Often the talks David and I have during and after our intimate moments open up whatever area is on the surface at the moment. More than once David would say something, which would set off a chain reaction in me that opened something up. He also frequently talked about how different women would be towards their husbands and life in general if they were as satisfied with their relationships as I am with David. Another time he asked me what I thought I would have been like if I’d known I was so easy to please. The first thought which went through my head was, “I would have become a nympho.”

This led to the realization that I would probably have had sex with even more men and been used by them in the process therefore piling on even more hurt. I started crying. David quickly realized what was happening and just held me. He has never made me feel like I can’t cry immediately after being intimate with him or even during. If I start to cry, we stop and he lets me cry. Often in those instances, we continue our intimacy at another time.

The intimacy David and I shared gave me an environment in which I felt loved, respected and most of all safe in ways I had never experienced before. Not knowing who I am made me uncomfortable in virtually any social situation and as a result, I never felt truly safe with anyone, till I moved in with him.

I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part 52

Even now, situations arise in which my mother somehow puts a new hurt on top of the old festering wounds she has already inflicted. I saw a notice at church regarding a women’s retreat to be held at the end of March one year. The contact for information person was my mother. That almost made decide not to even look into it, but look into it I did. I spoke with her at church that morning and found out that because I would be registering so late, if I went at all, it would cost me an extra $5. She said that she hoped I would come and that she would put the information in the mail to me in the next day or so. That Wednesday, there was no sign of the information I needed. I told David that if it didn’t arrive by the next day, I didn’t think I’d bother going. The next day on my way home, I saw mother’s car on the side of the freeway and stopped to see if she and her husband, who was with her, were ok. They were, the car had been making funny noises and they had stopped so he could make some adjustments and they could get home. While we talked, I asked her about the information she was supposed to mail to me. She said that she planned to “drop by” with it the next day on her way home. I thought, “uh huh. You’re just doing this so you can see Caleb outside of church.”

As I drove away from mother and her husband, I started crying and got angry with myself. Why did I stop to see if they needed help, when I really didn’t care to spend any time with either of them? I suddenly realized that despite everything I feel about them, it is not in my nature to stop caring altogether, nor can I pass up someone I know who may be in need of help.

That night when I got home, I told David what had happened. He agreed with me about mother’s probable motive. I called her and left a message on her machine telling her not to bother, as I wasn’t going to go to the retreat. She didn’t call back and ask, “why?” nor did she ask me in church the next time I saw her, which happened to be her birthday, but then I didn’t stand around in church where she could find me either. She did try to come over to greet my son during the worship service, but I shook my head at her and she backed off. I didn’t fully realize it at that time, but I had made a decision to keep her as far away from my son as possible, even in church, until she and I work out the difficulties in our relationship. Unfortunately, my son may pay the price in the end, but then again, I can’t trust her to follow my wishes in regards to things that concern him, unless I’m right there. The other thing is, that I was hoping this would force her to come to me and say something, which would allow me to tell her why I was doing the things, I did.

It didn’t work. Mother did apologize for not getting the information to me sooner, then she mentioned the probable dates for next year’s retreat along with her hope that I would go. I told her I wasn’t sure I wanted to. The one thing that made me hesitate in the first place was the probability of having to have more contact with her than I really want. At a retreat, there aren’t a whole lot of ways to avoid someone.

The next time she called me, it was to tell me that my insurance had been cancelled. I learned that I’d been driving around without insurance on my car for just over a month. The insurance company sent the renewal notices to mother’s address. Rather than forwarding them to me or putting them in my church mailbox, she assumed they were ads and sent them back. When they kept coming she finally realized they might be important and opened one up. That’s when she called me and said something about it. I was furious. Then to top things off, the insurance company wouldn’t re-instate my policy because it had been over 30 days.

I called mother back and yelled at her. I told her that thanks to her the insurance company would not renew my insurance. She told me it wasn’t her fault that I hadn’t told them my new address and I told her that she could have at least taken it with her to church and put it in my church mailbox, and hadn’t it occurred to her that because it was insurance related, it could be important? I also told her to put the shoe on the other foot. I could bet anything you wanted that if I had done that to her, she would have been angry with me and said things like, “You couldn’t take the time to bring it to church and put it in my church mailbox?”

Yet, she seems to think that it’s fine to not extend me the same courtesy. If she had not known where to find me and how to reach me, then yes, it would be completely my problem, but that’s not the case and obviously she can’t be bothered with such a thing.

I also learned that I can’t spend any time with my mother and my son, Caleb in the same place outside of church. I had occasion to do so at my niece, Raychel’s birthday party. I found myself competing with my mother for my son’s attention. When I realized what I was doing, I stopped, but I was so tense the rest of the day that I even bummed a cigarette from my sister-in-law even though I no longer smoked.

The next morning was Sunday and although I wanted to go to church, I woke up with such a nasty migraine from grinding my teeth over the tension that I was unable to go. I got up and took two Excedrin at 3:30 a.m. then went back to bed. When that didn’t work, I took one more around 7:30 a.m. Two hours later I took two more. When the first two don’t ease it, I know I’m in bad shape. David took us out to breakfast. Although that helped, I was in no condition to go to church. So, David took Caleb to church while I came home and took a much-needed nap on the couch. Thankfully, I had recovered by the time they got home.