I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part 4

Trigger Warning: Rape Scene

Mother took us to a Presbyterian church when we were young. I remember the Sunday school teacher talking about Jesus and how He was the only way to get into heaven. She even talked about the rapture and how Jesus was going to take his believers into heaven before the great tribulation hit. The thing that really impressed me though, was when someone gave me the impression that becoming born again was like having a second birthday. It was a few weeks away from my eighth birthday when I heard this. I decided that if becoming born again meant having a second birthday, then I wasn’t going to miss out on this. I also thought it meant having a second birthday party with gifts and the whole works. When I think about that now, I smile at how innocent I was. I have never regretted giving my life to the Lord - even though doing so didn’t get me the second birthday party I thought it would.

A few years later mother started taking us to a non-denominational church. At first, I hated it. These people didn’t use hymnals and they made a joyful noise when they worshiped. How did people learn the words to the songs without hymnals? Then to make matters worse in my eyes at the time, these people prayed out loud - and in different tongues! As far as I was concerned at the time, this was too much. I wanted to go back to our old church. We stayed because as I would learn years later, mother felt as if God called her to that church.

As I looked around at the people during services, I eventually realized that they had something I didn’t. It’s called the infilling of the Holy Spirit with evidence of speaking in tongues. It’s in the book of Acts, if you want to look it up.

While mother and Don were still married, they became friends with a couple who had a nephew, Dennis, on whom I developed a crush. I thought he was cute and very nice, even though he was five years older than me. At some point, he realized I had a crush on him. He was very nice about it. He sat me down to explain that he was too old for me; that he needed someone his own age.

One night, a couple of years later, mother had him babysit the three of us kids so she could go out with Bill, the man who became her next husband. While she was gone that evening, Dennis and I started kissing when my brothers were out of sight. At one point he asked me to put on a different shirt as the one I had on was rather high in the neck and he wanted to kiss my neck. I liked the idea, so I did as he requested. A little while later, we went into mother’s bedroom and lay on her bed, necking. Pretty soon though, he wanted more. 

Dennis asked me to take off my pants and have sex with him. I said “no.”

He persisted. I said I was afraid of getting pregnant. He said I was too young to get pregnant. I still said “no.”

Eventually I reluctantly agreed because he wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. I don’t know what he got out of it; I just know that for me it hurt; physically and emotionally. I was so ashamed about what we’d done when it was over as I had been told that sex without marriage was wrong. Because I had just had sex with this young man, I felt very guilty. I didn’t realize it then, but I had just been raped. I did not at that point in my life fully understand what it was that I had “consented” to. Not only that, but my “consent” was given under pressure, not out of any real desire to participate.

The day after my 11^th birthday, mother married her third husband, Bill. He was a nice enough guy in his own way, but too much a little boy emotionally. He also didn’t have enough understanding about growing young children, girls in particular. He often told me that I cried too easily. When I told mother what Bill had said, she agreed with him. Because of that I learned not to cry easily. When I did cry, I was often ashamed of my tears, even at times of genuine grief, such as breaking up with a boyfriend or when my great grandma died. In fact, when great grandma died, I went to the school counselor to talk to him about her death. I told him how felt like crying a lot. He told me it was normal.

Bill never really got involved with us as kids beyond bringing home a paycheck or if we woke him up. He slept days, worked nights, then spent most of his weekends pursuing his own interests or sleeping.

When I was in the sixth grade, I tripped and fell down a couple of stairs, breaking one of my front teeth in half diagonally. Mother took me to the dentist that night when she got home from work. He put a temporary cap on my tooth then told mother that I needed a new crown. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, as we were there after hours and what he put on my tooth was supposed to be temporary. Several weeks later, I went to mother and asked her about getting my tooth fixed.

She said we didn’t have the money, as it would cost one of Bill’s whole paychecks to fix my tooth. That was her response every time I brought it up. This was very hard for me as it made me feel like I wasn’t worth the money. To make matters worse, the temporary cap was turning yellow. I hated to smile and show that tooth. Mother used to tell me to smile big for pictures; she never realized how embarrassing that yellow cap was. I came to hate having my picture taken.

When I ran the preview for this blog, I noticed spacing issues in the last two paragraphs. I'm sorry, but I have been unable to fix those issues.