I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part 40

Eventually, I got tired of his impatience and his “I’m a man” speech among the other problems and quit trying to hang out with him. In retrospect, I can see that I wasn’t as ready to deal with my emotional damage as I’d thought I was.

            After I quit trying to hang out with David, I started dating Ricky R. The man who got me pregnant. It didn’t take me long to realize that Ricky and I wouldn’t work out. As I was trying to figure out how to break it off, I learned I was pregnant.

            During my pregnancy, I started seeing David again. At this point, I really didn’t want to raise a child with all my emotional crap determining what kind of mom I’d be. Things were better this time. I even came to a place of trusting him enough that I asked him to be in the delivery room with me when I gave birth. I knew if things didn’t go well, he wouldn’t run out on me. I also asked my sister – in – law, Danice to be there. Things went well during labor and the next day I took my beautiful baby boy, Caleb home.

One night, when Caleb was about two months old, I asked David and Jan to watch over him while I went to an evening test at the local community college I was applying to. I didn’t get to take the test that night as the night testing had been discontinued and someone had forgotten to remove the notices. I probably wasn’t gone more than an hour and a half. When I returned to pick up Caleb, Jan told me they’d fed him some orange sherbet “just to see how he’d react.” I was shocked. He wasn’t nearly old enough for any table food, much less something citrusy and sugar laden. She justified it by telling me it wasn’t much.

I took Caleb home. By the time I got there, I was furious! How dare they feed my son something like that without my permission?! I settled Caleb in, then called Jan and told her in no uncertain terms just how angry I was. That what she’d done could have endangered my son if he’d been allergic to what she’d fed him. She apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again. I said, “You’re right. It won’t. Because I won’t let you watch him again.”

I knew David had to be at work early, so I didn’t ask to talk to him that night. I did, however, write him a letter. I really poured it out to him in that letter. As the head of the household, I figured he held primary responsibility for what had happened that evening.

For the next couple of years, every time I thought about David, I’d say, “Lord I know you told me to go to him for my healing, but I don’t trust him. If I have my way about, I’ll never see him again.”

The Lord let me rant. He never once made me feel like a bad person for how I felt or for telling Him. At some point, as I was driving down the same stretch of highway on which He’d told me that David was my go to person, the Lord spoke quietly to me and said, “It’s time to forgive David.”

I sighed and said, “Okay.”

I was living with mother at that point and she went to church at the old location of the church that had fallen apart. I knew she would know if David went there, so I asked her. She told me that he was there every other week. So, the next week I took Caleb to church in hopes of seeing him. When we arrived, he was sitting in a pew along a wall next to a wooden beam. I sat on the pew on the other side of the beam. I was uncertain what to say to him or how to tell him that I’d forgiven him. At some point, I decided I’d just put my hand out by the beam and see what happened. He took my hand and we stayed that way for the rest of the service.

We talked afterwards and he told me that when he saw my hand come out, he knew I’d forgiven him.