This entry is an enhancement to my profile. It�s the nutshell version of �the story of my life,� and I leave it here because the woman God has for me will have to know all this sooner or later, so, here you are.
I was born a poor black child in the cotton fields of Mississippi--no, wait! That's Steve Martin. Gettin' my stories mixed up here...
I was a precocious child with emotional problems and my parents took me to a shrink when I was 8 and he said I could do anything I want when I grew up. When I was 11, though, my mother was murdered, and it seemed to affect my psyche more deeply than my two younger brothers, who were 8 and 5 at the time.
My Dad went out and impregnated a very backward, not-so-bright woman who had 5 kids. His 3, plus their one made the Brady Bunch from hell, which didn't help matters.
When I was 14 I started smoking weed, and then dropping acid a year and a half or so later. I probably did 100 hits by the time I was 17. I never had a girlfriend 'til I was a senior in high school because of a lack of confidence, and when she broke up with me in the middle of the school year, I was devastated. To me, it was the end of the world--not only because of typical teenage drama, but because my mother's death did a thing to my head where I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop--nothing's any good and if it is it won't last--the rug will be pulled out from under you sooner or later.
So, one day in my bedroom I asked Jesus into my heart. I'd heard that expression all my life on Billy Graham crusades on TV. We were raised Episcopalian, so nobody knew anything about getting save by grace, through faith. A couple months later I went to a retreat where I received the Baptism in the Spirit, as it was the height of the Jesus and Charismatic movements.
I only lasted 7 months, though, before I backslid. I fooled around a couple of years, living at home and working for Dad, who is an accountant, then I hitch-hiked all over the country. I was almost 20 by now, and I had this delusion of grandeur in my head that I was Dylan, Hendrix, and Robert Plant rolled into one, and all I had to do was get to California and be discovered. Dad had bought me a guitar for Christmas and in 6 months I was pretty good, and can sing well.
I hitched around for a couple months, finally landed in California, and, of course, nothing happened. (I didn't think I had to do anything--it was all supposed to unfold, like a lotus flower. "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass was popular then, and my head was a hodgepodge of Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, and acid).
Crestfallen, I headed back home. On the way, I called out to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, because I knew He was the right one. He got me home in four days from Kingman, Arizona. However, I was miserable. Back home with Daddy. The Dylanesque troubadour with hair halfway down his back crawling home to Daddy. I hated it.
I'm not sure how long it was after I got home that I went into the bathroom one day and swallowed every pill in every bottle, and there were quite a few. I looked up and said "Now save me." He did. The doctor told my Dad if he'd found me 5 minutes later I'd have had severe brain damage, but they pumped my stomach in time, and I spent a few days in the hospital.
Shortly thereafter I came back to the Lord, and started going to a charismatic church that met in a barn. The pastor was a lovable, bald, round-faced guy that everybody loved dearly, but he had a subtle control problem, and it wasn�t too long before that hideous �shepherding� heresy came around. That, among other things, caused a split in the church. One of the elders and his wife who were real hippies in the 60s and had gotten saved at the original Calvary Chapel when it was still under the tent in Costa Mesa had moved to northern Va. for better work prospects. I visited them, and ended up moving in and working for him. Several months later I got a job as a courier in DC. I did that for several months, then started driving a cab in Falls Church. By this time I was backslidden again�lonely and totally miserable. I was taking all the cool, upwardly mobile set to the airport to fly away to exotic locations and then turning around and going back to the same old. Takin� tips and gettin� stoned.
The cab business is one in which you can make a fairly decent no experience necessary/no education necessary income, and you�re your own boss, but it�s long hours and you work with the dregs of society. You make too much money to quit and start at the bottom of a �real� job, and you�re caught in a spiraling catch-22. �You can check out any time you like�but you can never leave.�
I picked up a chatty, buxom lady one night, and we made a date. Yada yada yada we soon moved in together. We�d lived together for about three years when that space shuttle that exploded happened, which for whatever reason moved me to want to get back to the Lord. Carolyn got saved as well, and we slept in separate bedrooms for four months before we got married. I did not really seek the Lord concerning this, or really know how�it was she who wanted to get married badly, but it was a real mismatch, especially intellectually. I quit the cab, which I hated, but had trouble finding anything decent. I got back in the courier business. This lasted a few years, and we tried to escape northern Va. and go back to Harrisonburg, which didn�t work too well, either. I couldn�t get a decent job and ended up commuting the two hours back to DC and the courier thing. We then moved to Winchester, an hour closer.
We struggled along for another few years, and I ended up driving a cab again in Falls Church. (Like a cyclical curse!). One night I had a pick-up in Reston and a good-looking blond answered the door, and caught her breath. We ended up talking and more that night, and it was the beginning of the end of my marriage, as I was already fading again spiritually.
I left Carolyn and moved back to my Dad�s temporarily and got a cab job in Charlottesville. I moved there in a couple of months, by which time things had gone south with my new girlfriend. It was �93 by now, and I had decided I wanted nothing to do with church and church people ever again. I had a lot of ups and downs, (mostly downs) and a crazy girlfriend for a year. I was depressed after breaking up with her, when another cab driver set me up with a neighbor of his who�d just been through a break-up. Her name was Amy, and she was educated and sophisticated and beautiful. After that first night, I figured I didn�t have a chance.
However, a month or so later we somehow ended up going out again, and we were together ever since. We fell in love and had a whirlwind romance, dining out every night and hob-knobbing with Charlottesville�s elite. We dated for a year, were engaged for a year, then got married in �97 and went to Paris for a two-week honeymoon that was absolutely fabulous. (How many cab drivers get to do that?) We always had a wonderful time together, and never fought.
Long about 2001 I started having a pretty serious E. D. problem. It hit me pretty hard, and I failed to deal with it emotionally and try to help the problem, which wasn�t really fair to Amy. She graciously and patiently put up with it for a few years as our sex life became a pitiful shadow of what it once was. Then, (being very open-minded and avant garde in such matters) she suggested we try seeing other people, hoping it would spice things up and help me improve my �problem.� This went on for over two years, she with a boyfriend and me riding my bike all over the state being the playboy. My problem was getting better, but I still wasn�t working on us the way I should have. Finally, she said she wanted a divorce. She bought me out of the house and I bought a condo.
A year later I was tiring of the playboy thing, and I had a lot of credit card debt hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles. I got in one of those debt-negotiation programs where you stop paying your bills and pay these people X amount every month and when there�s a big enough pile of money they negotiate with your creditors. The X was 780 bucks a month, and it was killing me. Life was wearing me down, and I was tired of the emptiness and purposelessness of it all. One night in October of �07 I decided I was going to come back to Jesus. I dreaded the thought of church, and the prospect of no sex, but I couldn�t go on. That night I couldn�t sleep, and around 4 am I got up and read the Song of Solomon. It broke me down. I wish I could tell you things got better, but they got worse. Continuously. The next six months or so were the hardest of my life. God was bringing me through the fire to see what I would do, having wavered so many times before. Church was indeed a huge disappointment, which came as no surprise, but still�I went to a couple different ones and finally landed at a Calvary Chapel for a year. Calvary Chapel is a good teaching church, with their way of going through the scriptures verse by verse, but lacking in spiritual gifts and any meaningful community. I left after a year and went nowhere for about 8 months. I went another place for 4 months�same thing.
Little by little, the debt thing was getting better, though. The biggest creditor was paid off, and the next will be soon. One more year, maybe, and it will be over. The cab business really went to the dogs when the recession hit, and I was making half the money in �09 as �08, and got three months behind on my mortgage. Yahweh came through, as He always does, and I got a great job, sort of in the same business, but only transporting Medicaid recipients, driving much better cars and working with much better people, and making much better money. Hallelujah! I�ve only been there a couple months as of early Jan. �10, but I�m almost caught up on my mortgage and will be working on the IRS soon. God has taught me much patience and total dependency on Him and Him alone through all this. He miraculously delivered me from the notion that I would be miraculously delivered, and set me on a Rock.
When I came back to the Lord I shelved the idea of dating for a year before I felt ok about getting on this site, which as of Jan �10 I�ve been on for 15 months. I want what He wants in my life, and who He wants, and will settle for nothing less.
Ok..So I do not follow directions very well...Just read this now...
Wow. That's quite a story...All I can tell you is, although I had a very happy childhood (until I was about 16, when I, too, swallowed a bottle of my mother"s sleeping pills and ended up in a psyche hospital for about 6 wks), I got married to my high school sweetheart at the age of 20 and moved from Mpls. Minn to Norfolk Va. As soon as I got away from mom & dad ( my father was also an accountant- as in CPA, Managing Partner of a Big 8 acctng firm) I went wild!! I left my husband, started partying and leading the wild life. I did a whole lot of drugs, drank a whole lot of alcohol, got pregnant, had an abortion( and didn't think twice about it) got busted for selling pot, married my second husband, who had all the pot and all of the other drugs, and got pregnant for the second time. This time, I had become Born-again and was married, so I had my one and only child, Matthew, who is now 28 yrs old, married, in the Navy and living in VA. Beach with his wife and step son.
My son's father was also a very abusive man and used to beat the hell out of me on a regular basis...So one night I ran for my life leaving my son and only taking the clothes on my back. I ended up at a woman's house, who took me in. She was an English Instructor at the local Community college where I enrolled and where I began my career in Physical Therapy.
I also met my third (and soon-to-be-x) husband in the very first class
I took. He was in the x-ray tech program and I was in the PT program. He graduated a year before me and specialized in the MRI/CT, which required him to attend UVA for a year. So, like I said, I know my way around Charlottesville. Also, his brother lived in Charlottesville and we used to visit him frequently. He was 8 yrs older than Andrew, and also Andrew's "hero", his idol.
On Sept. 22, 2008, his brother was killed in a sky-diving accident
at the age of 54. It rocked Andrew's world and literally tore him a part. Six months later he walked out on me for another woman. He now says he was dating her at the same time he was dating me, back when we were both in school. The only reason he married me instead of her is because she was engaged at the time. However NO ONE (his closest friends and sisters) believes this, as he was very much in love with me for many years. But it makes a convenient story for him now.
Now, I need to rewind this story, to the years we were married.
After we both lost our fathers to cancer within 2 yrs, I was diagnosed with M.S. We had just bought a new house up here in Williamsburg. I was VERY sick, as I had lost a huge amount of weight, as well as most of the function of my left leg. This resulted in me not being able to work and I had to go on SS Disability, which was/is about an eighth of the money I was earning.
In 2006 they came out with a new medication, that has proven to be a miraculous drug for thousands and thousands of MS patients all over the world. It is administered via a monthly infusion and has the possible but rare (1out of 1000) side affect of death. After being basically bed-ridden for 2 years I took my chances, and have not ever regretted it. It took a while but between the drug and God, I am completely healed and have more energy and vitality then I have had since I was 25! In fact, I don't ever remember feeling as good as I do now!
Spiritually, I have also had many ups and downs and backslid over and over again. When my husband left me, I also found out that the State Board Of Medicine will not reinstate my license to practice Physical Therapy because I have a neurological disease, even though you would NEVER know unless I told you.
So there I was, no husband, no career, no life...I had NOTHING but God and He has been soo good and faithful.
I still do not have a job, but am looking into going back to school for computer training and possibly training in Medical Coding/Billing. One of
the requirements is Medical Terminology which I know like the back of my hand....
