So This is Love

Filled with joy from head to toe, I stare into my man’s eyes as we stand before the minister. My heart is pounding and I can’t believe this is real. I’m getting married today! How long I’ve prayed for this moment, exchanging vows with a man who truly loves me and I him. Finally free from the users, abusers and losers. He was waiting for me all this time and I never knew. To think I almost missed him, thank you God! He’s so handsome and he’s smart too. I thought I would never meet a really good man. Anticipation fills every fiber of my being. Our life together won’t be perfect but it’ll be good. The life I’ve always wanted but didn’t think I could have. I feel giddy, youthful, totally adored by him, the man who finally captured my heart.

Growing up, I knew true love existed but let’s face it my own father divorced my mother when he learned of my arrival. If he didn’t want me, what man ever would? I grew up knowing only that my mother loved me and was taught that God loved me, but it seemed no man did. I was raised to be independent.

Being raised by a single mother who was indeed a strong woman, I learned that it was best to be my own person and never let a man define who I am. But my mother, in a contradiction of terms, eventually married a man who kept her down emotionally for lack of his own self esteem and worth. I was 15 when that happened and up until then my life was full of love and happiness with my mom and younger sister. My mom was a teacher and spent the summer with us daily, praying, dancing and reading to us. She was full of life and strength, children were drawn to her. My friends adored her as much as I did. But on that fateful day in August of 1986, a month before my sixteenth birthday, she married a man who would forever change my life.

I was a virgin and totally naive of life and of love. I only had my mom until that point and I didn’t know what having a dad in my life meant. I’d met my real dad once when I was seven when he came down for a weekend to visit me. He was only interested in sleeping with my mom, not really getting to know me. To him, I was a distraction at best. When he did finally pay attention to me, he realized that I was smart like him. So he tried to take me from my mom, but that fell through. Knowing this man was apart of me, I longed to know him, in order to better know myself. I wrote to him since then but never saw him again until I was 19. My new step dad, however, had no intention of being a father to me either. He was a father, but didn’t know his own children so how could he hope to father me and my sister? I not so politely warned my mother of this but she assured me I was wrong and this was the man God told her to marry. I know GOD doesn’t make mistakes, but you have to wonder, was mom really listening to God or her own loneliness? Marrying him turned out to be a terrible mistake. From the beginning this man pursued me, claiming it was out of friendship.

I used to write poetry and he began to write poems for me and put them in my books where he knew I would find them. I informed my mom, who quickly shrugged it off and said it was just his way of getting to know me. On my sixteenth birthday, my step dad kissed me on the lips after saying “sweet sixteen and never been kissed” in front of my mom and my friends. (Little did he know that I’d had my first kiss at the age of 14.) I pulled away and looked at my mother who just smiled as if nothing happened. My mother was pregnant now and she didn’t know it yet, but I did.

I watched her body change and her mood shift. She looked so happy and pleased with herself. How could I take that away from her? My step dad continued to pursue me even claiming that when he married my mother, he married me as well. As the eldest daughter I felt protective of my mother and I knew she deserved better than this man. He was a lazy, arrogant, know-it-all who claimed to have the all the answers spiritually but to me was a fraud. If he was so great, why at 36 yrs old was he living with his aunt with no place of his own and then proceeded to move in with us in our tiny two bedroom house? My mom dated doctors and such, even my high school principal wanted to marry her. But whom does she pick? This loser. And "God" told her to do this? I began to wonder about this God and what in the Hades he was thinking when he told my mom to marry this bozo. It was then my love of this God and subsequently, man began to fade. Why didn’t my mother see what this man was about? Was love really this blind? Or was my mother just that desperate and lonely.