Preface: This blog contains memories from early childhood that have impacted me in adulthood. I share them here solely for the sake of painting that picture. As you read, know that I love my momma and daddy, and I am grateful to them and to God for allowing their parents to step in to raise us kids.
“This’un better be a boy. If it ain’t, I just might give it away.” I was playing in the back yard when I heard Momma and Granny talking. I was the second of Momma’s four kids – three girls and one boy. My older sister lived with my dad’s parents, but I lived with Momma, PawPaw, and Granny while she waited for her third baby to come. That memory stayed with me growing up. To the day my brother died at age 35, I felt sure he was always my momma’s favorite. For most of our lives, it didn’t matter much to me because we didn’t live with Momma. She wasn’t around enough for me to feel her favoritism or be hurt by it. And over time, her absence led to a fair amount of self-protective indifference. It got to where it didn’t hurt anymore when she left, and it didn’t feel exciting anymore when she came back home. “Home” to her was PawPaw and Granny’s place. No matter how many times she left unexpectedly, their door was always open when she came back.
While my PawPaw’s health was still good, he asked me one day if I would make sure my momma was taken care of if anything should ever happen to him. Years later when that precious man passed to Glory, Momma came to live with my (now ex) husband and me, after we agreed that if it was a strain on our marriage to have a woman we barely knew living with us, we could figure out another way to make sure she was taken care of. I was thirty. He was thirty-two. We had two young sons. It was going to be a lot to add a grown woman to our home and lives, but my husband was mind-blowingly supportive and helpful as we pilfered through and packed her things and moved her into our lower level bedroom after moving the boys into a room together upstairs and moving some of her things and ours to storage.
While going through Momma’s old papers, I found special education report cards and recalled some things PawPaw had said to me years prior that I hadn’t understood at the time. Once Momma was moved in and I was around her more than I had ever been in my thirty years, I pretty quickly realized that I had to explain things to her similarly to how I did my oldest son, who was six at the time. She needed help with medication and making decisions, and I realized I needed to know what I had unknowingly taken on. I paid for Momma to have some mental and cognitive testing and found out that she functioned on a third to fourth grade level. She would always need me to be responsible for her well-being, and she never could have been fully responsible for us kids. This put my entire childhood in a different perspective. It wasn’t that Momma didn’t love us enough to stay, but she wasn’t able to understand how much it hurt us for her to go. Leaving us for our grandparents to raise was the most loving thing she could have done, even if she didn’t do it with that intent.
The first time I remember meeting my dad I was maybe five or six years old. My older sister had lived with his parents since she was a baby. There are pictures of me with her when we were younger, but I don’t have those memories. I assume my dad’s parents contacted Pawpaw and Granny and asked if I could come see Daddy while he was in town from out of state. My dad’s parents house was the grandest I had been in at the time. It was a large double-wide mobile home that had been bricked over the outside, and they had added a large porch across the front with nice hedges and a concrete walkway. The home had a living room, dining room, kitchen, and den; laundry room; four bedrooms, and two bathrooms. At that time, the first bedroom on the left going down the hall was a playroom. It had a kid-size kitchen set with a stove, fridge, and some cabinets. I had never seen anything like it, and I was eager to play with the little dishes and toy foods. My daddy came in there with me and shut the door. He didn’t look very happy as he sat me down and told me that there was really no way to know for sure if he was my daddy because Momma had already left him when he found out she was pregnant. I didn’t really know what to make of this, but I had my PawPaw. And these grandparents seemed to love me. In fact, my grandmother let me know she was none too happy with him for saying this to me.
I started to visit those grandparents and my sister pretty often and continued over the years until I went to live with them when I was twelve. I would see my dad when he came to their house, or they took us to visit him. I think he regretted saying that to me and even still makes tremendous effort to tell me how much he loves me, but he wasn’t really present enough while I was growing up to replace that first memory with others that spoke enough love to override it. Words just do not replace presence in a child’s life.
I’ve never once regretted my childhood or the tough, unusual circumstances of how I grew up. The tough stuff made me who I am. It gave me strength and gumption. And it was a blessing to be loved well by Godly grandparents. In fact, I felt so loved by them that I didn’t realize the deep unhealed wound from my parents until my husband left.
I was in the master bathroom, where I often went to cry after his affair because it was farthest room from where my kids might be playing. I was pouring out my soul to God, unleashing all the disgruntled and hard feelings from my heart when the words from my mouth shocked me. “My own momma and daddy didn’t want me, and now my husband doesn’t want me. Why God? What is so wrong with me? YOU made ME this way!” In my hurt, I was lashing out and blaming the only One whose love and acceptance I never had to doubt. The One who had never rejected me.
Rejection is a hard thing. I have spent a lot of time thinking on it, and it is still one of the hardest feelings to convey in words. It’s like it reaches into the deepest part of you and puts down roots. Not the kind of roots that come up easily with the weeds I pull to clean out my overgrown flower beds, but the kind of roots that somehow stay buried deep enough that no matter how many times I rid the surface of the pesky nuisance, it still manages to come back eventually. For a while, my flower beds look tidy, so I pay them less attention and go about day-to-day life…then all of a sudden, the weed is not only back but taking over the surface, crowding out beauty, hindering growth.
It seems that despite the progress I’ve made in healing from my divorce, rejection lives deep inside me. I am usually able to keep it buried under the Truth of how God sees me, but sometimes it nudges through and crowds out Truth for whatever time I give it reign. Sometimes it’s subtle, like the weed that grows slowly and gradually takes over. Sometimes it breaks ground suddenly, wraps itself around me, and produces such fear that it immobilizes me for a bit. It shuts down the thoughts of God’s promises for the future and holds me captive in the present. And its dormancy makes it hard to know when it will shoot up. The roots of rejection that my parents left lay dormant from childhood until my late thirties when the person I trusted with my heart left, and life was shattered around me.
As I put life back together over the next two years and as I found new contentment, I thought I had gained some sort of control over my emotions. I got to a place where I hoped to one day love and be loved again. Then for the first time in probably twenty years, a man – someone not my ex-husband – expressed interest in me. I’m not counting the married bozo who hit on me in the parking lot of an Academy Sports store shortly after my divorce was final. I quickly let that guy know I’d seen the ring on his left hand. That guy’s attention made me feel sleazy and so very concerned for his wife. This guy’s statement was different. Flattering and surprising, but just for a moment before the root of rejection sent up long tentacle-like shoots that wrapped around my mind and took me too quickly to a very messed-up place. A place where the positive things I should have been feeling were replaced with negative thoughts and nausea because I couldn’t bear the idea of ever feeling again the way I did when my husband left – discarded, unwanted, inadequate. Rejected.
Just as surely as I know that the circumstances of my childhood were not my fault, I know that my husband’s choices had as much or more to do with him as me. Rationally, I know that. But knowing something rationally does not keep you from having irrational fear from time to time. Thankfully, God has not given me that spirit of fear, but of power, love, and sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7), so I have been trying – as I have with every other – to face the fear of rejection and work through my insecurities. Despite my childhood and maybe even because of it, I have faith and fortitude. Enough of both to trust that God will not allow the roots of rejection to choke out the good He has planned for my life.
Bonita you are so beautiful inside and outside. Thank you for sharing your story so beautifully. You are not alone in those feelings of rejection and just not measuring up.. God has given you a wonderful ministry to help others. I would proud to have you as my daughter.Thanks again for sharing. Prayers for you and your sweet children
“He was despised and rejected….” Isaiah 53
He knows what you feel. I am just thankful that you let me be your pseudo-mom. 🙂
Brilliantly written and incredibly insightful. I’m sorry you have experienced this pain of betrayal, but PTL you are looking for the lessons to be learned and allowing God to use you to speak to countless others.