Agent for a Cause - Page 58/131

"Baptist. You know how there are good Christians and bad Christians?"

"Yes."

"Well he was the bad kind. No compassion, nothing but discipline and disapproval all the time. It was hard for my mother, but in all fairness she did cheat on him a lot. I don't even think I'm his. I have none of his features at all or his somber nature. I do share quite a few characteristics with one of the ushers in my father's church though. I think my father knew and he was all the more spiteful towards me, because of it I think. It got bad. My mother ran away when I was twelve. I can forgive her a lot of things, but not that! She left me alone with that pious monster. He made it his life's mission to save me from my mother's promiscuous blood as he would say. I wasn't allowed to have friends or go out. I rebelled and he beat me. It was a continuing saga all through high school. Finally he told me I was unredeemable and threw me out in my senior year. I was walking along the street with nowhere to go, when Ms. Dorothy stopped. She took me in for a couple of weeks. She was an elderly widow and a member of a different Baptist church in town. Now she was a loving Christian! She lived everything my father preached about, but wasn't himself. Those were some of the best weeks of my life that I spent with her! The authorities made me go back to my father's house and it was better than before. I was no longer beat, because he had been put on warning by social workers. I decided I wanted to make something of myself so I enrolled in nursing school. I loved it. Life was going well and I wanted to complete the cycle of positives so I moved out of my father's and in with Miss Dorothy. She died nine months later in her sleep and I kind of lost it for a while. I did some pretty inappropriate stuff and got kicked out of nursing school. I moved in with a boyfriend and then I got pregnant with Kevin. The boyfriend dumped me when I refused to get an abortion. I'm not a poster child for good choices by any means, but even I knew what was wrong and right. It was my mistake and not my babies' so what gave me the right to kill someone because of what I had done. I got some fast food jobs and in short I survived. Kevin was born. He was perfect! In the midst of everything that had gone wrong he was absolutely perfect! The same friends who had pushed me to abort him now hammered at me to put him up for adoption. They said I couldn't take care of him alone by myself. They said that the fun times I could have had would be all over if I was stuck raising him. They were crazy! They wanted me to be like my mother and leave my little baby boy, who had never done anything to anyone all alone in the world to fend for himself. I lost those friends and worked instead. It was hard, but every little impish grin Kevin gave me inspired me to do greater and I didn't mind the sacrifice, because he was worth it!"