The ‘not-so’ dreamy life

I love looking back at the 19 years of my life.  It is helping me to grow closer to the Lord.  But at the same time when I look back I see what a horrible life that I had.  Let me explain to you what I mean.  When I was two years old my biological mother and father divorced.  I remember nothing about him and I still don’t know who he is.  Shortly there after she married my first step-dad.  He was okay to begin with.  He seemed to love me, my older sister and younger brother.  But that front wore off after a couple of months.  He was an alcoholic and wasn’t afraid to hit on us kids.  My most vivid memory of him was when I was about 4 or 5 years old.  He was getting ready for work and he was looking for his work boots.  Well I had apparently gotten in his way.  So he picked me up and threw me across the room and started swearing up a storm and yelling at me telling me how much he hated me and how I was the worst child ever.  The sad part about this was my biological mother just sat there and did nothing what-so-ever to protect me in front of him.  He left for work angry and I just sat there on the floor where I had landed crying, feeling like I was really the horrible child that he said I was.  I wasn’t the only one who was being abused in my family though, my older sister was also being hit on all the time.  We were like his punching bags and my biological mother and my younger brother were his prized possessions.  When I was nine my biological mother found out that he was cheating on her with our neighbors wife.  So one day when he was at work she packed up us kids and a few of our favorite items and we left.  Us kids went to spend the summer with our grandparents in the lower part of the lower peninsula of Michigan.  I had never really been to a city before and was loving it more than anything.  That summer was the best one I had ever had at that point of my life.  I was spending time with people who loved me and protected me much more than anyone ever had.  When the summer ended we went back to up to the country.  My biological mother was living with my first step-dad’s best friend.  bio-mom and step-dad number one were almost completely divorced and she was pregnant with the new guys baby.  Shortly after the divorce was finalized she married the man who became step-dad number two.   He was the dream dad… to begin with.  He would buy us kids gifts, and he was really nice.  But as I soon realized it was all to good to be true.  Step-dad number two was also an abusive man, but in a different form.  He was sexually abusive to me and my sister.  I was growing up not truly knowing what it was like to have a really family.  I mean I saw my friends’ families, and they didn’t do the type of things that mine did.  On September 10, 2002 at 8pm DHS shows up at our front door.  I was terrified, I didn’t know why they were there.  My bio-mom always told me that they were bad people who destroyed families.  It was so scary, I was being asked all of these questions and I couldn’t answer any of them, I was too scared and confused.  Well needless to say I was placed into foster care that same night.  I went to so many court hearings, having to testify against the man who I had once called my dad.  My biological mother lost her parental rights, no wait that is incorrect, she had a choice, her children or the man that had harmed her children.  She chose the man.  I was adopted by the family that I was staying with, which happened to be my first foster home.  Everything was GREAT!  My new family was huge and had so many kids for me to play with.  My father was a Pastor of this tiny church, which is were I first really heard about Jesus, and my mom was (and still is) amazing!  But as I should have known when something is going as wonderful as my new life was, something was going to go wrong.  Which it did.  I soon found out that my dad was having an affair with this girl who could have been his daughter.  So he moved to Georgia the summer of 2004, planning to start a business and then have all of us move down there with him to start a new life.  Again, it never happened.  The girl that he cheated with moved with him. Father’s day of 2006 he told my mom that he wanted a divorce and that as soon as he could he was filing and taking as many of us kids as he could.  Well my mom wasn’t going to let him take us kids and filed before he could.  The divorce was finalized May 21, 2007.  It was so hard for me to grasp.  I was a fairly new Christian, and I couldn’t understand why God would allow so much pain and trouble in my life.  I went the next couple of years really relenting God and my father.  Then at the end of 2008 I found out that I had a STAPH infection on the bottom of my right foot.  It was so bad that I had to have two different PICC lines for about 4 months.  It was pretty bad, because that was my last year of high school. April of 2009 I was finally declared healthy and that I no longer had an infection, but my immune system was so low that I had to be careful, but I was healthy again so the world couldn’t stop me from being free from the bond of my bed.  I graduated June 14th 2009.  I was accepted to Oakland University in Rochester, MI and life was looking up.  But I still wasn’t grasping God, and my life was starting to show it. My first year of college was really hard on me.  I was away from my mom and I was living with my brother.  He was always working so I was pretty much on my own, and I liked it that way.  I could listen to what I wanted to listen to and live the life I wanted to .  Well, my brother was monitoring me when I didn’t know it and was really concerned about me.  He got me going back to church regularly.   I even started going to the young adults group.  God was really speaking to me and changing me so much.  But even now I have such a hard time really doing what God wants me to do.  I just need prayer that God will continue to work with me, that I will learn to believe that He took me through all the horrible things in my life to help me in the future… because right now, I don’t really see why it all happened to me…

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