Born, Beaten down, Born Again

I’ve noticed that some people seem to skate through life. You know the people; generally happy, worry free, seem content with their circumstances. They seem to come out of everything unscathed.

Then there are the other people. The ones who, when you hear their story, you think, “How is this poor soul even alive?” Their stories of trauma and abuse are straight from a bad movie and you don’t understand how they can even talk about what they went through.

There was one little boy whose life seemed to play out just like this. Born in 1986 to a woman with a horrible past of her own and a man who wanted nothing to do with him, he was eventually given (actually, his mother sold him) to a man in South Dakota. Now, his mom knew this man came from a family with money and she thought it would be the best thing for him.

So this little boy, Chris, was sold to his “dad”. He could not technically be adopted by him since his birth father wouldn’t relinquish his parental rights (the guy who wanted nothing to do with Chris). Right from the start, he questioned who he was and where he belonged. He legally had his mother’s maiden last name but used his new dad’s last name for everything else.

What was supposed to be a happy new home turned out to be ground zero for the consistent strife he would go through during his life. Before the age of 5, he was raped. His mother had another child, a little girl, who she also relinquished care of to this same man. Chris suddenly had a little sister and he absolutely adored her. What he wasn’t prepared for was having to care for her.

Chris spent a great deal of time as a young boy caring for his sister, trying to be a big brother and almost a father at the same time. He would cook her meals and let her play with him and his buddies (though they mostly tried out new wrestling moves on her). But Chris took care of her and made sure she always knew that he had her back.

When his little sister was raped while he was still in high school, Chris went and beat up the man who did it, crushing this man’s nose. Chris went to jail for one day for the “assault” because of the “suspected rape” involved in the case. However, Chris was not aware of, until this year, was that his little sister was repeatedly raped, over several years, by another man: their dad’s best friend. This same man was raping several young girls around the town – they even had codes for when they were going to be with him that they would share with the other girls.

This man also had Chris begin dealing marijuana for him when he was 15-years-old, and continued to do so for years. Throughout all of this, Chris continued to go to school, work, and play sports. He was under a tremendous amount of pressure, though. He spent every second of his life trying to fit in with his family or his friends’ parents. And while his dad came from money, they didn’t see very much of it. The extended family made their distaste for Chris’s dad very clear, and this distaste extended to Chris as well.

He wanted to be accepted, to be loved, just like any child. Any human being.

Chris tried to be the best at everything he could to impress his dad. He worked for him, left a good job to help his dad at his store. He was talented at most sports, but hockey became his sport of choice, something his dad was never gifted at. And no matter how hard Chris tried, he was still seen as the “screw-up” or the “black sheep.” His dad would verbally abuse him, calling him “little bitch-boy” whenever he was upset or disagreed with him. He would talk to Chris’s friends about him, making fun of Chris. To this day, his father still calls him “little bitch-boy,” even when Chris is trying to speak to him out of love.

With all the pressure Chris was under, Chris developed a liking for alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine. He was a full-blown alcoholic before he finished high school. He needed something, anything, to numb the pain he was in from being abandoned as a little boy, to numb the pain of knowing no matter what he did, for good or bad reasons, he was still never good enough.

He made his way to Iowa when his mother, again, left him behind in South Dakota so that she could follow her two other daughters (in their biological father’s custody), and be a “mother” to them. Meanwhile, there was Chris, still young and in need of a mother figure, especially with his substance abuse problems, being abandoned all over again. So he followed her this time.

Iowa was no kinder to Chris than South Dakota was. His struggles with substance abuse followed him across the state line. He was even molested by two different grown men on two separate occasions while he was sleeping, one of which happened in his mother’s house.

Chris continued to spend the majority of his twenties in and out of treatment centers, jail, and psych wards. When he went for treatment for his alcoholism, the majority of the time it was voluntarily because he knew he needed help. Other times, it was because his mother or his girlfriend would call the police on him just to get him out of the house. He has been unlawfully detained in jails, treatment centers, and hospital psych wards more times than is acceptable for any person.

Chris was miserable. For pretty much his entire life, Chris was depressed, anxious, and suicidal. Nothing he did was ever “right” or “good enough” in the eyes of his family, friends, or girlfriends. And he suffered so much for it.

I met Chris in 2015 through his then girlfriend who I happened to work with. She was trying to set me up with one of Chris’s buddies who was living with them at the time. I remember I was terrified the first time I went over to their house because she had told me so many horror stories about him. I thought he was a monster. He was actually sober during this time, as well. She claimed he never let her have friends or do anything. She made it sound like he was a verbally abusive control freak who wouldn’t let her have a life of her own.

But then I met him.

Right away, once we began talking, I could tell he was a funny guy. He was nice to me and made me laugh. But I could sense something was off… something was wrong. I knew just by looking at him that he had a lot of anger and pain inside.

Somehow, Chris and I began to hang out more and we became really good friends. I knew more about him than I did about his girlfriend who I met first. I also figured out that she was the true monster in the relationship the more time I spent over at that house with them.

Chris and I would spend hours talking about our lives, the traumatic things we’ve been through, and parts of our lives we still struggled with. Naturally, I began to have feelings for him after we spent so much time together. It got so bad that I would have panic attacks on my way to their house to just hang out and watch TV with him.

One day, I just had to tell him. I knew what he would say and I knew he was off limits, but I had to get it off my chest just to get it over with. I told him I had feelings for him and that that probably meant we shouldn’t spend time together since he was with someone else that he loved at the time. He was kind about it. He didn’t even outright reject me. But he chose to stay with her and asked that we continue to be friends (I was pretty much his only friend at the time since it was actually his girlfriend who kept him isolated from others).

So we stayed friends. I got past my crush and things were back to normal for a short while.

And then she cheated on him.

Chris was devastated. I remember listening to him weep on the phone over her, asking me why she would do this to him? I couldn’t understand it. He was one of the kindest people I had met and I could see that he had such a good heart.

Chris fell off the wagon, drinking heavily again. He would call me up to 16 times during the night, each time inebriated and crying. One night, he just left me a voicemail saying “goodbye.” I couldn’t handle it. Since I grew up with an alcoholic mother, his drinking and belligerence when he was drunk was more than I could emotionally stand. I called my dad that night and bawled. It was all too much for me – the pain in his voice was so familiar to my own and I hated that I couldn’t help him. It was tearing me apart. So my dad blocked his number and the number of his girlfriend so I could get some distance.

Well, I definitely got my distance. I didn’t hear from either of them until August of 2016. Chris contacted me and shared how his girlfriend had been lying to him for a really long time and was essentially living a triple life. There was the girl who he thought he knew, the girl who cheated on him and lied to his face about it, and then… THEN! There was the girl who was a meth addict! She had been an addict the entire time they were dating and he never knew. I was just as surprised as I had no clue either.

I picked him up that night from the place he was crashing at the time. He smelled faintly of booze when he got in the car. But as we continued talking, I realized how much I missed him, missed our friendship. Throughout the evening, it was clear he was still chasing his ex-girlfriend, still drinking, and was possibly on more drugs. But I missed him and missed my friend. So I tried to stick it out.

His life was chaos, and after two weeks of it, I knew I had made a mistake letting him back into my life. I told him I couldn’t deal with the chaos of his life right now and that I needed more space. He begged me to not abandon him when I told him that. He said he would take a step back and give me some space. Against my better judgment, I didn’t abandon him. And he was true to his word – he gave me my space. The week my uncle died the following month, he checked in to make sure I was doing okay every day, but never overstepped.

I decided our friendship was worth it and that I was going to do whatever I could to get him to stop trying to chase his ex, who was still very much sleeping with other guys and would physically and verbally abuse him every chance she got. She would literally demand money from him to support her and her drug addictions. When he would refuse to give her money, she would freak out and scream and yell and punch him. And I wasn’t going to let him keep getting treated like crap when he was such a good man. So Chris became my life.

While I hid my friendship with him from pretty much everyone in my life, I spent as much time with him as possible. About a month after I decided not to give up on him, he quit chasing his ex, something I honestly wasn’t sure would ever happen. Now I just needed him to get his crap together and get sober. At this point, he was homeless, living in hotels close to casinos. He was being supported financially by his aunt, but he wouldn’t stop living his chaotic life.

This chaotic life brought him a rebound girl, almost as crazy as his ex. I remember this day very clearly because I had met her once before, and the moment I saw her with him, I knew she wanted him. And I almost threw up. The three of us had been hanging out in one of his many hotel rooms and she had probably only been there 20 minutes by the time I had to leave. I knew what she was after and it made me sick.

Well crap. Looks like those pesky feelings had come back.

Turns out, her behavior was so erratic that she was even too much for him. I wasn’t too sad when after about a month or so, he couldn’t stand her.

In January, Chris decided he was going to tell his family about how he was raped back when he was little. He also wanted to blow the whistle on his dad’s best friend for raping his little sister for so many years. His aunt, the one who was supporting, offered to listen to his story. She even told him she’d be “his mama bear,” the one he desperately wanted and needed his whole life. But by the next day, his entire family quite speaking to him. His sister lied about what her brother said about her rape as a child and throughout her adolescence. His dad accused him of trying to extort money from the family. His other two sisters, both aware of their other sister’s rape, also began denying what Chris said. He was cut out, cut off, and publicly shamed for sharing the truth of his abuse, both sexual and verbal. His dad even accused Chris of making up the story of his own rape just for attention.

Chris came to live with me shortly after this (he knew I had feelings for him again and he had admitted that he had feelings for me as well, but we weren’t “together”). Once he moved in, his drinking quickly increased and became too much for me to handle again. He was a different person when he was drunk and I hated it.

February brought a fresh start for Chris, though. It brought a fresh start for me, as well.

Chris had another mix up with the law and found himself in jail for 30 days. No one on his dad’s side would bail him out, none of his three sisters would help him, his mom… none of his supposed friends would post his $400 bail. So he called me every day. And in those thirty days, I fell in love with him all over again.

Chris found Christ in jail. He was sober again for the first time in a long time. He started a bible study and prayer group. I put money on his books and talked to him every day. The change in his voice alone was noticeable… the way he spoke. At first he just wanted me to find a way to get him out, but then even that changed. That’s when I knew he was becoming the man he was always meant to be. Instead of asking me every day to sell whatever I could to bail him out, he started telling me to sell his things so that I could have some extra money for myself and girls to live off of (I wasn’t working at the time).

My mother’s side of the family disapproves of Chris, going so far as to call him “dangerous.” So when they found out I was still speaking to him while he was in jail, my older brother informed me that the entire family (mom’s side) would be “stepping back.” I hadn’t told them I was still speaking to Chris. Why would I? They didn’t know him or know his heart. Not the way I did.

They haven’t spoken to me since.

It was March 8^th when my aunt (on my dad’s side) helped me bail Chris out and bring him home. He was a completely different person from the one who went in on February 5^th. For me, I was seeing what I had seen in his heart all along come to life. He had even finally shaved his head and grew out his beard.

When he came home, we started living our lives differently. We put our focus on God first, both of us continually working on our relationship with Him by doing devotionals, praying, staying in the Word. We’ve been reading a lot, mainly books on our faith.

He’s started challenging me, too. Every single day, this guy pushes me in some way that makes me a better person. And holy cow… he can cook. He cooks almost every night for me, him, and my dad. He loves my dogs, probably more than he loves me ;) He’s looking for jobs, going to meetings. We spend each night watching something funny or playing games on his PlayStation.

I’ve been a different person since he came home too. Both he and my dad encouraged me to start writing again, so I finally did and I forgot how much I love it, how much I love sharing my life stories and writing little bits of fiction here and there. It was like the moment I started writing, I woke up. And the moment I decided to accept that Chris truly loves me, and I him, I felt free.

So there is the SHORT version of how a little boy, sold by his mother to an abusive family, who had known so much abandonment and trauma and sickness in his life, became a man of God and reignited my own fire for my faith and my life. He became happy. I’m truly blessed to get to call him my partner in everything. And in all honesty, I thank God for Chris every day.

Chris finally found where he is truly safe and belongs: in God’s heavenly kingdom.

And with me.