To continue from yesterday’s post. My skill for falling for unavailable men. Like, I said the next 2 are especially hard, and the third is a, “Deandra, you should have known!” one. Thankfully, this last one hasn’t included as much emotions, time, or heartache. Not this one though. It messed me up pretty good.
Okay, so the next guy we will call Scot. Scot was/is 17 years older than me. His family started going to our church when I was maybe 4 or 5. I had had a crush on him since then. We didn’t see him very often after he left town because he had come out to his family as gay, and had faced some rejection from others because of it. He would come back and visit every once in a while though, and that crush was stiiiiiillllll there. Always. I thought he was the love of my life, and I just knew that God could reform him, and then we would get married.
First of all, I know. I know. I know. I KNOW. Trust me. I know. Just bear with me here, okay?
When I was 19 or 20, I decided to go back to my childhood church. I started taking my brother to VBX (vacation bible eXperience). Or maybe the summer reading program collaboration between the local library that my best friend’s mom ran, and the church I grew up in. It actually might have been the latter now that I’m remembering.
Anywho, I remember so vividly my surprise that Scot was back in town, and actively attending our church again. What had God done? What had happened that he was not only attending, but also involved in some ministries.
I told my mom, and we might have all had dinner with each other to hear his story.
It all came down to this: God called him home, had made him whole again (not gay), and now he was actively living out a hetero/Christian lifestyle. Like this was the best news ever to my then 19 year old evangelical self. I really believed that God could change the hearts of lgbtq persons because it was a choice. (Y’all trust me, I know).
This one is both a story of me coming back to the church, and falling in love with this dude, Scot. Now that I’m writing this, I’m actually probably going to have to do this thing in more than just a two-part series. Because there is nearly 3 years worth of stuff with this particular relationship.
Antyway, I started going back to that church again. First I was just attending, enjoying making friends with the adults that basically raised me, and the people I grew up with. I wasn’t in any ministries for a while, but I also was feeling a little left out of the cool crowd there because I wasn’t a part of that. I really didn’t know how to get in. I was kind of the legacy kid though. See my mom had been the worship leader at this particular church for 10 years...until they found out that she was pregnant with my brother, and wasn’t married to the man who had gotten her pregnant. During that time we had also just lost my grandpa to cancer. All of this happened in the same year. Her forced resignation as the worship leader, any and all other involvement in ministry, and losing her support system in the church because of what she had done (Y’all, again, I KNOW). To get back to the point, being a legacy kid, and the daughter of a bomb-ass worship leader, meant that my initiation into the crowd was inevitable. I had been attending one of the adult small groups on Wednesdays. I was the youngest participant with everyone else being the same age as my parents and grandparents. One Wednesday, our church partnered with this community health org to do a field day type of thing before church that afternoon. Scot, me, and my mom were all hanging out and doing activities together. Scot asked what I did on Wednesday nights, and then invited me to check out the youth group to see if I wanted to become a youth sponsor. I was STOKED!! Of course I did! Not only because he was there, but I never really experienced youth group as a teen because after my mom’s ousting we didn’t go to church much. We never stayed anywhere long enough to really get involved. I also had really bad social anxiety, and was terrified of my peers. I was the kind of kid/teen/young adult who loved hanging out with the actual adults. Always.
That was my entrance into this whole unrequited love story.
Scot and I began to do EVERYTHING together. We were pretty inseparable, and almost always a package deal if one of us was invited somewhere by the other people in church. He came over to our family holiday stuff. We hung out with the teens, watched movies or TV shows while talking on the phone (we really got into the Real Housewives of New Jersey), he introduced me to SO much music (some of which is till my favorite to this day: Marc Broussard and Adele. BTW, because of him, I knew about Adele before she became REALLY popular. So there’s that), went over to his house constantly, went out to dinner all the time, went for coffee, and went to lunch after church. We sat together in church all the time (yes, with all the other youths and leaders, but we almost always sat by each other). I ate all of this up, just waiting for him to take us into official relationship status. Everything was there, and I thought we were awesome together. He paid for my shit all of the time too. We talked constantly when we weren’t together. Trust me, he initiated a lot of this too. “Hey you wanna go get coffee?” “Let’s go out to eat.” “You want to meet me back at my place and watch (enter show)?”
He was also really good friends with my mom. She knew about my love for him during this whole thing. She did try to talk to me about Scot and I’s relationship, and how he just wasn’t ready for an actual dating thing.
Also I will mention that purity culture was a part of some of this shit. I followed his leadership, was waiting on him to make the decision to move us into romantic relationship territory, and that relationship would be very intentional. That is, the intention of seeing if this would lead to marriage.
(I was also on the worship team thanks to that legacy thing I mentioned above, btw. He was also on the worship team).
Scot was so gahtdamb creative--he did so much: interior design, graphic design, photography, he built fucking houses, he cooked like a pro. He was so creative, so dynamic, funny as fuck (he had that British humor), was cool AF, and was just an all around wonderful person. He still is.
He was everything I really had ever wanted in a person. But he was 17 years older than me, and he thought he was a truly “reformed” gay person. (Again, I KNOW, y’all. This was our Evangelical way of thinking).
This went on for a couple of years.
I remember this one time that he was starting to long distance date the daughter of a couple who happened to be church board members. She showed up at church one weekend, and he walked towards me with this funny look on his face, cocked his head, gave me a weird smile, and said, “Sherry (not her real name, btw) wants to meet you!” He looked like he knew I wasn’t going to like this at all. She was around his age, tall, had red hair, drawn on eyebrows, was curvy in the “right” ways, was as creative as he was, was confident, and coming my way. It was the most fucking awkward thing in the whole wide world. It was like she was sizing up the competition...which she was, really. Apparently, he had told her a lot about me because she said something along the lines of finally getting to meet me, and that Scot talked about me a lot. I remember I had asked him to save me a seat because I was going to do something, but she took my spot. He did nothing to stop it. I was so upset. I remember sitting with one of the older ladies, completely separated from him and the rest of my people (youths and youth leaders). I was trying not to fall apart during the whole service. Especially when Sherry got up to do a special music thing. As soon as the service ended, I left as fast as possible, sobbing the whole gahtdamb way home. Sobbing. I was crushed. Fortunately for me the relationship with Sherry didn’t last. I have to say I wasn’t sad. She adopted a daughter from Ethiopia, met someone else, and got married shortly after. I was relieved.
The beginning of the end was one Valentine’s Day when I posted on Facebook about unrequited love. He saw it, asked my mom what I was talking about, and a couple of days later texted me this long ass message about how he never gave me the idea that we were something more than friends. It was bullshit. All absolute bullshit. Things were pretty awkward after that, and our relationship was strained for a while. We stopped doing stuff all of the time, and he tried to do more group activities if we did. I was devastated, and I just couldn’t understand why this was happening. It was so obvious that we were kind of in this emotional and time spending relationship.
Within the year things just never returned to the way they were before, and it was hell. I started to take an interest in one of the other youth leaders who was my age, and someone I had gone to school with. I started branching out on my own out of necessity. This other guy was, again, enjoying the time and attention without actually committing to a relationship with me. That was pretty short lived, and he was conceited as FUUUUUUUCK. The whole time I was still pining away for Scot. I begged and pleaded with God to repair things.
Within that year I left that church. My best friend came back to live in Kansas, I had started attending a young adults group at another church, and started openly having a drink here and there. I was 22, and I wanted to live my mother fucking life without worrying about being condemned for my one drink at a bar. I needed the time with my peers, and it was just what I needed to move on after this fiasco with Scot. I decided to step down from the youth group and worship team to be a 22 year old, finding God with my other 20-something year old people. Doing life together with them.
Scot was still around, he was the manager at the condo place where my mom lived, came over to her house quite a bit, and lived in the apartment above the clubhouse which is where the pool happened to be too. He would come hang out when I would do late night swims, or come hang out with my brother and I when he was home during the day sometimes. Our relationship never was the same though. We even got into a couple of nasty conflicts because he was angry that I left our church. I had to do what I had to do. Our relationship was super unhealthy, I was heartbroken, and that was the only way I knew to move on. By leaving all of that behind (for the most part. I still went back to visit every so often. It was, after all, my home church. Those people were my family. We did everything together for 3 or so years. They welcomed me back “home” after being away from the church for a few years, I felt loved, I belonged, and they helped me flourish in that church while I was there).
Scot loved all of the benefits of having me around. He basically used me as the training wheels to his new life of dating relationships with women. I was more than ready, thought he was the man God had given me to marry, and was just waiting on him to move us forward. He just never would. I took up a necessary space in his life, and he took up space in mine. It took me a few years to get past this fucked up relationship. But I replaced it with another one that was probably more fucked up.
That will be part 3.
P.S. I’m probably really rambly. But I am just telling a story that I think I need to tell.
P.P.S. It’s super hard to not add too many details in this story. I’m trying to hit just the relevant to my series parts, but this brings up soooo many memories of my three years there. Sometimes I think I want to go back, but then I know I couldn’t handle most people's extremely conservative political and spiritual beliefs in that church.
P.P.P.S. Some part of me will always love Scot. He was the first person I really had a “relationship” with. Also, to clarify, he ended up dating a couple of women after this fucked up thing. Like to the point where he almost married one lady a couple of years ago. I’m not sure what happened or why it ended, but it did. I’m not sure what is going on with his lgbtq status, but he is still in our old church, and I know their stance on being lgbtq hasn’t changed. They are not affirming, and still recognize it as a sin.
P.P.P.P.S Scot also happened to be the person bought me my first drink when I turned 21. My mom, Scot, and I went out to the pub. He bought me a cosmo martini, and a chocolate cake shot. I no longer drink Cosmos, but it was my go-to for a while.
Also, that night? Is how I got my blog name: Saltwater Ponds. I’ll tell that story too. It was funny.
No comments:
Post a Comment