Just before my senior year in high school, I decided that I wanted to take a year off from school after I graduated, to travel or do something different. My grandma offered to pay for most of a 3-month trip to Europe, but I decided to turn that down to go to the HA instead, because it seemed that this was what God was calling me to.
In January 2006, 8 months before I was scheduled to arrive in Texas for the HA, my parents split up after 22 years of marriage. This was a shock to me and my 4 younger siblings, because we had been a strong Christian family from the beginning. Both of my parents were Christians, and had taught and encouraged each of us in our faith as well. My parents told us this was a “temporary” split, and that they would be back together before I left for the HA.
In March, I started dating a guy that I was in school with and working with. I had never been in a romantic relationship with anyone before, and neither had he. He was a strong Christian too, and he knew that I had committed to going to the HA, and we both knew that we would have to end our relationship before I left. He still asked me out, because he felt God telling him to enter a relationship with me anyway.
Things went up and down until I left in August. My parents were still separated, and my dad was living with friends but coming over for dinner almost every night. I arrived at the HA, and broke up with my boyfriend. We decided that we could remain “friends” and talk on the phone occasionally. After a few weeks of this, my ex-boyfriend emailed me and my CA, telling me that he couldn’t just be friends, and he didn’t know what to do about it. My CA talked with me, basically saying that we obviously couldn’t be in a relationship, and that I would need to go on probation and go before the Honor Council for telling this guy that I still cared about him. Beyond that, she said this was something I needed to pray about.
I prayed about it, and I felt God telling me to close communication with this guy for the rest of the year. No contact at all. This was huge, because although I was committed to completing my year at the HA, I loved this man. I called him and told him that I would not be communicating with him, and not to have hopes that we would get back together after the year was up. Knowing he would respect that, it was the last time I spoke with him for that year.
In January, we came back from Christmas break, ready to go at it once again. I had spoken to my youth group while I was home, about how we were eternally accountable for our actions today (the HA theme that year). I didn’t see or speak to my ex-boyfriend, so I felt like I was honorably keeping my commitment to God and to the HA.
Just about a week after we got back, our CA came and told us that she was leaving the HA, on good terms, but leaving all the same. We were all shocked. She had been a great comforter, and had taught us a lot–we really enjoyed our time with her. She wouldn’t really tell us why she had to leave, and for her to be able to just drop us and go home in the middle of her GI year felt like betrayal.
The HA made a decent decision and decided not to have Januaries stay with us during their gauntlet week. Our leadership (RD, etc.) spent that week trying to find us a new CA. We were already a really dysfunctional core (why they threw such a weird group together, I’ll never know), and none of the new January CAs wanted us. They ended up asking our CA’s MA (a working GI without a core, that hangs out with a specific core throughout the year) to do it, and she accepted. We all knew her, so that was a good thing, but for the rest of the year it seemed as if she was too busy to really lead us so we basically had to figure out our own way.
When 4 new Januaries got assigned to us, our core got weirder. We already had a boy-crazy girl who had previously dabbled in witchcraft, one who had a dysfunctional family, one that the HA was constantly calling “rebellious,” one that constantly seemed like her mind was elsewhere (she also acted really strange and some core members thought she was creepy), and one with constant medical issues (a lot of her friends from home also died early in the year, so she was really depressed). Our new Januaries included a homesick one, a quiet and shy one, and an angry one. For a lot of the year, I wondered why a lot of these ladies even wanted to be at the HA, and with some of them, how they were allowed to stay at the HA (they made a lot of choices that should have gotten them dismissed). Our new CA was never really around, or if she was, she seemed like she didn’t know how to handle us. Our RD was sugary sweet all the time, but SO unavailable. We had nothing like the leadership and training we had been promised.
I was definitely more judgmental than I should have been. These girls needed to be loved and accepted. We needed to work together to make it through the year. After our 1st CA left though, we all just kind of fell apart. We didn’t really hang out with other cores, except some members from our sister core. I filled up my time with extra-ministry placement activities (writing with Write to Convince, optional corporate exercise, Intense Elective Training (IET), etc.). I became the model intern, but it was all works-based. HA encouraged that though, so it didn’t seem detrimental to me at the time.
From what I heard from home, my parents were getting even further apart. All of my friends from home stopped answering my calls or emails, and didn’t respond when I called and left messages. I missed the friendship from my ex-boyfriend as well, but I was determined to obey God with not speaking to him.
In the spring, I went home for a week. While I was home, I went out to dinner with my mom and my dad so that they could explain to me why they were separated. (They had not answered questions about this until now, so I had no clue why they were still separated, why they needed to be. I did suspect an affair, though). My dad confessed to me that he had had multiple affairs, beginning when I was about 4 or 5. He confessed this to my mom when I was about 8, and they had gone through counseling with our pastor of our church at that time. My mom thought everything was good until Winter of 2005, when she found many more instances of his adultery, as well as evidence that he was into porn. So they separated so that they could work on their marriage, but with him living elsewhere so that he would take it seriously and change.
My CA picked me up from DFW airport when I returned. I told her about my parents, and she was sympathetic, but I could tell that she had no idea how to handle me. I had no clue what I needed. For the following couple of weeks, I went to work, ate, went to classes, but I was completely dead inside. When I had free time, I just laid on our couch in our dorm room, or on my bed and slept or just lay there.
At some point, I snapped out of it myself. I decided that there was nothing I could do, and all I could do was pray and beg God to fix the mess my parents had made. I started to realize around this time that the fault was not all my dad’s. My mom is controlling, anxious, and disrespectful to all men in her life. My dad had dealt with it wrongly, but she also had pushed him away from her.
1 comments:
Shilohsays:July 26, 2010 at 1:55 PM
Wow. Thanks Em.
Reading your story I just kept laughing.
I was like, ‘OH! I bet I know whose core it was!’ But I thought of at last 5 different cores. lol.
It was the classic H.A. dysfunctional core.
All the odd balls mixed together, everyone thinks they’re a super cool core from the outside cause you’ve got all these different personalities and between everyone they end up being friends with just about the whole internship.
My BIGGEST regret from the H.A. is that I did not love enough and judged WAY too much.
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