Holy crap.
I am about to tell you something that I don't like to talk about, partly because it exposes my youthful indescretions and my inability to make right a wrong.
You think you have all the time in the world to make up for mistakes in the past, but the stark realization is that it all passes too quickly, and sometimes that moment of opportunity is suddenly just an image in a rear view mirror.
When I was going to Bob Jones University in the late '70's, I was there because I was heartbroken. Someone I thought was going to be in my life for “ever after” had disappeared. She was taken away secretly by her mother, who was in an abusive marriage, one that left her daughter vulnerable to a sick, perverted man who shrouded himself in the gospel but was anything but godly. He was the reason that they disappeared without notice. It could not be known to anyone where they went for fear of this man finding them. My family knew the family, familiar with them. He knew that his stepdaughter and I were a couple, and if I knew where she was they might be in jeopardy. So... they disappeared... and so did I... not physically, but emotionally. I had to move ahead, despite my heart being attached.
So I started going to a church, a small fundamental Baptist church that the love of my life had ties to. Her best friend was the preacher's daughter.
I was introduced at that time to a world that I had never seen before. It was the mix of religion and constitutionality, the likes I had never seen nor knew existed. While attending the church, I met Jolyn. She was sweet, but more than that for a teenage boy, she was present. I took all the heartbreak and emotions and switched them to Jolyn. She was preparing to go to Bob Jones University in the fall of 1979. So I said, why not. My other plans of going into the Air Force had fallen through, so why not religion.
What I knew, and what was realized, was that Jolyn would never be the replacement for what I had lost. No surrogate love there. I left for Bob Jones as soon as I could that summer. I wanted to get acclimated to the area, the climate, and the people. I worked at the commissary on the campus with all of the other summer workers and realized that this was a huge new world for me, and I refocused my attention to the work, the studies, and the new restrictions the university would put upon me.
When Jolyn got to BJU, it was quite evident that we would not be together. Frankly, I was relieved. I was newly focused. School became my love, and I jumped in wholeheartedly. First semester came and went, and I realized that working on campus was not going to pay my tuition. In fact, I was in debt to the university and was told I could not return until I had made the balance of my tuition (which is another story... one that I have shared before).
But anyway... I got the money... gifted to me... and I returned for the next semester. It was uneventful, well, except for accusations against me not living up to the social requirements the school had set (yet another story). I stayed through the summer, continued working for the university, and began semester three. I decided that finances would not allow me to go to my fourth semester, but I would hang around and hoped that God would provide for me to continue.
I dated some during this time, hung out for Christmas in Dade City, Florida, with the Tillmans. Twins Rebecca and Rachel... (you get their family was religious... right?). When I came back to South Carolina, I got a job with the local radio station, the one associated with the university, WMUU. It worked into a pretty good part-time job that I supplemented with a cook's job at the local Shoney's restaurant.
It was in February of 1981 that I met my first wife, Deena Maerene Hester. She was sweet, simple, and was dealing with a lot of demons that I had no knowledge of. You see, the way BJU was set up, you couldn't really get to know the real person, probably why the divorce rate among BJU students was so high. Deena and I dated in accordance with the BJU policies. Never alone, always supervised (if even from afar), met in the dating parlor, ate in the snack shop, talked extensively.
Somewhere in the whole four months that we had known each other, I began to think about what life would look like and did not have the foresight to see what was to come, only that I wasn't going in any direction that showed promise. I felt that I could move back to Tucson, work for my parents’ restaurant, and eventually take it over. So I did the most stupid, and what I realize now was the most insensitive thing I could have done. I asked Deena to marry me, and she said yes.
Being honest with myself now, it felt like a surrender. A pitching aside of the potential I believed was there but stymied after the loss of my first love. It was unfair to Deena.
What makes it more hurtful was the day of our marriage. We decided on a church in Traveler's Rest where a mutual friend of ours played the piano. Everyone was going to be there. Her mother and father (aunt and uncle that raised her), my mother and father who flew from Tucson to be there. And then it happened, the shitty, selfish-minded event that spun me out of control, but not enough to call off the wedding.
My mother handed me a stack of letters that had been accumulating. On the top of the pile, I saw it. I froze. My heart felt like it wanted to beat out of my chest. I was wanting to cry, I was wanting to scream, I wanted to run from the chapel and never look back, but I did not. On top was the familiar handwriting I had seen many times before. The envelope still had the smell of strawberry. It was from my first love.
My mother handed me the stack, and I looked at her when she said, “This came several weeks ago for you.”
“What?” my inner voice screamed. “Several weeks ago? You have had this in your posession and you are just now giving me this? On my wedding day?” All those words still silent in my head.
I walked aside, found a private spot, and opened the letter. “How are you, how have you been? I have been thinking about you, are you seeing anyone? Here is what happened to me...”
That is not the letter you want to get when you are about to make the biggest mistake of your life. No, of course it is. But I did not do the right thing. I opted to move forward and marry despite knowing that Deena would never be loved like “she” was loved.
This began the downhill spiral even before the “I do’s” were spoken, but we moved forward. Married, moved to Arizona, worked for my parents. I was angry, and not only that, but I found myself with someone that I really did not know. Someone who had deep-seated issues due to a father that was not there and had been abusive when he was, leaving her to be raised by her mother's aunt and uncle. Her mother struggling with mental health issues and Deena dealing with a lot of anger as well.
We hid it well in public, but in private it was volcanic. The yelling, the screaming, the frustration, the disagreements, the pregnancy. Yup, that's right, the pregnancy.
I decided, or we decided, not sure now after all these years, that we needed to be in a place that was nurturing for both of us religiously, so it was back to Greenville with the hopes of me returning to the ministry and finding my footing and the peace that had thus far escaped me. We left in June of 1984. Found a place nearby the college, and I started to work on building a life. I got a manager's job at the Shoney's I had previously worked at and began working 10, 12, 14-hour shifts. At first, stressful, but as the months went by, a blessing.
It was later that year in October that another twist of fate occurred. October 8th, 1984, 6:30 in the morning, the phone rang. I instantly knew it was bad news. Deena handed me the phone, and my mother told me my father was dead. It was at that moment that everything fell apart. The floodgates opened, and I could not hold back the years of feeling that I had been holding in.
Now Deena tried to be supportive, but I think her relationship with her own father might have had something to do with the ineffectiveness I felt in that support, or perhaps it was just my grief.
Fly to Tucson, alone. Deena was six months pregnant, and we couldn't really afford to both go. As it was, I got a grief rate, and my mother paid for it.
God was no longer on the table. Dismissed, forgotten, blamed. Everything else was on autopilot. And because the autopilot was set with the wrong heading, it was only a matter of time before I started to make changes that would affect my life, Deena's life, and our soon-to-be-born son, George's life.
Needless to say, by the summer of 1985 the marriage was done. Divorce court was tough. No lawyer on my part. I just said “whatever” and succombed to the wishes of her and her lawyer, even as the judge said, “Mr. Henry, are you sure you don't want a lawyer on your behalf?”
Hindsight, right?
The next several years were rough. A new relationship, new responsibilities, more and more separation from my son. Deena dragged me into court several times over the next year. I just kept mailing the check.
Eventually, we were all estranged from one another. Deena took George in the middle of the night and moved out of state, despite my visitation rights. (Learned later that Deena's aunt and uncle counseled her to “make it as hard as possible on him,” me, and he would come to his senses and come back and get on track.) I think that when she saw that had the opposite result, she would just move away and separate herself in distance from me.
At the time, I didn't know where she went, only that she was gone. I was still supposed to pay support even though I no longer had visitation... that was tough. In fact, after about six months of no communication, no updates from family court, and neither hide nor hair of them, I did the worst thing possible. I stopped writing checks. They were going to family court in South Carolina. Deena was no longer in South Carolina, and she refused to let me know her location so as to reestablish contact with my son.
Now I know there will be judgment by some, support by others, but that is not what I am after here. I have fallen on my own sword time after time over this.
But I want to get at the whole reason I started writing this... Every now and then, when thinking about the son I never knew, I take a look online, or at social media, and see if I can find him again. We had a brief encounter around 2010, but Deena shut that down quickly.
So yesterday I got that urge again to see what I could find. I found a few references with my son's name on it, and one struck me odd. It was the sale of a house with his name and the name of another man on it. So I did a whitepages.com search, which will bring up his name and usually family members with which he is associated. Sure enough, the last name of the man appeared again, so I made the assumption that he was the stepfather to my son. So I googled his mother's name with the new last name, and it popped up on Google.
An obit. February 21, 2021, at the age of 61. It was linked to a mortuary website, and I clicked on it. No posts, no pictures, no messages at all, just one picture of forget-me-not flowers. I used the same tactic and went to Facebook with the same name, found a blank Facebook with everything erased. The only thing that made it real was one profile picture. Everything else... gone.
Even with what I just wrote, I maintain that I had no regrets, but I must say, I wish I had the chance to at least make amends to the mother of my son. Now as to my son, not sure what comes next, but the last time we connected, he reached out to me. Perhaps it is my turn, and be prepared to be disappointed.
