Introduction...part 2 (my secret addiction)

Before I get to the good stuff...ya know, that part about how my amazing wife was able to help me discover God's love for me, I need to talk about a sensitive subject.  The subject of addictions.  A secret addiction that took me down a path of shame, embarrassment, and guilt. And what could have derailed my marraige and left me alone and bitter. If not for God's grace and my wife's mercy.

I don't remember a lot from the past, especially details.  People that know me, know I have a bad memory.  But it's funny how certain memories can stick with you forever.  I vividly remember the first time I was exposed to pornography.  I was 8 years old.  That's a shocking statement to type and read, but it's true.  I had older step-brothers, who were old enough to be curious about sex and didn't mind showing me what they had discovered.  A dirty magazine, full of naked women.  At 8 years old you're not even experiencing puberty yet, so that experience alone didn't have a profound effect on me in the moment.  But even as an 8 year old kid, I can look back and remember the innocence being washed from me and it left me feeling dirty.  I can compare the feeling to what Adam & Eve experienced in the Garden of Eden, when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Once they ate the fruit, they immediately felt shame, from their nakedness.  That's how I felt...shame.  It's weird how a kid's mind works.  Like when you convince yourself as a kid that lightening is the result of clouds colliding or if you're trying to pretend to be asleep as a kid, not only did I close my eyes but also held my breath because I assumed you didn't breathe while asleep.  Well, as a kid, I guess I heard about AIDs on TV and how life expectancy after being infected was about 10 years with the virus.  I'm sure I was wrong or mis-heard or mis-interpreted  that, but in my child-mind that's what stuck.  And I knew that it was a "sexual" disease. So as an 8 year old kid, I remember thinking......"If I just got AIDs from seeing this dirty magazine, I could die when I'm 18!"  I know that's a weird thought for a kid, but it's what I thought. You'd think that would scare me away from pornography. But it didn't.

I think a lot of boys, teens, and men associate pornography with it being "just a guy thing" or "boys will be boys".  And that's sad.  I now realize the Enemy, the Devil, Satan, whatever you wanna call him has been able to convince the world that porn is ok, and that lust is ok.  I'm convinced that the Enemy has to be pleased and excited that society has so openly embraced lust, porn,  and sexual sin.  It's everywhere.  But that's a whole other post for another time.  Anyway...By the time puberty hit, it didn't take me long to realize my dad kept dirty magazines and dirty VHS movies in his closet hidden.  Once you see the men in your life treating pornography as, no big deal.  You believe it to be true and before long your mind rationalizes it as, no big deal.  But see, God never intended it to be that way!  He designed the body of man to be functional, like a mult-tool (to work the garden, so to speak), and women were designed to be beautiful and catch the eyes of man so that they could become "one flesh" and marry.  I don't mean any of those descriptions to sound shallow, but you get the point, I hope.  The relationship between man and woman was never intended to be a shameful thing.  For those Christians out there that held onto their virginity and stayed sexually pure until they were married...I have so much respect for you!  In the world we live in, it's rare and temptation is at every corner.  I wish I knew then, what I know now.

From age 17-20, I was primarily living with my grandmother.  Their was several cool things about living with my grandmother.  First, she wears hearing aids and even with them she hears very little. Second, she had a computer with internet (which I never had living with my dad). Third, I had SO much independence.  That combination of "coolness" became a perfect storm for my exposure to pornography to become an addiction.  As a kid I could flip through dirty magazines and fast forward or rewind dirty VHS movies. But along with my teens, came new technology....computers, internet, DVDs and cell phones.  It didn't take long to realize porn was a just a click away.  I began watching porn online, ordering a few porn DVDs, and eventually, I was able to watch porn on my cell phone.  It was so easy and so tempting that a young man could not resist.

My Grandma Goddard

I love to hate the expression "hindsight is 20/20."  But it's so true.  I like to look back and can see even when I doubted God's very existence, He was there.  Orchestrating things in my life, so that I would be put in a position to know Him and need Him.  My grandmother is an extremely spiritual woman. She came to America as a refugee during World War II from the Ukraine. She grew up Eastern Orthodox. Here in America she belonged to an Episcopal church, but after her first trip back to Ukraine she found an Orthodox church in Charlotte and went back to her roots, so to speak.  I'm not judging any religion, and I'm definitely not trying to put a group of people under one big blanket idea.  Catholics and Orthodox have a sort of reputation to be more "religious" than "spiritual."  But I know in my heart and witnessed that my grandmother had a relationship with Christ.  It looked weird to me, to see her, in her room with candles lit and praying out loud, but I could hear her talking to God and praying for her family every single day!  She would sometimes pray for 1/2 an hour or longer.  I was literally one room over, living a sinful, lustful life and without a care in the world....while she was praying for me...and probably never knowing what I was actually getting myself into.  Over those years, she was able to subconsciously convince me that..."MAYBE, there is a God", instead of "I'm confident that God doesn't exist."  She never lectured me about church and never guilted me into going to church.  But God was planting seeds in my heart, through her.

Fast forward a little.  By the time I was 22, I had found the woman of my dreams! I asked my future wife to marry me in February of 2006. We didn't actually get married until September of 2007.  It was in that first few months of our marriage that my secret addiction would be discovered....by the woman I loved most.

But let me tell you about her and "our story" first...to be continued...

Introduction...part 1 (my dad)

I wanna start this blog with a more formal introduction. The "About Me" section is odd...in the sense that too much info looks weird, and too little info looks weird too.

Hopefully, you got the basics...my name (Dusty), my location (Fort Mill, SC). I don't wanna update my age every year, because I'll forget, and in the blog world I would remain 27 years old forever.  I was born and lived my entire life in the Charlotte, NC area (one of the few natives) in June 1984.  Two years later...my mom and dad had twin girls (Lacey and Kelly).  A few years after that...my parents divorced. I barely remember them ever living together. Us 3 kids lived together with my single-parent dad.  Life was Ok.  I mean, we always knew we didn't have a lot of money and things were tight. I'm sure my dad was stretched thin financially and emotionally. He lacked the patience needed to raise 3 children alone, but I can't imagine that many single dads or moms could excel in the "patience department."  He was tough on us, and expected a lot out of us. Not in an abusive way, but in a way that made life not very fun for kids.  When I was 13, my sisters decided they wanted to leave and go live with my mom.  I couldn't blame them...they were girls, and life with a single dad was not the greatest.

My dad soon got remarried and gave me a new half-brother (Kevin) in 1998. Within a year of his birth, my dad was diagnosed with throat cancer.  It didn't look good at the time. It was a rare form of cancer. At that time, 14 people had been diagnosed with it and only one had survived. But my dad was relatively young (around 40, i think) and in great shape.  The doctors said they would treat him aggressively and it worked. The cancer never came back.  But the results would change my life forever.

My Dad, before cancer

My dad would never be able to work again after the cancer treatment.  He always worked hard-laboring jobs and came home dirty.  The cancer surgery and treatment left him unable to swallow, and he would have to feed himself through a feeding tube.  He lost weight fast. He went from a solid 5 ft 10 in, 200 lb man...to a skinny 140 lb old man  in the span of just a month or 2.  Looking back, I can see that he must have went through severe depression. He was always a working man, used to providing the best he could for his family. After the cancer, he just sat around the house feeling sorry for himself.  He quickly began drinking alcohol.  And by "drinking alcohol," I mean....he poured beer, liquor, and wine down his feeding tube.  Most normal people may drink a 6 pack in the span of a few hours. With the feeding tube my dad could down a 6 pack in minutes.  Before long he was a full-fledged alcoholic.  He became a shell of himself and was drunk constantly. Making my teenage years a living hell.

He would be drinking all through the night, and frequently wake me up in the middle of the night to "talk" and tell me "how much he loved me."  In case your never been around alcoholics...they either get aggressive and wanna fight, or they wanna talk and be your best friend.  But at 2am on a school night, I wasn't in the mood to listen to my drunk dad ramble on and stumble around my room, no matter the topic of conversation.  With the alcoholism getting out of hand, it was only a matter of time before my dad went through another divorce and the 2 of us moved out.

By 16, I had moved in with my grandmother.  Off and on my dad would manage to rent a house and convinced me to move in with him. But it never worked out or lasted long.  I always ended back at grandma's house.  Dad was impossible to live with.  I had a part-time job, but nearly every penny went to my dad for "bills", but I knew my paychecks were being used for more alcohol.  He constantly used guilt and fear to make sure I gave him money.  On really bad nights when my dad was extremely drunk and miserable to be around, I would lay in bed, cry and ask God why I had to live like this. I just wanted a normal house, a normal family, a normal life.  I prayed that God would fix/help my dad. But nothing ever changed...things actually kept getting gradually worse.

After awhile you start questioning whether God actually exists and before too long I could say out loud that not only did I not believe in God, but I was sure He did not exist.

It took a very special woman to show me how wrong I was....to be continued...