He didn't respect me because he didn't have to.
To look at him, you would have thought he was an upstanding, decent brother--marriage material, even. Mr. "Urban Professional" with good looks and a great job thought he was God's gift to the universe. His clean-cut image fooled the best of them.
But child, looks can be very deceiving. He was a Casanova whose smile could melt you like ice cream in the hot summer sun. He never met a woman he didn't like, even though he had one at home. But sadly, I stayed with him for way too long, knowing somewhere deep down inside, he wasn't worth my time.
I was the other woman, the "wifey" who he was coming home to after he did his dirt, and it broke my mother's heart to see me living that way.
“Don’t make the same mistake I did Ashley,” she always told me, welling up with tears. She recounted how hard it was raising me so young, and how she wanted “so much more” for me.
My mother got pregnant with me when she was 17. My grandmother gave birth to my mom at 16.
The year I told my mother I was pregnant by my unfaithful live-in boyfriend was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. Although I was older than she was when she had me, still, my mom just cried and cried.
I had never seen her like that.
“I told you!” she shouted over and over again, slamming her hand up against the wall. She said some other things I won’t share here that hurt me to my heart.
Although I miscarried and never had the opportunity to hold my child, I couldn’t see it back then, but I was living out a cycle. I was following in my mother’s footsteps down the wrong path.
When I was younger at home, my mom Janice, who proudly shares her testimony of redemption, was in several different relationships with no-good men. They cheated on her and failed to love her the way she deserved to be loved. “I was a fool because no one taught me not to be,” she has said countless times before.
I used to be so angry when she didn’t stick up for herself. I remember going in my bedroom with chipped up purple paint, and punching my pillow repeatedly. I can’t even count how many nights I curled up in a ball, crying, listening to my mother yell at one of her boyfriends for being “trifling”—her favorite word to scream out.
At the height of my drama, it was my go-to word too.
Prior to my real downward spiral, what seemed like millions of times, I promised myself I would not be her; I would be different.
And yet, I did the exact same thing.
But why?
For years, I could not answer that. But now I realize I came straight out of my mother’s house into the dating world. I never knew how a woman should be treated, so I didn’t demand respect. I was passive about speaking up for myself.
Even when I got mad and flew into a rage, I still didn’t leave the toxic relationship. I’m not proud of it, but I would go into cussing and fussing fits. I’d throw things and act a fool. But when I finished being melodramatic, all that yelling, hollering, and carrying on meant nothing, because I would stay right there.
"Baby, temper tantrums won't change a man that doesn't want to change," my Sweet Ma always says.
I threw plenty of them though. Then, like a child who gets angry and forgets why only minutes later, I would quickly give my heart and body right on back to someone who didn’t respect it.
In my really misguided days, when I did muster the strength to leave one man, I would find the same "new" man in a different body, equally as unfaithful and disrespectful.
It wasn't until God saved me and showed me the error of my ways that I realized, through prayer, consecration, teaching, and mentoring that my mind needed to be changed and renewed.
I had to re-learn what it meant to be a woman and be introduced for the first time to the meaning of being a woman of God. Thank God I received direction and counsel that showed me I wasn’t made for drama, promiscuity, and craziness.
Today I know I am a child of God, created in His image, and designed to be wise, virtuous, and self-respecting.
So are you.
Wherever you come from, whatever you have been through, and whatever you have allowed—no matter how shameful—the power of God is able to reach all those broken areas mentally and spiritually, and bring wholeness.
One the scriptures that has helped me a great deal over the years is Romans 12:2 in the New Living Translation: “Don't copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.”
We have all come from something, and we all need to be delivered from something in order to be the single, saved, and satisfied women God wants us to be.
In order for that to happen, at some point, you have to say no more and then, allow God to transform your relationship mentality. He'll do it if you let him.
When did you realize you needed a change in your mentality to live the single life God’s way? I would love to hear about it.