So I was finally tempted.
After a month of living within my purity pledge, I was faced with an old flame so to speak. Not Matt or B, or even that older guy that claimed to live and work from a hotel room in town. This was the young man that convicted me to end the foolishness, Alex.
I needed to vent to someone about the changing situation with my living situation. Shay's food stamps have been reduced since she is now working and one of her baby daddys is out of work and she is no longer getting his child support. Financially frustrated, she initiated a conversation about me needing to help out. "We need to come up with a figure for you" were her words. I already knew about her food situation but it wasn't until she made dinner one night and simply didn't include my portion that I realized something shifted and things had changed. So I offered to buy my own food. I had sort of done that last week when I returned the swim suit I would have used at Cheri's pool party and used the money for fruit and snacks. Her kids ate a lot of my fruit and some of my pudding snacks. She agreed that that would help, me buying my food, and that she would talk to her kids about not eating my stuff.
Then she went on to say that me buying my own food would not be enough to help because her power bill went up and gas went up. I told her that I don't know how much the Illinois Child Care Program will pay me for the Saturdays that I am babysitting for her but I can just give her that check every month. Her last babysitter quit on her because she found out after a few weeks that she would only be getting paid for the Saturdays and not the Mondays and Tuesdays. My concern is that I lost 18 hours at $9 an hour and knitting on Saturdays to help her out and I thought it would be temporary. It does not seem as though I will be alleviated of my duties after June when she becomes a full time employee from her current seasonal position. I have no idea what will happen in the future, but I do have my own goals and dreams and watching her children seems like it is quickly becoming a hindrance.
Now, I know I am living here for free. She offered to let me stay here instead of me moving back to San Antonio and said I wouldn't have to worry about food or rent. Well, her pecuniary situation has changed dramatically and the reality of the situation has settled in. Now, she is changing the conditions under which I can stay. Because her babysitting circumstances have fallen under my responsibility, I feel like I have become a nanny in exchange for living here. I have been asked to wash the dishes daily, I do laundry regularly, and of course there is the watching of the kids. I don't mind buying my own food. I don't even mind giving up potentially $200 a month to help her out, but I really want and will probably soon need my Saturdays back.
I suggested to her that she may want to start looking for someone else to take over the babysitting for me and she stated matter of factly that there simply was no one else. I offered the suggestion of asking around at the church and she shot that one down as well claiming that no one would want to come here and watch all of her kids and she doesn't really know and trust that many people. I do not want to still be babysitting when I move out of here into my own apartment. I know she needs help, and she is helping me greatly, and I do not want her to misunderstand my appreciation and gratitude, but my therapist agreed that my attitude of helping someone if I can always has to have some boundaries. I have to draw a line.
I said all of that to say that I wanted to talk to someone about it and decided to talk to Alex. None of my other friends had been responding lately and I knew he was online and we talked while I went to Meijer and picked up $23 worth of groceries which took about 2 hours. My mom had to help talk me through a few ideas and get my cart down to a much more financially manageable size. He suggested that we hang out sometime, I suggested that I was free then, so he offered to make me something to eat. But of course, like EVERY SINGLE MAN that I have ever been involved with, including Stephen, he does not have a car. Well, that's not true, Matt had a truck. But Matt has a match.com girlfriend now and wants me to return his bike before I leave town. ANYWAY, I had to bike to Alex's apartment. He made me a sandwich and it started off as talking.
Once I finished my sandwich, he wanted me to sit next to him. He became very touchy, arm around my shoulders, "smoothly" holding my hand, sitting very close. I mean, he might as well of yawned and stretched and grabbed my boobs. I was being cold and unreceptive and finally called him out about his advances. We both admitted that the last time we were together left us feeling awkward so neither wanted to contact the other. However, we then spent about an hour going into a debate about entering into a friends with benefits relationship. I told him, in several different ways, that I wanted to share myself physically with someone that I was in a committed and monogamous relationship with and it simply would not be special to just make out with someone and have lines we didn't cross and so forth.
He argued that I wouldn't be starting a serious relationship in Champaign, that we were more comfortable with each other now, that I was really good the first time around, yeah like flattery will get you anywhere but he went on anyway, and humans have urges that are natural blah blah blah. This is already an atheist, lives with his ex-girlfriend who left him to be with another man, a guy who is not in the market for a serious relationship (oooh have I heard that one before only to see the guy in a serious committed monogamous relationship weeks later with someone else *cough**Matt**cough**), and admits to be honest that he was hoping that I would stay the night and rock the casbah.
I was prepared to ride my bike home, similar to the times I went to Bs prepared to take the last bus from Lincoln Square home. I was getting sleepy and my proclamations of being a rock, not a glacier, were getting weaker and weaker. I told him that I did not want to have sex with him. And he holds me closer and whispers something sweet into my ear. Of course, I made the rookie mistake of admitting that I hadn't been looking him in the face all evening because I knew if I did I would kiss him, so he kept looking at me and eventually just started kissing me.
So we're on the floor going at it, clothes on, and I am like, geez Shamika, you are riding a fine line. The still small voice was in my ears and I kept seeing my ring and cross and knew that I had put myself in a tricky situation to begin with and the night naturally culminated into what I knew it would. We did not thankfully have sex, mostly because I had been to the STD clinic just the day before to get tested because of all the unprotected sex I had had over the past few months and the message from the nice Nigerian nurse (lovely alliteration!) rang loud and clear in my head. He got off, I didn't. I didn't have time to even nap there because Saturdays Shay has to be at work at 7am so I had to be back in the house before she woke up. So I left a little after 5am, not necessarily feeling guilty because we didn't go all the way, but certainly not feeling pure, feeling as though I once again compromised, and wondering how I let myself keep in contact with someone I was supposed to have cut off like B and Matt and whomever else lingered in my phone or online like a sticky residue to my new squeaky clean endeavors in life.
But enough about that! Just today I found out that a co-worker and new friend Elise was leaving Champaign, IL for Bloomington, IL for school this week and was having a going away shindig at a local bar Jupiters. I got off of work at 11pm and another co-worker Erin, she had baked two cakes and brought chips to the break room earlier for everyone, lived close to me so she dropped me at home so I could change then we went together. Most of the other people there were co-workers and drunk. We hung out, at some of the specialty pizza, I lost a game of pool, then she left teary eyed as she said goodbye. Again, the guys (all Mexican and all from work I believe) were flirting with the skinny girls and Elise but she was dressed in hooker boots, hot pants, and a top with a belt over it. I once again felt that I was not attractive, my self esteem seemed to not reflect how the small world in which I live sees me. I had to just let it roll off my shoulders when the girls were being talked to, written on, yes written on, and invited to share bar stools. I waved goodbye while they were given long hugs and partial salsa dances. No one hugged me but Elise.
At any rate, I am looking up. Something has been delaying my plans lately to file the paperwork for dissolution of marriage, but the situation will be resolved in a timely fashion and I will not spend the rest of my young days in limbo married to an incommunicable person. I am not so much compromising as editing my thinking about dating and courting and wondering about what I will do if I end up a single woman while in Champaign. I clearly need to stay away from guys on Craigslist. I would like to get to know Christian men and I am excited about the idea of started a relationship with a Christian guy. Spending time with that person, getting to know them, getting to know all about them (gold stars to those who picked up on that reference*) Playful flirting, hand holding, cuddling during movies, kisses goodnight. I hesitate to say "casual" dating, but I do feel as though there is a foundation of experience that I am lacking and the path in which I find myself is a poor one to build upon with the internet dating and such.
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