Get to Know Him

I engage in conversations with women daily, at work, on the phone, while out shopping, etc. I am a talker as well as a great listener. I pay attention to people words and actions. I recall a conversation I had a few months ago with a young lady that I’ve known for seven or eight years now. The conversation was about her not allowing her kids to see their father. I know the young lady and the father of her children extremely well, in fact, I remember telling them when they first got involved with each other that they weren't right for one another.

I told them due to their age difference and background they will have different outlooks on things they may run into throughout their relationship. She was 21 and he was 17. They both were still at home with their parents, and she was working to provide for herself and his mother was providing for him. My exact words to them both were, “people are taught to respect their elders, and an elder is someone older than you. There may come a time when she may start telling him what to do and don't do, where to go and not go, how is he going to respect that?" I also, asked her "what if he says something to her about what you can or cannot do, thinking he has the right because he is the man, how is she going to submit to someone younger than her?" Neither of them listened, I backed off and let them do what they wanted to do because I knew that one day, they would find out for themselves that what I said was true.

Infatuated with one another, almost one year into the relationship, they had their first child. He stayed around, finally got a job and did what a father was supposed to do. She was still residing with her parents and her parents allowed him to move in.

Looking into it all, that was their way of trying to teach him to be a husband as well as a father. As time went on, the pressure from the young lady's parents started to rise and that only pushed him to start hanging out with his friends again, working less, and seeing other women.

The couple remained together through all of that, and then five years later another child came along. Now they have two kids out of wedlock, conceived under the roof of her parents "the Christians" home. One morning after getting into an argument with the young lady’s father about him not going to church and not marrying his daughter, the young man decided to leave and move back into his family's home. The young man’s family house was down the street. However, the young man continued to go spend time with his children daily.

A few months later he met another woman and that is when the time he was spending with his children got cut in half. He moved away with the other lady, but when he would come over to see his children, it was a "no go." When he would come around to visit his kids and his family, she wouldn’t allow him to.

One Saturday afternoon his children were outside playing when he pulled up and started heading towards him, she snatched them up and made them go in the house. The oldest daughter didn't know what was wrong, and she didn't understand why she couldn't see her dad.

Me being who I am, the talker and the person to ask questions decided to ask her “why didn't she let him see his kids, especially when the oldest child is a daddy’s girl? I know it must have hurt the daughter and her dad.”

She said, "when he does come around, he isn’t sober, and he doesn’t do anything for the kids, she has always provided for them since day one."

I explained to her that she couldn't use that as an excuse to keep the children away from him, because she knew what kind of person he was when she first met him and decided to have two children with him. I also stated that when they were a couple it didn't bother her when he was drinking and getting high. She didn't mind him being around the children then and she shouldn't now because she knows he wouldn't do anything to harm them.

The truth is she was letting her emotions get in the way and she wanted to hurt him the way he hurt her. When a woman gets involved with a man, and their relationship doesn’t work out the way she thought it would. The woman cannot speak anything bad about the man nor blame him for anything without saying anything bad about herself and blaming herself.

This young lady knew some things if not all things about the young man when she decided to get involved with him. He was younger than her, he didn’t have a job, hanging out with his friends drinking and smoking was something he did daily. It doesn’t matter if he told her he was going to stop doing those things, start going to church and marry her. Still, the truth is she knew what was in him to do and not to do from the beginning. She didn’t have one child by him; she decided to have two. She could have prevented a lot of sorrow and pain if she had made wiser choices.

People show us who they are in the beginning and it is up to us to pay attention and seek the truth. That is the only way to save our soul and not be mad at ourselves or anyone else. We cannot expect people to be who we want them to be for us. When we come across people who ways are different from ours and we want to make them a part of our lives, it is our responsibility to get to know the truth about them so we can understand them. Therefore, when we find out who they truly are, we can make the decision about being with them or to leave them alone and let them be. To love a person is to know and understand them.