Popular: Boys, Booze, and Jesus

by Tindell Baldwin

  This is the part of the story I’d heard; I knew they fell in love and got married. I always thought it was kind of a short story, but who bothers with silly details when it’s your parents? Then my dad revealed the second part I’d never known: two months into dating, my mom got pregnant (I’m hoping not at Bible study, but I never did ask about that part), and the next month they were married. Kristian was born six months later, and so the Stanfills began. Two years later Taylor was born. Two years after that I came along, and two years later there was Brett.

  ♥

  At that moment I decided I would wait to have sex. I knew my parents had had the strength to handle the situation, but my dad told me how hard it had been on their marriage. He told me how they’d had to fight through the problems young couples face at the same time they were learning to be parents. He told me they’d had to grow up much faster than they’d wanted to.

  Despite my rebellion, my dad and I had a pretty good relationship. Even in the worst of times, we understood each other. He loved my brutal honesty, and I loved that I could be honest with him. There was only one time I actually deeply disappointed my dad, and it left an impression that will last a lifetime. But that comes later. . . .

  Father-daughter camp was fairly successful, except for the new friend I made. At night we had cabin talks where we’d go around and discuss what we’d learned that day. True to form, I never held anything back. If I had learned nothing, I would say so. If I thought the day had sucked, I told the leader it sucked. One of the first nights, all the girls were going around saying their biggest fears. They all had real spiritual fears, like they wouldn’t accomplish God’s work or they’d fall into temptation to sin. I was barely paying attention, and when it was my turn to answer, I blurted out my biggest fear: not getting married. Later that night, one of the girls came up to me and told me she wasn’t into the whole “church camp” thing either, and we talked about how, when we got back to Atlanta, we’d go to a concert together and get drunk. A few weeks later, my new friend from church camp called. We went to see John Mayer and got plastered on the way there. I think the concert was good; I was too busy vomiting to notice.

  My dad and I left church camp no worse for wear and possibly a little closer. It kills me now to look back at the sacrifices he made for me that week. All he wanted was to spend time with his daughter, and I treated him like he had the plague. We did bond some, but only because I glimpsed that most daughters weren’t as lucky as I was. It still breaks my heart to think about one girl we met whose father had been in a bad accident and lost a lot of his brain function. She had to remind him to do everything down to the last little detail. The day we were all supposed to go horseback riding she forgot to remind him, and as our horses were trotting away he ran up with an expression of pure disappointment on his face. He looked like he had failed her. At that moment I thanked God for a dad who could be a dad. In times like these, I realized how truly lucky I was, but the moment was always too short. Reality and my need to be popular always came back full force, and I forgot my blessings a lot more easily than I remembered them.

  As soon as I could, I picked up my life as if we’d never left. A few weeks after we came back, my parents caught me drinking again. Where I grew up, parents had this phone chain, and even if you didn’t want to be in it, you still got weekly updates about whose kids were misbehaving. Well, a Stanfill drinking made it to the top of the gossip reel, and my parents quickly got a phone call to let them know I was dabbling in alcohol.

  My dad sat me down to talk about my drinking problem. This happened every time I got caught for something, and I hated these talks. I knew what he was going to say, but this time I could tell he was really worried.

  He looked at me and told me about the rapids.

  The “rapids” became my dad’s and my way of talking about how I navigated high school. He said I was going down the rapids, and he was watching from the shore. He said he could see the bigger picture, but I could only see right in front of me. He could see the pitfalls and the traps that I couldn’t, because he’d been rafting before. He knew I was approaching small rapids, and if I kept drinking, the rapids would only get bigger. When he talked to me like this, I’d laugh and tell him that I wasn’t going down any rapids; I was just living life to the fullest. I lived by the Dave Matthews Band song I loved: “Celebrate we will. ’Cause life is short but sweet for certain.” I was just living, having a few drinks to find out who I was. It was no big deal. I tried to tell my dad this, but he looked at me with something I hadn’t seen in his eyes before: worry.

  The problem with living like life is short but sweet for certain is that life isn’t that short, and the decisions you make last a lifetime. I wasn’t living a song; I was living my life, and every step I took would stay with me forever. Each drink, each boy, each cigarette, each joint would never be erased, and that’s what my dad was trying to tell me. He was trying to warn me that this was much bigger than a few beers. He knew the rapids better than I did. In hindsight, maybe he could have said more, but at the time I think he did the best he could.

  I should note here that my father is a brilliant businessman, a family man, and an excellent father. He has the kind of confidence that made me believe he could handle it all. I never saw my dad worry before this. No matter what happened, he’d just fly through life laughing. He could make anyone laugh, especially me, and when we got on a roll, people tended to ignore us. Although you have to be vocal in a family of six, my dad and I are both unnaturally loud. We’ve always had a strong connection, so when my dad looked worried, I listened.

  He said, “Tindell, right now it’s just drinking, but then it will be drugs and sex, and I don’t want to sit across this table four years from now and see regret in your face.”

  I didn’t see it this way, though. I just wanted to be popular. I didn’t want to ruin my life or make mistakes I would deeply regret, but I would also do anything to be a part of the crowd.

  CHAPTER 3

  GIVING IT ALL AWAY

  MY MOM NEVER gave me “the talk” when I was growing up, so consequently I learned everything I needed to know about sex from listening to my smartest middle school friend and overhearing boys’ conversations—all very reliable information. (Yeah, right.) Needless to say, sex was interesting to me, kind of like dissecting a rat: I didn’t want to go near it, but I was curious about what was on the inside.

  Part of my curiosity came from the Christian home I grew up in. My parents weren’t shy at all, but for some reason sex was a subject they almost never broached with me except for telling me not to do it. That was no problem. I never planned on it. I was going to wait until I was married, because that is what good Christian girls do—they fall in love, marry, have sex, and then have a bunch of kids. Right?

  See, I never got the flip side of sex. I was never told why I shouldn’t do it, just that it wasn’t right until marriage. That’s great for kids who follow the rules, but it’s kind of useless for kids like me who are hell bent on breaking them. The idea of being told not to “do it” just heightened my curiosity. At fifteen I was okay with the idea of not having sex, because most of my friends weren’t doing it and I’d never been in love. But that changed.

  When I fell in love, the reasons to not have sex were unclear to me. This is when having “the talk” would have come in handy. My parents did most things right in parenting, but in the area of sex talks, I was lacking information. I needed to know what sex can do to an unmarried woman. I needed to know the emotional damage it causes to her heart. It would have been good to hear from my mom about her experiences, because while facts about STDs might scare kids out of bed for a little while, they won’t work forever. One day you fall in love and you never imagine that the person you love could have an STD or even worse—that he might move on to someone else. I’d like to believe that if I’d known a little more about my mom’s past, I might have made different decisions. I’d like to believe that truth might have pulled me bac
k to reality. Because that feeling of being in love isn’t reality. Passion isn’t reality, and when it comes to sex, we all need a good dose of reality.

  Even when I started drinking, I told myself I would make out and do whatever else my friends were doing, but I wouldn’t have sex. I didn’t want to have to tell my husband that I’d had sex with someone before him. This was the only value I promised to hold on to.

  Let the Dating Begin. . . .

  My first boyfriend was eighteen, and I was fifteen. I’d gone unnoticed at my school, and my best friend was dating a guy from another school, so in one supremely strategic decision I decided to date his best friend. I figured that way I’d get points for having a boyfriend and I’d still get to hang out with my best friend. A few of the “popular” girls had said he was hot, and even though he was an inch shorter than I was, I figured I’d give it a try.

  Our dates mostly consisted of getting drunk at someone’s house and making out for a while. He was older, though, and more experienced, and at some point making out wasn’t enough. I don’t remember when things changed. I just remember the pressure to make them change. People at school would ask me how far we were going, and I always alluded to things, but I was ashamed to say I had no desire to do anything else with him. He told me he loved me, and I said it back because that’s what you do when someone says, “I love you.” It didn’t feel like love, though—at least, not what I expected love to feel like. I never actually decided to let our relationship move past basic making out; I just got drunk enough that it didn’t matter. My friends were all going further, so I figured why not.

  I crossed a few lines without having sex, and then eventually I made out with another guy and let the boyfriend go. This was my trend for a while. Instead of having the messy breakup talk, I just cheated, and then the guys had to break up with me. I was careless with other people’s hearts, because even though I said the words I love you quite often, I never really meant it. I cheated because I didn’t know how to treat other people, and when I got drunk and my boyfriend wasn’t around, I got bored. I cared far too much about whether or not boys wanted me, and one boy wanting me was never enough. I received validation that I was pretty through attention from boys, so it didn’t matter who I was “committed” to. If another boy wanted to say the right things, he could have me—up to a point.

  My first boyfriend was one of a few who were no big deal; I was fifteen and really just needed someone to drive me around. My relationships never lasted long, and I was never really interested in anything more than hanging out with my friends. My parents thought they could rest easy; since I wasn’t in love, they didn’t have to worry about me having sex.

  ♥

  I made it through sixteen relatively unscathed by boys. My brother Taylor was now a senior and kept pretty good tabs on me. He had come to terms with the choices I was making and was more concerned about my safety than stopping me from drinking, which he knew he couldn’t do. He told me that if I ever needed him, he would pick me up without question. Like the rest of my family, he was more concerned about not pushing me away with opinions. Kristian was in college, and I missed him like crazy, but I enjoyed the weekends when I could go visit him. Brett was in middle school, and my biggest fear was that he would start going down a bad path like me. But for the most part, my life was relatively smooth. All my parents could do was ground me and pray they’d get through to me one day. Everything changed, though, when I turned seventeen.

  Like in all tragic love stories, I met a boy who wasn’t like the others. We had a class together, but I have no memory of why we started dating except that he flirted with me during class. I flirted back. One night when I got drunk, I decided to kiss him. If the start was any indication of the finish, I should have known it was headed for disaster. We both made out with other people but realized after a while that we wanted to become “a real couple,” so we decided to be exclusive.

  It was all wrong from the beginning. He was a “leader of the pack” type. He had aggression issues and would fight just about anyone. We fell in love the high school way, with so much passion that our love for each other was equal only to our hate for each other. We’d spend the week screaming at each other on the phone and the weekends making out—behind closed doors.

  I fell hard but still planned to stick to my last value: that I wouldn’t have sex until I was married. He’d already had sex, though, and part of me wanted to be that connected to him. I believed he would never love me like he’d loved the girl he’d slept with if we didn’t have that same connection. And part of me believed that if I loved him, I should give myself to him. He never said this; he didn’t even pressure me. I pressured me. I pressured myself for the classic reasons that everyone says not to believe. All my friends were having sex with their boyfriends, and I started to believe it wasn’t the big deal I’d made it. We were doing everything besides having sex, so what would really change? Mostly, I just wanted to be loved. I pressured myself, because I didn’t think I was worth waiting for. I believed all the lies.

  My commitment not to have sex until marriage was made two years before I fell in love. Since I was always more concerned with having fun than with having a boyfriend, and since I had a tendency to make out with anyone who was around when I got really drunk, my relationships never lasted more than a few months. (Think Kelly Clarkson’s “Miss Independent.”) Hear this: I had every intention of keeping my virginity fully intact, but when you’ve abandoned so many of your long-held principles, it’s hard to remember why you should keep the last one. This is why teens crave internal boundaries: because these boundaries create a way to navigate through tough times. I didn’t have boundaries, though. My motto was “Anything goes,” and I lived my life in that manner. It didn’t matter what my parents thought or what anyone who really loved me thought; I lived my life for me and no one else.

  My parents had an inkling that my relationship was heading in this direction. My dad started to talk to me about making better decisions and realizing that my actions would have consequences. I didn’t believe in consequences, though, because the only consequences I had faced so far had come from my parents, and to me they were enemies. I believed that if my parents would just leave me alone and let me live my life, then I would be consequence free and happy. Luckily for me, they wouldn’t. They refused to take the easy route and stick their heads in the sand. They refused to brush off my rebellion as a part of growing up, and instead showed an intense love for me despite my hatred—a Christlike love.

  My mom saw the classic signs that I was in love, and because she taught abstinence classes at the time, she told me lots of statistics about sex. But statistics didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t care if most teen girls lost their virginity in their boyfriends’ basements. Knowing that didn’t stop my deep desire; it only gave me knowledge that had no effect on my behavior. My mom was great at telling me the reasons sex was wrong, but not great at telling me why sex was made for marriage. In classes, she taught the biological part of sex but not the feeling part of sex, and I lived my life based on my feelings. Statistics were her way of trying to caution me, but cold facts didn’t change anything for me. My friends would laugh and say that obviously my mom’s teaching made no impact—we’d all been through the same class together and it hadn’t convinced any of us to be abstinent.

  Looking back, I think what could have changed something for me was my mother’s own story of heartbreak. What might have changed me was hearing that we’re all tempted, that desire is real, that young love is powerful. But by this time I was already on the express train headed for disaster.

  I started to wrestle with the idea of sleeping with my boyfriend, and I went to the only person I could talk to about my issues: my sister-in-law, Kerri. She sat with me in Starbucks and begged me not to do this. She told me story after story of people getting hurt because they had sex before marriage. She used logic and reason, and she left religion out of it, so I listened. But my heart was hardening to
the idea of waiting. She told me later that there was something different in my eyes that day, like the life had been drained from me. I remember feeling just that, stuck at a crossroads with no real guidance. I was begging for direction, but I wanted to be happy—and wouldn’t this make me happy?

  The truth is, this relationship was different from any I’d been in before. I fell harder than I thought I could and suddenly couldn’t remember why I didn’t want to have sex. The idea seemed even better when I was drinking, which was most nights. I’d get drunk and forget why I’d promised myself to wait. Two months into our relationship, we were “in love” and crossing physical boundaries I thought I’d never cross outside marriage. Suddenly my commitment to wait until marriage felt really far away, and this opportunity was right in front of me.

  Sin often involves yielding to a temptation of the senses. It promises instant gratification if you trade in long-term satisfaction. I could feel good right away if I traded in a marriage of purity. I tried to convince myself it wasn’t that big a deal. And when I was drunk, which was often, it felt like something I really wanted. I knew we wouldn’t get married, but I also knew what I felt was very real. I knew he really cared about me, and I really cared about him. When we were together, I felt like I was a part of something bigger than myself. I felt like this stage of our lives would never end, that high school would just melt into college and that we’d all be friends forever. I didn’t let myself think past tomorrow or the next day. I loved fighting with him almost as much as I loved making up with him, because it showed me someone wanted to fight for me. I was on cloud nine when we were together, and it didn’t matter what my parents or anyone else thought. I could see he wasn’t the best choice. I could see we weren’t meant for forever, but the now felt so good.