A Song For Ally (Part 4 of 6)
In the last episode: "Jimmy. I think maybe some of Ally's secrets are kind of your business. You would never know it by her behavior, but I'm pretty sure Ally thinks you are a very special guy."
I almost laughed. "No way. That's just fan stuff. She loves our music and the idea of me being kind of a rock star, although I'm really not."
Joanie looked me straight in the eye. "Will you listen to me for a few minutes?"
I nodded. "Sure."
Joanie took a deep breath and sighed, apparently in preparation for what she was about to tell me. "Jimmy, Ally was orphaned when she was only about three years old. Her folks just dumped her off at the county child welfare center and disappeared. So you could say Ally learned about rejection early in her life."
Shaking my head, I said, "Oh, swell."
"But that's not the worst of it. While the county tried to find her folks, they placed Ally in foster homes. Because of some technicality, the county never put her up for adoption, and she ended up spending most of her life until she was eighteen being bounced from one foster home to another.
"That was bad enough, but on top of it all, the mother in the last home she was in abused Ally terribly. It wasn't physical abuse, it was mental. I'm guessing she was jealous of Ally's looks or something and for eight years the woman told Ally over and over she was ugly and worthless and stupid."
"Why on earth didn't the family send her back to the county if they didn't like her?"
"I sometimes think the foster mother actually enjoyed mistreating Ally, but there is another reason they kept her. There can be good money in foster parenting these days, especially if you have more than one kid in the house. In Ally's case there was an older foster sister, and when that sister finally got out of the house for good, she went straight to the county and told them how Ally was being treated. The county looked into it, decided the story was true, and removed Ally from the home."
By this time I was in a state of amazement. "Good! Thank God for the older sister!"
"Thank you. I guess it won't hurt anything at this point for you to know that I am Ally's older foster sister."
"Wow."
"Yeah, and to make a long and awful story shorter, Ally stayed on at the county until she was eighteen, and then they tossed her out. Ally came to live with me then and we found her this terrific job as a commercial artist's apprentice. Ally has super artistic talents. Back in the bad days, she used to make herself feel better by drawing pretty pictures in a sketchbook. They were beautiful.
"Anyway, the bottom line to all of this is Ally's sense of self-worth—her self-esteem—is practically nonexistent. She honestly believes she's ugly and worthless. She is finally getting some help from a therapist, but she still has a very hard time accepting that she might be pretty and smart and that a good man would want to be around her."
I shook my head again. "Well, this is one man who definitely wants to be around her."
Joanie stared at me for a moment. "Even after hearing about her life?"
"Especially after hearing about her life."
Joanie smiled. "Jimmy Bishop, I think I like you. Now all you have to do is find a way to make Ally believe you think she's special and you want to know her."
"I don't know how to do that yet, but I will find a way."
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Story and design © Steve Eitzen
Header graphic & HPO logo © HPO Productions
Character images © 123RF Used by license
Fear of rejection is one of the most difficult challenges to overcome - You handled this well, HP :)
When I started reading, I thought, "Oh crap, I was right!"
Luckily I was not. But it is almost as bad, for people who do not believe they are worthy of being loved, even when loved find an excuse so as to prove it is not true. I'm looking forward to seeing how you deal with it.