Climbing the Ladder
To Love
by
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I think most girls grow up wanting to fall in love, get married, and have a family. The order in which this dreams appears is a totally different story. As young women, we all look for every man as a prospect for marriage or we search for the perfect man. We find out years later that there is no such thing as a perfect man; nevertheless, we go through years and years of turmoil and ache and pain thinking we can find him. Ruby was different. She realized at an early age that she was different because she always wanted different things out of life than her friends. They all wanted to marry the football stars and go off somewhere and get married. Ruby just wanted to have fun and be free. She learned later that same fun caused so much pain. Ruby was from a small town in Florida where her mother was a homemaker and her father was a Holy Ghost preacher who lived by the bible to every word. Ruby was a very sheltered child. When she was growing up, she went to school and church and had no social life so she made her own social life when her parents were not around. The sad part was she had a twin brother who because he was a boy could do anything he wanted to do, which led her to do what she wanted to do. The first time she had sex was one time she had beat her brother home from school and this boy in her class said he always wanted her and at that time, that was all she needed to hear so she laid down and let him have her. It hurt so badly that she thought he had to misunderstand her screaming for moaning. After that ordeal, Ruby came to the conclusion that sex was not for her and abstained for about six months but sex is like Lays potato chips, you can’t just do it one time because it haunts and tingles you. All through high school, Ruby felt the need to fit in because she was a preacher’s daughter, and she didn’t want to be labeled as a good girl so she did everything that any young teenager could imagine. At this age, Ruby just knew that she was having fun that was until she found herself 17 about to graduate from high school pregnant. Ruby’s parents always thought she was a good girl because all her dirty work was done undercover so how could she tell them that their angel was pregnant. She didn’t know how to tell them so she didn’t. Months and months passed and she was getting bigger and bigger so she decided to wear a girdle and carried on her normal activities. But when you come from a small town, there are no secrets and it got out soon that Ruby was pregnant but she denied until she had her son, Daniel, seven months later. Having a child changed the way Ruby felt about life and especially her life. Toward the end of the pregnancy, her mother found out because she became very sick. After thinking she was going to die from childbirth, Ruby started connecting to God and asking him for the first time in her life for help. Ruby made it through and she and the baby were okay. She was so horrified that she wanted to get away and by the grace of God, her mother said she would keep her son while she went off to school so when her son was three months old, she left home and went to school in Texas. Ruby felt she needed this therapy to find out what she wanted in life. Leaving home was definitely therapy because when she got to school, she saw and did things she never thought she would see and do.
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About the Book
Climbing the Ladder to Love
About the Author
She is the daughter of Elder Dave and Annie Jackson of Camilla, Georgia. She is the mother of two children: Desirae and Byron. She has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English from Albany State University. She is currently an English teacher at Albany Technical College in Albany, Georgia She has several unpublished manuscripts relating to the struggle of African-American women and African Americans in the south, but decided to write about love, which is also a struggle for African-American women. She has edited several novels for publication and has worked for newspapers as a copy editor and as a reporter