Jillian Rue

He was the head pastor. He later would tell me about how he was just an associate pastor in Ohio, but the church he was at there wanted to plant a church in Tampa, and so they chose him and a few other members to go to Tampa and open this church. It was beautiful, big, contemporary, relatable, and all the things I’d been aching for in a church.

I wasn’t there for religious purposes though, I was there to take a class called Empowered to Connect, about being able to connect with your adopted child. My husband and I had just been through a terrible time in our family life where he’d been removed from the home, due to some terrible parenting choices, and this was our amends, or try to make it look like we were amending. I wanted out. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was not going to be able to get over what had happened in our family, and that it was irreversibly broken. My husband was more hopeful than I, or maybe more prideful and didn’t want to be seen as a failure. I am not sure, whatever it was, we were there to learn how to parent a child like our son.

We were sitting in what was the known as the youth room. On a bunch of mismatched couches that would become the safe haven for teens who needed a bit of respite. Tonight, and every Tuesday night for the next 7 weeks, instead of teens on the couches, it was a mismatched bunch of weary adoptive parents. I was sitting next to my husband who possessively kept a hand on me at all times. Then in walks E. I should mention it wasn’t a walk, it was a bounce. He bounced on his toes, with his backpack on his back. Here was a man dressed in a collared button-down shirt, dress slacks, and the most beautiful grey hair. He had a smile that lit up his entire face, and with that business attire; he wore a backpack and tennis shoes. Such an odd duck. But I was at once drawn to not just him, but the woman he sat next to. She was thin as thin as rice paper. If you touched her, she might melt away, but she also seemed full of spunk.

Over the next 7 weeks, I learned that they’d adopted their son from China, and it was E.’s idea and his wife had wanted none of that. It sounded so very familiar to me. I felt pushed into the adoption of our son, and now my family was falling apart due to that push. But here was E. Meyer and his wife, slugging it out. Making it look effortless.

We formed a friendship during that time in the class together. His wife was less keen on the idea of friendship, but that seemed to just be her personality. E. was IN IT. He wanted to be the best of friends with our family. I was skeptical. I told him up front that I did not have a good relationship with my father, and so I was always looking for a dad. I told him that I was nervous about having a man in my life in any role because I’d previously tried male relationships and they always went sideways. He assured me that he was safe and would love me in the ways that I deserved to be loved, but that he wouldn’t just love me. He would love my whole family.

I wanted that so desperately for them. My husband was weary. He’d already gone through a Pastor who’d fallen in love with me and asked me to leave my husband to be with him. He wasn’t about to play this movie on repeat. But I was naïve, aching for love that didn’t hurt. I

It wasn’t long before E. started to ask me to help him with his sermons, or to meet him at coffee shops to go over the topic for the next week. He said he admired my writing and that I should really help him with his. It felt odd, because he was so much older and had a real career. Why would he want the help of a stay at home mom in her late 20’s to help him write sermons? He’d been writing them since before I was born. I enjoyed the attention he gave me, and I played into what he asked me.

Not long after the coffee shop meetings started, he asked me to go out side the shop with him so he could tell me something privately. I did. I sat there as he told me that he was developing feelings for me, and not feelings like a father should have for a daughter. He told me that we’d have to end our meetings, and that was the right thing to do. I was livid. Beyond livid. I called him a coward, I spit out the venom intended only for my biological father, and he took it. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he apologized to me for not being a stronger man, but he wanted to do the right thing. So, we couldn’t meet anymore. I left there thinking that was the end.

Really it was just the beginning of the game of cat and mouse that would last for 8 more years. He’d tell me he could be strong, set boundaries, blow them up, feel horrible, discard me, and then come crawling back. Over and over, and I let it happen.

During this 8 year stint-I’d divorced by husband, lose E.’s baby, married my new husband, moved across the country, had another child, gotten full custody of my four biological children, and unadopted my adopted son…mine has been a busy life, made no less chaotic by my relationship with E.

He would vow to leave me alone and that we would be better off never speaking again, but then I would get a card in the mail about how he loved me and wanted to be with me. It always came back to the same conclusion. He knew that we were wrong together, and he couldn’t ever let his family know about me. He was a Pastor of a large church, after all.

After I divorced my husband, E. got me pregnant. He offered to pay for an abortion, but I lost the baby before I needed one. He grieved that loss for years, and I was thankful for it. What would I have done? Let him continue to go on living as though he actually was what he said he was, as I died inside protecting his image? I asked him to let me go.

He would. But then he would circle back. I even moved away, but he would send the most romantic letters to me. It wasn’t all him. I was enraptured by his love. It was so full. Good. Kind. Perfect. The love part. Not the sex. I hated that part. But it felt like sex was the price I paid to keep that Good/Kind/Perfect love. So, I did it. I would occasionally try to tell him that I didn’t really enjoy that part of us, but all he would hear is that he wasn’t desirable and I should go be with someone else.

When his wife got cancer, we were on our longest break. It had been a couple years since we’d spoken, and it was the middle of the Pandemic. He texted me.

“Come to me. I need you.”

And I flew out to him. Like a moth to a flame. I loved him. He loved me. Neither of us could decide who was the moth and who was the flame.

She died, and then he got cancer.

“Meet me in the mountains of Georgia. I need you.”

I went. My new husband while he hated this relationship I had with E. knew that to demand I give it up would be the end of our relationship, so he chose to let me go. I’d never hidden from him this ugly part of my past.

Georgia was a bitter-sweet time.

He was dying, as the cancer was aggressive and the treatments were not working. We talked about what he wanted for the end of his life. And he told me that this would be my last time seeing him. We had to end, because he didn’t want me around when he passed. He didn’t want his grown children to know about me.

Again, I called him a coward. Again, I unleashed my venom on him. But this time, he would have none of it. He drew a line in the proverbial sand, and I was determined to cross it.

As he got weaker, he would call me. The time in Georgia wasn’t the last time. I would fly out to see him and spend time with him, even as he lay in the hospital, I was there. He would feel better for a weekend but then sink quickly as his white blood cell count increases. Then the day of reckoning came.

He called me and, on the call, I lost him. I hung up, and called 911, and then his son. I told him to get to his father as fast as he could because I feared he was dying.

I was about 15% sure that E. was really unable to communicate with me, the other 85% didn’t know if E. was being dramatic, but I DID know that I was done with whatever game this was. I wanted to be his end of life plan. I wanted to be his everything, and if he wasn’t going to give me that…I was going to blow this shit out of the water.

I did in the most gloriously horrific kind of way.

After the dust settled, and E. got furious with me for calling an ambulance. His son called me to ask questions, and I answered them beyond what he asked, and with videos and pictures to back it up. It was grewsome.

E. Meyer was always dramatic, so I never knew if things were really as bad as he said they were. But this, this undoing of his, it must have been bad. I know that I am good, and loving, gentle and kind…until I am hurt. And then, I am someone you wish you never met. And I can say that E. Meyer likely now wishes he’d never met me. I damn near destroyed him…but what I wrestle with…is did I? Or was he, his own undoing? He was 26 years my senior, a Pastor, and schooled in what vulnerable women look like/act like and how to be around them. Yet, he still did what he did. He messed with my head and heart for 8 years, and expected that I would just slip off into the night to protect his image, with no thought of the torture he’d done to me.

Was it vindictive to call his son and the ambulance? Or was it just that I was done? I wanted out, and this was our mutually assured destruction.

Yes, I was his undoing, but he lit the match and poured the gasoline…we both burned.

E. Meyer and I lasted from the spring of 2016 until August of 2023. 8 years in and out chaos. I am so glad it’s over for good now.

E. Meyer got remarried this last March, to a woman I know he’s always been fond of. I know he treats her far better than he did me or his first wife. I heard once that you have three great loves in your life. Your first love, the one that destroys you, and the one that heals you. I hope she heals all the hurting parts of him, or he heals them in himself.

That burn left scars, but it also left me wiser.

The Pastor taught me to be as a cunning as a snake, and as innocent as a dove. Thank you, E. I keep my eyes wide open now.