My name is Shannon and this is my story. It may be similar to yours or it may seem to you like make believe, but I assure you it is all too real and I certainly lived every moment of it. Please listen with an open heart and understand that the ending is still in the making.

I was born in 1975, the daughter of a prostitute. I have no idea of the truth behind my conception and birth. You see my mother has lied to me so many times about the story that the truth is something only God Almighty knows. For most of my life I believed this is the way it took place and this is the version I'll share with you.

As I have already said my mother was a prostitute; she slept with many different men. For 28 years this is the story that was passed down to me. When my mother discovered she was pregnant with me she told David (the father I knew) that she wanted to have an abortion. He gave her the money for the procedure; she took the money and left town, going back to stay with her parents until my arrival. After I was born, she left me with her parents and went back to the life of prostitution she had known before me. My mother spent the next nine years lying to me about who my father was, and my dad went on with his life not knowing I even existed.

When I was a couple years old my mother began working in a strip club. I suppose to her it was a step up from actually having sex, and she saw it as a good move up the ladder. With the job also came a new romantic relationship-she became the owners mistress (I say that because he was married and stayed married for the next 10 years or so while living with my mother). His name was C.B. and since I was so young when he came into the picture, he had a huge impact on my life.

My mother soon became the manager of his strip club, and I was introduced to the world of GO-GO. Because I still lived with my grandparents, I didn't spend a lot of time with my mother, but when I did stay with her most of our time was spent inside the club. I would stay in the office while she was working, and thanks to a two-way mirror, I was able to watch everything that went on in the club.

I remember the summer I was 5 very well. I spent the entire summer with my mother and this meant I spent a lot of time inside of the club. During this time C.B. had a very serious drinking problem, and he and my mother fought all of the time. I don't know what they fought over, I only knew he screamed and cussed at her and she cried so much.

This same summer I got to know all of the employees at the strip club very well, especially the dancers. They fascinated me-they seemed to be so beautiful-and I loved watching them dance. I would sit for hours as each one performed. I thought it was normal for women to take their clothes off in front of men. My mother told me it was okay; she filled my head with the belief that this life was perfectly normal and that all men enjoyed this type of entertainment, and that all men could have a wife and a girlfriend and it was fine; this was simply human nature.

After that summer was over I went back to momma and daddy (that's what I called my grandparents) and back to a completely normal world. My grandparents were opposite from my mother and her boyfriend. Daddy was a truck driver and momma stayed at home with me. They never screamed at one another and they had a basic but happy life.

And so my life followed a pattern of spending the school year with my grandparents where life was stable and settled, and spending summers and Christmas vacation with my mother and C.B. in a world of confusion and chaos.

Now, let me tell you about my father. He came from a wealthy family and that is why my mother told me she hid me from him. She claimed to be afraid he would take me away from her, so for nine years she allowed him to believe I had been aborted and simply avoided answering my questions about him altogether. Finally, the summer I was 9 she gave in and took me to meet him.

I remember sitting in a Waffle House restaurant and watching him get out of a black corvette. I did not take to him at all. I didn't know how-he and I were strangers, and all of a sudden he was supposed to be my Dad. I was so attached to my grandfather, I'd always known him as Daddy, and I was confused about making room for another one. I wanted a father and had been asking who mine was for several years, but now that I was face to face with him, I had no idea how to react.

But he tried very hard. From the moment he met me he accepted me and wanted to be a part of my life. I know now that I was very blessed that he even cared. As I grew older our relationship grew as well and when he passed away in 2000, he had earned my respect, friendship, and love. I never blamed him for not being in my life early on. I blame my mother for that. She held all the cards and simply made a poor decision. From the moment my father met me, he did his best to be my friend, and so he became my father.

When I was 7, my mother adopted a little girl from one of her dancers. This was heartbreaking for me. I was so jealous. I didn't understand how my mother could "pick out a new baby, but hadn't kept me". To this day I haven't resolved this issue. I was her flesh and blood, but Sonya was her pride and joy. We were raised completely different. Sonya hardly came to the clubs. My mother said it was because she was adopted and someone might take her away if they knew she was around the businesses. So Sonya had a nanny and wasn't exposed to quite as much as I was.

My mother began to tell me when I was very small that one day I would take over for her. She expected me to be the next owner of the club after she retired. When I was 5 I was given money for setting the tables (I would put an ashtray, matches, and napkins on the tables). When I was about 12 I learned how to tally up the worksheets. I could change a keg when I was 15, and at this time I also began going to the bank on Saturdays. I would come in before the club opened and fill the registers for the weekend. At 17 I worked the door on some weekends, checking ID. Most of the time I was allowed to keep the cover charge to go on shopping trips.

I struggled a lot with the issue of moral verses immoral while I was growing up. You see on one side my mother was Jezebel incarnate, and on the other hand I had always gone to Catholic schools where I had learned about God and Jesus. I knew right from wrong, but I lived in a state of confusion because I thought, surely my mother couldn't be going to hell for what she did. It was supposed to be okay, and all men enjoyed this-it was human nature. I tried to confront my mother about her life of sin once or twice, only to be grounded and told sin money paid for my education and put food in my belly.

Finally I reached a point of "if you can't beat 'em, join em,' so I gave up on the God thing and went after the money thing. That is a very sad thing to have to admit now, but it is a part of my life and God knows. He allowed all of this to be in my life for a reason, and even though I don't understand it, He has always known what was going to happen.

When I was 14, I left my grandparents and moved in with my mother and C.B. By this time they had become fairly wealthy, having one of the most popular strip clubs in Birmingham. In my eyes they had arrived, and my poor grandparents just couldn't compete. They gave me love and were always there for me emotionally, but I was growing up and became interested in boys and clothes, and my grandparents couldn't give me what my mother could.

This move brought me even closer to the strip clubs. As I mentioned earlier, I began going to the bank on Saturdays when I was 15 and came into the club often for various reasons. I was even allowed to come to the dance contests to see the special showgirls. Several times a year my parents would have a feature dancer and I always watched them perform. I saw women dance with snakes, fire, and in feather-covered costumes, and all of this before I was 18.

Naturally, when I was 18, I went along with the plan and a couple of weeks after graduation became the new day-shift manager. It was the summer of 1993 and I was so excited-I was in charge of a nightclub and wasn't even old enough to legally be in the club at all.

My first few days were kind of hard and confusing. I knew how to do every thing except deal with a drunk man or a high dancer. Some of the employees took to me right away because they had known me most of my life. You see the waitresses were all former dancers, and most of the bartenders had worked for my mother for years.

But the dancers were a different story. They tended to be rude and competitive, and I don't think they liked the fact that I was so young. After a few months, however, they began to accept me, and before long I became just like them-rude and obnoxious. I think I boded with a lot of the employees because of my drug use. I had been partying since I was about 15, so being 18 and in a club was so cool.

I discovered cocaine within the first few days of being at work, and that started a roller-coaster ride that took years to get off. I also realized that working as a manager at the club was an open pass to other nightclubs in town. I suppose people assumed I was 21 and I was hardly ever carded. If I ever did need ID, it was never a problem; someone would always find me one. I was still so young, but here I was snorting cocaine and drinking whenever I wanted. For the next 3 years I was doing exactly what I wanted, and no one dared tell me to slow down.

I managed the club for that first year, but when I turned 19 I wanted to dance. I had been around this all of my life, and as I already mentioned, the dancers fascinated me. I wanted to do what they did. And after all the years of playing on the pole before the club opened, I knew all of those tricks. So the weekend I turned 19, I hit the stage, and I had no fear or shame. Unlike many of the other dancers who had to do a line or a shot of liquor to get up their nerve, all I wanted was to dance. To a normal mind it might seem like insanity, but to me this was where I was raised to be.

I danced for about a year, and in that time my cocaine habit grew and grew. I found myself coming in just to get the money to get high. There was no doubt I had an addiction and it was wearing at every part of my life. I had no friends except other employees and a few customers, and I associated mostly with the homosexual community. Straight men seemed to disgust me by this time. The gay guys were always making over me and there was nothing sexual about it, so I enjoyed their company. I had become what this lifestyle makes almost everyone, a monster of sorts.

Luckily burnout began to set in, and about this same time I met a "real" man. He had come into the club to see his roommate, who was the DJ, and I thought he was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen. There was only one problem-he didn't really like strippers. He was the first man to make me feel embarrassed about what I was doing.

Soon I quit dancing and went back to managing, and he and I started a relationship. He wanted me to quit working there completely, but this was my life; it took a while for him to help me change. I continued to work as a manager for the next couple of years until I discovered I was pregnant. This changed everything.

Remember I mentioned having gone to Christian schools, and I knew who God and Jesus were. I knew that I was living in complete contradiction to what the Bible said, but I had tried the God thing once before and it didn't seem to work. But the thought of bringing another life into the world I was raised in scared me senseless. I had no intention of allowing my child to grow up the way I had, and the only way to ensure my child's life would be different, was to truly let God have control. Don't misunderstand me, I had no over night miracle, and God is still working out many of my issues, but from the second I asked Him to put the puzzle together, He went right to work. He gave me the ability to leave cocaine alone, and for anyone who has ever had a drug problem, they know that has to be God. I gave birth to a perfect and beautiful baby girl, and from the moment she was put in my arms, I knew I would never be the same. I had someone who depended on me, and she deserved a mother.

That little girl is now 6 and she has a brother that is three. I am still married to the "real" man that rescued me, and I could not ask for more. My life is not perfect, but no one's life is. I have my good days and my bad, but my God has been ever so faithful. He has delivered me from so many things: depression, drugs, pornography, and countless other things. He has given me a new heart and a new mind. He has given me self-respect and the ability to hold my head high without being high. He has been my strength when I had none and my hope when all my hope was gone. I know who I am in Jesus and that I was created to praise God not exploit myself. I am still a work in progress, but this new life is a whole lot easier than the one I lived for 23 years before.

If you are like I was, know this... the God thing does work. He will give you everything you need to have a different life. Even if you have to leave family, friends, and everything that may be familiar, He is so worth it. He will never disappoint you if you truly give Him control. And He will change you, as He sees fit, in His time. You don't have to do a thing except come to Him with an open heart-He does the rest. He doesn't say change first and then come to me. No, He says come to me and I will give you rest. And He will.

If He can change me when I was raised and "programmed "to be the next Jezebel, He can change you as well. Fall on your face and let Him have it all. It's not like you've been hiding anything from Him. He has seen it all and you aren't a disappointment to Him. He specializes in doing great things with what seem like horrible people. I promise, He is ready for you if you are ready to let Him have your heart.