Beginnings Are Always Shaky
I have been having a bit of a hard time figuring out what to post as my first entry under "True Stories." I wanted to start the category off with a pleasant and enjoyable note, but all the memories that are springing to mind are stories vivid in detail yet dwindling morosely and disturbingly down twists and turns of some sort until melancholy is at least hinted at, which is not how I want to season this new venture for which I am so abundantly enthused. Such is the reason why I have not made my first entry despite my immense level of fervor surrounding the project. ... until now. "True Stories" is supposed to be real, right? So why try to be anything but exactly that. I do not suppose God intends for us minister out of contrived stories which we think might have some nice three point sermonette-of-a-ring to it. Instead, I'll be honest, blatantly...
My aunt recently sent me a package filled with old pictures from my childhood. She's not really my aunt. She's my cousin, but she was always much older than me, and acted toward me more like an aunt, and I called her Aunt V. I loved my Aunt V. She paid so much attention to me; we had special games we played together every time I would visit my grandparents. All the other adults would consume themselves in their conversations and cooking; Aunt V. would consume herself in me. I hated that due to location, so many of my dearest family, like Aunt V. were unable to have any part in my wedding. It still saddens me today. They were such a large portion of my early years.
When I got the pictures and began thumbing through them, I was all smiles, remembering, laughing, seeing the faces of people who seemed happy, but as we started to grow-up in the pictures, our faces changed. I do not mean our faces matured; I mean our demeanor changed. I watched my mother's face change. You can almost see the despair taking over her eyes, the hopelessness overcoming her. I watched my father's face in the pictures become darker, more set on proving his own way and more consumed with 'winning' the battle against mom. And I looked at the faces of my little brother and myself. I knew what was behind my eyes, and I ached for that 13-year-old girl. Her family had no idea....no idea. No one did. She had no one to tell really, at least not in her house-hold. Maybe she could have told Aunt V., but the thought never came to her mind. By that point, the battle lines her parents had drawn had already trapped her in rules about who she could and could not trust, could and could not love. She was paralyzed in more ways than one yet forced to keep moving. The only way she knew to move was away, and she moved in slow motion. No one in the direction of 'away' knew her or loved her though, so the further away she moved, the more new dangers awaited. And then there was her/my little brother, still only in elementary school, not even equipped with the ability to abstract think, and his world as he was attempting to grasp it was being shattered. He never got to understand the world for the first time. Psychologists say kids, by the time they are in the 5th grade, see all things in black and white and understand things as right and wrong. The world makes sense to them. Then hormones come in and switch things up, and they have to 'find' themselves all over again. My little brother never got to have a world that made sense to him. By the time he was in 5th grade, he was in the middle of a personal hellish war, and he was a pawn in it.
So I started the process of thumbing through the pictures with a smile, but I ended it with a very stern face. The pictures end in middle school. There are none after that. I did not see Aunt V. after that, and had I, no one would have smiled for a picture. Although I am not bitter, I do realize now that what my siblings and I endured is something we never should have had to endure. I won't get into Mom and Dad and who was right or wrong and whether they should have had to endure it- that's too much for one post. I do not 'blame' them in the sense that I want them to 'pay' or 'make it up' to my siblings or me. But I am seeing more clearly now as I grow up and untangle hosts of spiderwebs filled with lies. These are webs that I've rested tangled in for most of my life without even the knowledge that I was one caught.
When my parents' marriage reached the point of going to hell, pretty much everything in life changed. It's hard to explain exactly the atmosphere and why I feel hell is an adequate word to describe it. One attempt would be the example that the court judge ordered my father to leave the house because the environment of my parents together was too dangerous for us children. Another example would be that for a time, I never knew if I'd come home to amenities working or not because mom and dad would argue over whose turn it was to pay the bill. I think they both probably had (or could have gathered) the money to pay them, but they didn't. We lost water the day of my class ring ceremony because Dad said Mom was supposed to pay the bill. She said she couldn't. He had it password protected, and she said it was him who was supposed to pay it. He denied that. I just remember crying on the phone with him and begging him to pay it so that I could shower and go to the ceremony. He wouldn't. We stayed at a hotel for a few days. I didn't go to the ceremony. I'm not sure how the water got turned back on.
Then there was the fact that after we moved out of our house with half of the belongings we were allowed to take with us, Dad contested and said that he wanted the things Mom took and that he didn't want the things she left. She did take more of the nicer things I suppose; she said she took them for us. We had switch everything around again, and it had to be filmed on camera so that the lawyers could make sure not a single knick-knack was lost in the process. Apparently many items were lost, though. They still argue about them till this day. I remember staring into the camera at one point during the moving day and telling my dad I hated him. I needed someone to hate. He was the easiest and most obvious then.
Anyway, my point is that when my parent's marriage reached this point, EVERYTHING changed, even my relationship with other family members. I didn't see Aunt V. anymore really; hence, no more pictures with her. For a long time, I didn't even know what she thought of us. Mom told us that Dad said his family said some mean things about Mom. Granny told us that they never said them. I couldn't imagine them saying them, but I didn't know. Dad would never discuss it with me. I don't even remember all the specifics. Mom thought they hated her. I didn't want to go anywhere alone with Dad, so I didn't see them, but I missed them.
But maybe this is why, as I'm trying to remember good stories to put in my "True Stories" section, everything takes a dark twist. I don't think God intended for people to bind their lives together only then to rip one another to shreds as well as rip the lives they created apart. And that's what happened in our family, a lot of ripping apart. So most of the memories that started off good, for the most part, rest in my mind still...but rest ripped and torn and stained.
So you might not want to follow these "True Stories" posts. David, you might want to get rid of the "Megin Widget" on your phone. I intend to continue writing all this, but you most certainly do not have to subject yourself to it. Hopefully they won't all be as depressing as this, but this is just what I was realizing as I wracked my head the past day or so to figure out some memory that didn't lead me down a path that at least had some negative implication.
I'll leave you with these words of encouragement:
Who is this God who saves me? Who is this God who loves me so? Who is this God carried me through everything?
The Lord, King of Glory, strong and mighty and mighty in battle. (psalm 24:10)
The Lord who is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit (psalm 34:18)
If my life means nothing else, let it be a testament that it is possible to serve God, to love God, and to believe God even in the thickest and most perplexing of darkness. It is not always easy to serve, love, and believe Him in these times, but it is possible. It's possible to make it through to another side, to live to see another day even if you think you may be facing your last...we attribute far less to His grace than we should. Far more often we are upheld by it and do not even realize that. I'm thankful for a lot of things, and I still don't think I would want to change my life if I could. I mean, I might change some of the scenarios that went down, but I wouldn't want to change any of the people in my life. I want to keep them all, and so if all of the above is what I have to have gone through to have them and be able to give my love to them and enjoy them (when they are in moods that make them enjoyable that is), then I'll take it. I sure hope God continues to bring me through all the things that having been raised up in such tumultuous circumstances have set askew in me, and I hope and pray he does that for others too, like my incredible baby brother whom I adore so very deeply.
I hope "True Stories" will be raw, authentic, real, and show that out of weakness can COME strength. That from the ashes can rise beauty....Because either the abused and the depressed and the broken person has no place in ministry OR she has a very much needed place because she can relate in ways someone who has never been to the pit of Sheol cannot begin to comprehend. Jesus sweated drops of blood and hung on a cross and was rebuked and spit upon when he did nothing wrong and was God's perfect Son. And that is part of the very reason why He is acquainted with any grief we have. That is part of the reason why He was given the title "Man of Sorrows." And He was the greatest minister of all.
I'm headed to bed for now, but check back tomorrow afternoon, and I'll add a picture of Aunt V. and me to this post :). Good night all.
My aunt recently sent me a package filled with old pictures from my childhood. She's not really my aunt. She's my cousin, but she was always much older than me, and acted toward me more like an aunt, and I called her Aunt V. I loved my Aunt V. She paid so much attention to me; we had special games we played together every time I would visit my grandparents. All the other adults would consume themselves in their conversations and cooking; Aunt V. would consume herself in me. I hated that due to location, so many of my dearest family, like Aunt V. were unable to have any part in my wedding. It still saddens me today. They were such a large portion of my early years.
When I got the pictures and began thumbing through them, I was all smiles, remembering, laughing, seeing the faces of people who seemed happy, but as we started to grow-up in the pictures, our faces changed. I do not mean our faces matured; I mean our demeanor changed. I watched my mother's face change. You can almost see the despair taking over her eyes, the hopelessness overcoming her. I watched my father's face in the pictures become darker, more set on proving his own way and more consumed with 'winning' the battle against mom. And I looked at the faces of my little brother and myself. I knew what was behind my eyes, and I ached for that 13-year-old girl. Her family had no idea....no idea. No one did. She had no one to tell really, at least not in her house-hold. Maybe she could have told Aunt V., but the thought never came to her mind. By that point, the battle lines her parents had drawn had already trapped her in rules about who she could and could not trust, could and could not love. She was paralyzed in more ways than one yet forced to keep moving. The only way she knew to move was away, and she moved in slow motion. No one in the direction of 'away' knew her or loved her though, so the further away she moved, the more new dangers awaited. And then there was her/my little brother, still only in elementary school, not even equipped with the ability to abstract think, and his world as he was attempting to grasp it was being shattered. He never got to understand the world for the first time. Psychologists say kids, by the time they are in the 5th grade, see all things in black and white and understand things as right and wrong. The world makes sense to them. Then hormones come in and switch things up, and they have to 'find' themselves all over again. My little brother never got to have a world that made sense to him. By the time he was in 5th grade, he was in the middle of a personal hellish war, and he was a pawn in it.
So I started the process of thumbing through the pictures with a smile, but I ended it with a very stern face. The pictures end in middle school. There are none after that. I did not see Aunt V. after that, and had I, no one would have smiled for a picture. Although I am not bitter, I do realize now that what my siblings and I endured is something we never should have had to endure. I won't get into Mom and Dad and who was right or wrong and whether they should have had to endure it- that's too much for one post. I do not 'blame' them in the sense that I want them to 'pay' or 'make it up' to my siblings or me. But I am seeing more clearly now as I grow up and untangle hosts of spiderwebs filled with lies. These are webs that I've rested tangled in for most of my life without even the knowledge that I was one caught.
When my parents' marriage reached the point of going to hell, pretty much everything in life changed. It's hard to explain exactly the atmosphere and why I feel hell is an adequate word to describe it. One attempt would be the example that the court judge ordered my father to leave the house because the environment of my parents together was too dangerous for us children. Another example would be that for a time, I never knew if I'd come home to amenities working or not because mom and dad would argue over whose turn it was to pay the bill. I think they both probably had (or could have gathered) the money to pay them, but they didn't. We lost water the day of my class ring ceremony because Dad said Mom was supposed to pay the bill. She said she couldn't. He had it password protected, and she said it was him who was supposed to pay it. He denied that. I just remember crying on the phone with him and begging him to pay it so that I could shower and go to the ceremony. He wouldn't. We stayed at a hotel for a few days. I didn't go to the ceremony. I'm not sure how the water got turned back on.
Then there was the fact that after we moved out of our house with half of the belongings we were allowed to take with us, Dad contested and said that he wanted the things Mom took and that he didn't want the things she left. She did take more of the nicer things I suppose; she said she took them for us. We had switch everything around again, and it had to be filmed on camera so that the lawyers could make sure not a single knick-knack was lost in the process. Apparently many items were lost, though. They still argue about them till this day. I remember staring into the camera at one point during the moving day and telling my dad I hated him. I needed someone to hate. He was the easiest and most obvious then.
Anyway, my point is that when my parent's marriage reached this point, EVERYTHING changed, even my relationship with other family members. I didn't see Aunt V. anymore really; hence, no more pictures with her. For a long time, I didn't even know what she thought of us. Mom told us that Dad said his family said some mean things about Mom. Granny told us that they never said them. I couldn't imagine them saying them, but I didn't know. Dad would never discuss it with me. I don't even remember all the specifics. Mom thought they hated her. I didn't want to go anywhere alone with Dad, so I didn't see them, but I missed them.
But maybe this is why, as I'm trying to remember good stories to put in my "True Stories" section, everything takes a dark twist. I don't think God intended for people to bind their lives together only then to rip one another to shreds as well as rip the lives they created apart. And that's what happened in our family, a lot of ripping apart. So most of the memories that started off good, for the most part, rest in my mind still...but rest ripped and torn and stained.
So you might not want to follow these "True Stories" posts. David, you might want to get rid of the "Megin Widget" on your phone. I intend to continue writing all this, but you most certainly do not have to subject yourself to it. Hopefully they won't all be as depressing as this, but this is just what I was realizing as I wracked my head the past day or so to figure out some memory that didn't lead me down a path that at least had some negative implication.
I'll leave you with these words of encouragement:
Who is this God who saves me? Who is this God who loves me so? Who is this God carried me through everything?
The Lord, King of Glory, strong and mighty and mighty in battle. (psalm 24:10)
The Lord who is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit (psalm 34:18)
If my life means nothing else, let it be a testament that it is possible to serve God, to love God, and to believe God even in the thickest and most perplexing of darkness. It is not always easy to serve, love, and believe Him in these times, but it is possible. It's possible to make it through to another side, to live to see another day even if you think you may be facing your last...we attribute far less to His grace than we should. Far more often we are upheld by it and do not even realize that. I'm thankful for a lot of things, and I still don't think I would want to change my life if I could. I mean, I might change some of the scenarios that went down, but I wouldn't want to change any of the people in my life. I want to keep them all, and so if all of the above is what I have to have gone through to have them and be able to give my love to them and enjoy them (when they are in moods that make them enjoyable that is), then I'll take it. I sure hope God continues to bring me through all the things that having been raised up in such tumultuous circumstances have set askew in me, and I hope and pray he does that for others too, like my incredible baby brother whom I adore so very deeply.
I hope "True Stories" will be raw, authentic, real, and show that out of weakness can COME strength. That from the ashes can rise beauty....Because either the abused and the depressed and the broken person has no place in ministry OR she has a very much needed place because she can relate in ways someone who has never been to the pit of Sheol cannot begin to comprehend. Jesus sweated drops of blood and hung on a cross and was rebuked and spit upon when he did nothing wrong and was God's perfect Son. And that is part of the very reason why He is acquainted with any grief we have. That is part of the reason why He was given the title "Man of Sorrows." And He was the greatest minister of all.
I'm headed to bed for now, but check back tomorrow afternoon, and I'll add a picture of Aunt V. and me to this post :). Good night all.
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| Aunt V and me next to the field by Grandmama and Granddaddy's |
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| Playing our "drawing pictures" game while the adults talked "grown up" talk |
Comments
My dearest baby sister - you make me cry as I read this. Perhaps if I had ever known that you hurt our relationship would have been so very different. Yet you never showed this. You were always the strong one. The one seemingly unaffected by our surroundings and oblivious to our circumstances - which I found annoying while at the same time being jealous of. However, I would like to share a secret of mine with you concerning memories.
I am an extremely analytical person. I will analyze and reanalyze a situtation until I understand every possible aspect or outcome. I cross every t and dot every i. I pay extra special attention to details and expect nothing but perfection of myself and of those with whom I work - although I have found this to be an unrealistic expectation, it is something that comes naturally to me. This however, is my real life. When it comes to memories.....I am very different. If I think of a bad memory I immediately shut it out except on two occasions. 1)If I am in a melancholy mood and want to remember - knowing it will end in tears and a headache. I do this occasionally for several reasons. I believe there is something to be learned from youth the Lord chose for me plus my therapist has told me in the past that it helps to come to terms with my realities. 2)If it is a situtation that I have been praying about or have been seeking the 'truth' of. This happens most often about things from when I was young and do not remember the context of the situation or know that as a child my context is most likely skewed.
HOWEVER, when I have good memory from childhood. I rarely venture to far into the memory. The good memory is usually triggered by something in my life (as are the bad ones) most often to do with something Franklin does or says. I take that good memory, thank God for circumstances and emotions, and do not allow my mind to venture any further. Sometimes, I am aware of the 'rest of the story' I just choose to not actively remember it. Venturing too far into memory usually destroys the mood or provides a perspective I would rather of not been aware of. While my therapist would most likely be dissapointed, this practice has allowed me to have many more good memories than I once did. It allows me to have good memories of dad as well as mom. Of pre their marriage and after. Of pre their divorce and after.
Nevertheless, whatever can be said of our childhood, despite all of the hurtful memories I have, despite the fact I never had the family/father I so desperately wanted, I do not regret my life or wish it different. My philosophy is that if I believe in Jesus and the promises of Bible then I must also believe that the God who knew me before I was in my mothers womb and the God that has great plans to for my life and to prosper me in him, also chose/knew my parents, childhood, and circumstances. Thus, just as there is a purpose behind all good there is a purpose to be found behind all bad.
The persons for whom my heart truly breaks are mom and dad. Mom has so much guilt about our circumstances that it has stifled her relationship with God and so much anger toward dad for not loving her the way she believed he would that she continues to live in depression, and so much anger toward God for her belief that she was mislead that she misses any possible good of the situation in current life path. And dad has so much discontent for women that he never realized that a wonderful woman truly loved him, and so much pride that he continues to walk down a dark spiritual pathway and risk living his eternal life in hell. This may make it sound as though I blame dad. I do not. Truly. Their marriage did not work because both of them game up or quit trying, or they never tried at the same time. They both had faults.
However, my perspective of things is different from yours and Bryants for several reasons. The two most obvious are age and genetics. I am 8ish and 12ish years older than you two and thus understood or was privy to things that you two were not. Also, I am not biologically dads and thus my place in the family was different than ya'lls even before ya'll were born. I am thankful that our relationship is so much better now than then. My relationship with dad now makes it easy to forget the early years most days. Plus, I see both of their abilities for 'true' love in their relationship with Franklin. I always knew mom would love my kids but For me it a tremendous blessing how much dad loves Franklin. He is a wonderful grandfather and I will forever be greatful for that.
The person for which my heart is joyous is Franklin and soon to be Ellis. These boys can have the life I wanted as a child. Because I waited (for 29 long dreadful and treachorous years at times) for the Lord to reveal his perfect plan in marriage to me and faught the strong temptations to accept persons that were almost the one, or mostly right for me - my boys will have a loving mother and father to grow up with throughout their lives, God willing that we both live to see them mature to young men. Frank and I are not perfect. We do have disagreements, and sometimes fights. (his definition of a fight is not the same as mine - another side effect of our childhood....a disagreement is NOT a fight!) We do not always see things the same way and I do not always get my way - which is annoying. And while we are not perfect, I would say that our marriage is absolutely perfect. We communicate with each other, discuss things, express feelings, compromise, laugh at each others faults, take joy in each others accomplishments, and I would truly not choose to share my life with anyone else! If anything, I probably should be more considerate of him although I frequently tell him the opposite. I hope you and Jesse find this in your marriage as well. But it does not come naturally or without tremendous work/prayer. But it is possible. In highschool Adams parents gave me hope. In college CJ and Leahs parents gave me hope. Now, I hope to provide my boys with the strong foundations they will need to one day provide a troubled little girl like me with hope through their example - if the Lord chooses to tarry.
To my little sis. I hurt for you and with you - as I read your blog today. But mostly I rejoice with you because I see the fruit of your path and know that you and Jesse will find your rainbow. But I must warn the pot of gold at the end is a myth, just enjoy the path.