Great friends are hard to come by...

I knew something was up when my best friend asked me to get some time with her during the week last Sunday.  My guess was that she was pregnant again, since she had been on a roll with childbearing.  All I knew was that it had to have been important, since she wanted our time on the calendar.  Then she said something like, "Can I just share my life with my friend?"  I shook my head and rolled my eyes in my mind, because, I knew, even if she wasn't spilling what was really going on at the time, there was something heavy that she was about to tell me.

This afternoon, I made it to her house and kissed her babies as much as I could before we truly sat down and got serious.  As she starts to talk, I could tell it was serious, because she had this sneaky smile on her face like she was unsure how I was going to react to it.  So, before she could even say anything, I asked, "Are you preggers with a boy this time?"  She laughs hard for a second and then shakes her head.  If she wasn't pregnant, it could only be one thing left.  So I yell out, "Man, whatever you are about to tell me, just don't say that you are moving or that your husband is not going to be preaching at our church or anything like that."  And just as soon as I said it, she laid it on me, "We are moving."  I was in total shock in hopes that she was playing some sort of joke on me, but the more I looked at her, the more I knew she was being 100% honest with me.  The next thing I knew, my eyes were full of water and the tears begin to stream down my face.

This woman, has been my best friend for the past five years and everything about our relationship has been positive and motivating for me.  She is one of the most disciplined and heavy movers for Christ, that one can't help but be inspired to want to grow in the Lord too.  This woman, who is the godmother of my daughter, and who I can talk to about anything is leaving, has been such a huge blessing to my life and my children. 

The funny thing about my relationship with her is that when we first met, I couldn't stand her.  She was my supervisor at the time and I thought she had the most stuck up attitude.  The more I got to know her, I realized that she was one of the most down to earth people and just wanted to share the love of Christ with people.  We'd been friends through her and her husband's struggle with getting pregnant and celebrated when they were able to have baby one and baby two.  Years ago when I thought I had friends and people that I would refer to as best friends, I thought I knew what friends were like, but when I met her and realized what friendship was all about, she totally changed my perspective of that.  I can honestly say that she loves me for who I am and is literally one of the best people I know.

So, as I am crying my eyes out, she is trying to convince me that our friendship is not over, but that we are just going to have to be intentional about visiting one another and getting together.  It sounds so good when you say it and deep down in my heart, I pray that she and I will stay in touch and continue to encourage each other and love one another in friendship from Atlanta to Raleigh.  The news she gave me was almost as devestating as me finding out that my husband had been unfaithful to me for years, but the difference is knowing that I am going to miss someone who genuinely love me for who I am and is on fire for Christ.  If it's one thing that I learned or realized today it's that great friends are hard to come by.  You can't just find them anywhere, and when you do find one, you have to hold on tight to them.  I love my best friend and just pray that her family would be blessed in their new adventure and that this would only strengthen our friendship through the years. 

Broken faucet...

It is 9:30 a.m. and I am on my way out of the door to hit the gym for a couple of hours, when all of a sudden I hear my father calling for help from the bathroom on the basement floor.  I move at a glacial pace because he seems pretty calm, but when get to the doorway of the bathroom, I see an old man, trying to stop water from going everywhere.  My father, who is usually quite the handy man, had broken the hot water knob off of the faucet and called himself trying to to turn the water off when, poof, the protector flies off and water is flying in all directions.  As he attempts to stop the water with a wrench, he asks me to take over.  I'm just asking all kinds of questions, trying to avoid having to take over this job because I know that I will get soaked in the process.  He says he needs to go call somebody.  I yell and say, "We don't have time.  You have to cut the main water supply off for the entire house right now before the entire basement is flooded out."  Apparently the knob under the sink to turn off the water supply for this sink, specifically, was missing and he didn't know why.  So, he asks me to take over while he runs to go shut the water off outside of the house.  I try to do all that I can to stop the water from flowing onto the bathroom tile.  I take the wrench off and water completely soaks my hair and half of my t-shirt.  I then yell for my son to hand me the towel behind the door so that I can cover the broken knob to prevent the water from completely ruining the floor.  He does just as I ask him to and it temporarily works.  Meanwhile, I realize that my father is standing at the top of the stairs panicking and yelling for some keys.  I yell to him, "You have to turn the water off now, before this bathroom is ruined completely."  He calmly says, "I know."  He gets what he needs and is out the door.  The next twenty seconds feel like twenty minutes as I am scooping water from the edge of the bathroom counter into the sink to keep it from falling on the floor.  My son fetches me five more towels to start cleaning up the floor with and I am even turning the floor mats over at this point to get the carpet side to soak up some water as well.  I realize that my favorite beach towel, which I covered the broken faucet knob with is completely soaked and the sink is full of water and about to spill over onto the floor when the water is finally shut completely off.  I felt like I was in a wading pool because there was so much water on the floor and on the counter.  My shirt was completely wet and it was obvious that I was going to have to rebrush my hair.  It was truly the most excitement that I have had in all my years of house fixing problems.  Just as my father is thanking me for mentioning to him to turn off the main water supply for the entire house, I realized that I haven't even brushed my teeth yet, and began to wonder where I was going to get water from.

As my housing responsiblities become more and more evident to me, it is clear that I have a lot of learning to do.  For so long I had been broken myself that I didn't even have the desire to know or learn these things.  Now that I am a single mother of two in this house with my father, I am learning the responsibilities of taking care and upkeepnig a home.  It is truly fascinating to me.  The more that I am here helping him take care of this house, the more I see that there is so much more for me to learn in my adulthood.  I truly believe that you never stop learning, but I feel like there is so much that I missed somehow.  Where was I?  What was going on in my life that I had not experienced these type of things yet? 

The more that I realize that I am a broken person in the sense that there are so many things that I want to do and learn in this life and so many things that I haven't achieved yet that I often wonder what I can offer someone else.  The other question that I ask myself is if I was seeking a suitor, what would he need to bring to the table to offer me wholistically?  It started to trigger all kinds of thoughts in my mind.  In this day in time, do women even ask those questions?  I don't think I ever did when I was young and marrying the father of my children.  I think we both assumed that since we had already started a family together, it was the right thing to do...to get married and not worry about those things that we wanted and had dreams of doing.  Did we simply waste each other's time the past eight years of our lives?  It is evident now that we finished our childhood years together growing as adults and were growing in two completely different directions.  So I ask myself, if we wasted so much time together only to grow apart, what makes me think it won't happen again?  How will I know if I am doing the right thing when I think I finally find the right person?  Will that person really be the right person for me?  I mean, the truth is that I really didn't know my husband until we had been married for a couple of years.  It was only then that the lies and the cheating began to unfold and he wasn't very good at hiding the evidence of his sneaky ways.

The truth is, the faucet this morning begain to spray water everywhere only after it was tampered with.  The beauty behind the water going crazy in the bathroom was that the water hit places in the bathroom that, most of the time, only see a rag and some multipurpose cleaner.  But after it was all finished and the cleaning was done, the bathroom was sparkling clean.  It was whiter than it had ever been.  So, maybe I am not supposed to think through every little thing in life.  The best things come about due to an accident that nobody sees coming.  I believe my faucet is already broken.  It has been damaged and used inappropriately many times by its owner, but I am not sure that I want it to be fixed just yet.  It is clear that my faucet has some spray cleaning it needs to do and just maybe along the way, I will discover some new things that I never knew.  My lesson for the day is that sometimes it is alright to be a broken faucet...we all have to break sometimes...

Daddy and me...

Today seemed like one of the longest days that I have had in a long time.  After a long day of work, I got home to learn that I needed to assist my father in making some salmon cakes.  It really wasn't my idea of spending my evening, but somebody had to cook and we all had to eat.  So, I kicked off my heels which, at that point were causing excruciating pain to my toes, and stepped barefoot into the kitchen to help him out.  He had everything laid out and ready to go, but was adamant about running out to K-Mart to get a food chopper to finely chop the onions.  I had that squinted look in my eyes as if to say, "Are you serious right now?"  In my mind I was thinking, a man with hands as big as yours should be able to chop some onions up.  So, I took the chopping knife and grabbed the cutting boards and went to work.  As we began to work together in the kitchen to cook a fine dinner made up of salmon cakes, honey biscuits, spinach and rice there was this nice sense of teamwork that was taking place.  He took the bones out of the salmon and began to mix it up with the eggs and flour.  I was chopping the onions and preparing to put the biscuits in the oven.  Then I began preparing the salmon to be fried and he was preheating the olive oil on the stove.  If I needed something, he would pass it to me and if I needed to make a smart comment about how he was doing something, I did, and he would gladly take my suggestions.

Then at one point during our cooking endeavor, he looks out into the air and says to me, "You know, it's a shame that your husband didn't realize what he had."  He continues and says, "There are men who would go to China to find a woman that every Tom, Dick and Harry didn't know."  Just as he began to get a little choked up and just right before I was about to suggest to him to get himself together and to keep his composure, I just took the compliment and continued with my chopping.  I knew exactly what he meant and for that short hour in my day, I felt appreciated.  That hour was the best spent hour I had the entire day.

What was most amazing in that time spent with my father cooking in the kitchen was that the relationship that I have with him has always been the type of relationship that I have desired to have with the leading man in my life.  It's awkward, because eight years ago when I married, who I thought was that man, I would have never thought that I would be second guessing that decision someday.  What's comical and yet encouraging about my failed marriage is that I still have a desire to have a husband who is going to work with me as a team to grow and support a family.  I still feel that there is somebody out there for me who is going to be my knight and shining armor, even if I already have that knight in my father.  For so long in my adulthood I suppressed the desires of my heart and just ignored the fact that I wasn't getting what I felt I needed in my marriage.  I realize now, that the whirlwind of storms that I sailed through throughout my marriage crashed and destroyed my boat, only for me to still come out alive and to begin to rebuild a boat of my own.  Perhaps down the road, I will pick a co-captain who will want to sail away with me and rediscover a marital chapter of my life again.  But, until I do, I am content and happy sailing the seas unaccompanied and discovering my world alone.

Stuck on the concrete

So, a couple of days ago, we had this miniature ice storm that was conveniently scaled down from 12 inches of snow to a tenth of an inch of ice, after I spent all of this money at the grocery store stocking up on easy things to cook and junk food for when we got stuck in the house for several days.  Well, due to this monstrous cold I had, I hadn't even been outside of the house since the Thursday before the ice hit our town.  After feeling all refreshed from several days of being cooped inside four walls, I was reenergized and ready to go to work and have my freedom back outside of my own home.  With my cold weather clothes on, including my favorite pair of brown corderoy pants and my stylish Rainbow boots, I get out to my car, only to realize that I am stuck on the concrete.  With about a quarter of an inch of ice stuck to my entire car and the same amount of snow stuck to the concrete on every inch of my driveway with the exception of the small space under my full-size car, it was evident that my car wasn't about to go anywhere. 

I stood there for about five minutes trying to figure out what I was going to do.  There was something inside of me that was encouraging me to attempt to move the car anyway, no matter how much ice was on the ground preventing me from moving forward.  As I warmed my car up for thirty minutes, there wasn't a thought in my mind that was discouraging this insane idea of mine. 

There is a sense of freedom and happiness and joy that comes from me knowing that I can make a choice and not have to get it cosigned by anybody else.  Regardless of the fact that if I had actually moved my car and probably completely wrecked it up against the brick wall that aligns on each side of the driveway on the way up the drive, I was content knowing that I was making a decision that I had chosen to make.  There is beauty behind making your own decisions and living by those decisions that have been made.  It is a feeling that is almost indiscribable, but it feels so good to be able to do such a thing.  I am confident that in times when we are held in captivity or keep ourselves in a situation that is unhealthy for us, we fail to think for ourselves.  It's sad, really.  To know that the decisions that you made were based off of what someone else would have thought about them, is not really your decision.  In those five minutes that I was standing beside "Betty White," the name I call my car, and had made the decision to actually move her, there was nobody around.  There wasn't anybody that I could've ran that idea by.  There didn't need to be.  In that moment, I felt a sense of liberation from all of the second guessing that I had done so many times in my life because I was living in captivity.  I was free!

So, although I was inconveniently stuck on the concrete, I was actually freed from thinking for somebody else and finally, for the first time in a long time, thought for myself and the freedom behind that was incredible.

Sunny days are ahead...

I looked outside today and thought to myself that there are sunny days ahead.  As I began to think about all of the damage that had been done to my life over the course of the storm and how most of the mess had been cleaned up, it all starts to look a little better.  Day after day, whether it is sunny or cloudy, I can see a little bit clearer.  Perhaps, this was the plan for my life.  Perhaps, this was how things were supposed to be and, maybe perhaps there was something that I was to learn from all of this.  True, it would be easy for me to sit in a swivel chair and blame him for all of the massive destruction that was done to my life, but it is in fact, my life...  As I was looking out at the trees that were knocked down, the dents in my car, the small broken pieces of glass from the broken window, I realized that there was so much of me that depended on him.  Why?  I ask myself why, and I come up with nothing.  Could it be that I was so wrapped up in him and living this false sense of what love was that I forgot to take care of myself in the process?  Could it really be that the fact that I am still here standing, alone now, trying to figure out my next move in this mixed up world is partially my fault?  Well, if it isn't who is to blame and how can I ever imagine moving on from where this storm just took me?

So I say yes to all of it.  I no longer blame him.  I no longer blame him for my suffering and my hurt and pain.  I no longer blame him for the confusion of why and how all of these forces of wind came together to destroy what was my life with him.  No, I no longer blame him.  I blame me!  It is my fault for not looking out for myself and not asking the obvious questions.  It is my fault for not trusting my own instinct.  It was my fault for believing his lies, even when I had the evidence in a plastic bag, lying in my own hands.  I sometimes sit in disgust, because I know it is my fault.  I mean, what female wouldn't be even the slightest repulsed knowing what I know now and knowing that a different direction could have been taken a long time ago? 

I guess the beauty now is that I no longer have to worry.  As I continue to gaze out at what appears to be a very quiet and still day, where nothing in nature is moving...I can't help but realize just how beautiful it is.  What once was yelling and arguing and stupidity is now silence in the background.  And my face cracks a smile.  As the sun barely sneaks out behind the thick layers of clouds in the sky, I am confident that there are sunny days ahead.  There is going to be light that shines on my face and the warmth will bring a moment of contentment and joy to my life.  Everyday now is a glimpse of where I once was, but a runway of where I am going.  It's beautiful and peaceful...  I know there are sunny days ahead, because I am already standing here...in the sun.

The damage after the storm...

It's already been two years and I feel like this hurricane in my life has consumed me.  I received the warning years ago, but ignored it.  I guess I was in some sort of denial or something.  The warning signs were there though.  There were many days that I sat by myself crying, wondering, how in the world was I going to escape all of the damage that had been done.  The lies, deceit, distrust, abuse...all of that and I still held on to what appeared to be a pile of nothing leftover from the storm.  But there it was...I saw the sun!  There was some light!  Finally, all of the nonsense was over!  I could relax and move on, pretending that none of this ever happened.  Just when I thought the storm was finally over, I realized that I was only in the eye of the storm. 

More and more, things began to unravel and finally the storm hit it's peak of damage.  There was a baby that was born and it didn't have my blood.  The worst of what I thought could happen, happened.  My nightmare came to a halt and I suddenly realized that I was outside the entire time while the storm was taking it's course in my life.  I was vulnerable and naiive to think that it would never happen, although all of the signs were there.  How in the world could someone do this to their wife?  Why would someone want to do something like that, besides for the simple gratification of wanting to seek revenge?  That question was something that I was afraid I would never get the answer to.

So it has now been two years after the storm and it is all still unraveling.  The more information I find out about how this storm tried to ruin everything that I once knew and thought to be contentment and happiness, the more I see it as a rainbow.  My personal rainbow after the storm.  The storm begins to look like a blessing more and more everyday.  From discovering the countless betraying sexual encounters that happened under my nose throughout my eight year marriage, to finding out that my children have a younger brother, that has no relation to me, to taking pride in being a mother to my two beautiful children and realizing that this is something that I will most likely have to do on my own for the rest of their childhood....  There are still some parts of my life that are low hovering clouds through which are very difficult to see, but one thing is for sure...the days that I dreaded looking forward to after this category 4 hurricane are suddenly very sunny with small showers throughout.  This part of my life is no longer a detination, but a revelation that I was always supposed to see.  It was all supposed to happen, and I am now where I am supposed to be.  The damage is done and I can now begin to start picking up the pieces of broken furniture and shattered glass and start taking steps toward my rainbow.