I just opened my laptop for the first time since September and my heart stopped in its tracks. Staring me in the face was the speech I’d written to read at my Granny’s funeral. I’d been in a rush to print it that morning and never closed out of it, so I’ve been sitting here crying like a baby as I reread it. Once again I’ve found myself stagnant, not just since September, but my last entry was from July. I was making excuses as to why that was, and the truth is that I’d buried myself in my grief. Before she passed there were many times that we thought she would, but that woman was a fighter! The tenacity she had for hanging on to her family was a force to be reckoned with. I was one of her main caregivers and had been physically, mentally, and emotionally drained for months, and when we finally lost her it was time for me to rest, to rest, and get to figuring out what I was doing with myself. First thing first, feel the feelings, then HEAL. Maybe after everything the last couple of years have dealt me and my family, healing will continue to be a process for the rest of our lives. Maybe that’s true for everyone? Regardless, it is a new year and I’m plugging forward and leaving excuses behind. I read somewhere today that making excuses is something for the mediocre and I KNOW that’s one thing I’m not. I’m going to give a big part of that credit to my Granny. She was one of my biggest role models in life, someone who loved anyway, whether we deserved it or not. There’s nothing mediocre about that, and that’s just the short of it.
There have been a few changes since my last couple of posts. I had said I wasn’t going to continue moving forward chronologically because it meant compromising other people in MY story and that wasn’t something I ever wanted to do. Since then the ones I was trying to protect, have encouraged me to move forward, and as my niece Alex said, “Tell it all girl!” Now is the time for me to say again that the SOLE purpose for me telling ANY of it, is to glorify God and what He has done for us all.
So in the spirit of “telling it all”, I need to go back to where I left off with the birth of our son, Ray III. I left it up to Ray as far as what we’d name him. I figured that he was eventually going to decide that he wanted to carry on his name and I was okay with that at the time. He didn’t confirm it until I was on the operating table, violently ill and vomiting into a trashcan while about to undergo a cesarean, when he said, ‘I want to name him Ray the third”, “Umm, yeah sure thing buddy, you do that.” I probably would’ve agreed to anything in that moment…. I sometimes wonder now after everything that’s happened, if our son would like to change his name. Ray and I laughed recently about us changing our names to my maiden name, funny not funny. It’s taken us a long time to get to the point where we can make jokes like that. I no longer look at our last name as coming from his father, it is simply just his name and I will keep it because of that.
Not long before our son was born, Ray’s parents moved down to Southeast Oklahoma to my mother-in-law’s family land. They built a big beautiful home and shop on an acreage about a 2.5 hour drive away from where we lived. We would load up and go visit for holidays, or just visit now and then. It was always very regimented which I now understand better since my kids have moved out and it’s chaos without some kind of plan when they all come home for visits. At their house, we had assigned bedrooms, seats at the table, etc. My mother-in-law made everything from scratch, she’s a fabulous cook, which kept her busy in the kitchen most of the time. All of our kids, and our nieces and nephew ran wild all over the country or played pool in the shop with their dad and papa, or they’d hang out in the playhouse that their nana had built for them. I spent my time mostly with my sisters-in-law, we liked to ride their ranger through the pasture and go visit other family members that lived close by, or sometimes we’d go to the store to get ice or just to get out of the house for a while. Whatever the three of us did, it was usually a good time with lots of laughs and shenanigans. We almost always had a great time in general. The first time I remember feeling real animosity was on Christmas when Faye was turning 3. My in-laws were always very generous when it came to gift-giving. We were going to spend the weekend to celebrate Faye’s birthday and Christmas. My mother-in-law would get the big, thick JCPenney’s catalog out at Thanksgiving and let the kids peruse through it for their Christmas wish list. That year Faye and Erin had pretty much identical items on their lists. There was a Baby Alive doll and all the accessories, a battery-operated cat, and maybe a couple of other small things. When it came time to open gifts and they were being passed out, there sat my sweet little Faye, patiently waiting for something to be handed to her while everyone else had piles set in front of them. Finally, toward the end of everything being given to each person, a tiny little box was handed to her. She quietly opened it and inside was a pair of real diamond earrings. That was it, her only gift. I don’t mean at all to sound like an ingrate, but how do you explain to a 3-year-old that she got earrings, while her sister got everything that was on their wishlist? That little angel never complained once, instead, she sat there with her little baby lip stuck out quivering, trying her hardest not to cry. I was livid. If that was your plan all along, you could’ve at least given us a heads-up so that we could get the other stuff for her ourselves. Those were the two main things she wanted and she got diamond earrings instead. A 3-year-old doesn’t want or need diamond earrings. So I decided to drive to the nearest Walmart, 30 minutes away, and spend money we didn’t have to get her the things she had wished for. There was no way I was going to make her watch the other kids play with their new toys all weekend while she sat there empty-handed. By the time I got back, I had calmed down, but I had questioned her sanity while on my hour+ trek to town. I decided she meant well, that diamonds are special but wondered how she couldn’t see why that would be a problem.
Throughout the years there were other “moments” that occurred when I would realize that these “perfect” people were maybe not who I thought they were. There was alcohol available and ready for every occasion. I’ll be the first to say that I used to appreciate it as I’m not a big drinker and it honestly made it easier for me to be me in that crowd. Everyone’s favorites were always available. At some point, I started to see the problem with that, and after all the dramatics that would take place, I wondered why no one else was seeing it. Ray’s oldest sister and her ex-husband were heavy drinkers and the results of that started to take a toll on not only their marriage but the rest of us as well. There were incidents when they’d have screaming matches either with each other or others, even resulting in physical altercations on more than one occasion. They weren’t the only ones though. I’d started to realize that Ray became someone else when he drank, his eyes would literally turn black and a switch would flip turning him into no one I recognized or even wanted to know. They’d talked about Ray Sr. having similar reactions as well, so whatever was going on was clearly hereditary to me. Most nights when we were visiting, the adults would end up out in the shop drinking and playing poker or pool, and there were plenty of great times to be had out there. My father-in-law and my husband taught me to play poker pretty well which I always enjoyed. But there were some dark moments too. I noticed Ray Sr. giving his oldest sister glaring looks when she started to become obviously drunk. He would say some pretty hurtful things and talk down to her a lot. But he also had a habit of talking to everyone like that, he was very condescending, verbally abusive, and vindictive. He was also funny, goofy, charismatic, and smart, which is I guess how he got away with the rest. It’s funny how you can normalize someone’s behavior without even realizing that’s what’s happening. I witnessed him treating others that way many times but kept my mouth shut because it wasn’t my place to call him out. That is until he directed it at me or my kids. There were a couple of times that he treated Austin like the “stepchild that he was” and it would fly all over me. Another time when Erin was four, he called her stupid to which I immediately said, “She is not!”, and took her upstairs to console her. Those “small”, dark behaviors became more and more frequent over the years and began to take a toll on my patience and tolerance. I noticed the tone in which criticism was given a lot more than I had before, and the way general conversations became back-biting comparisons. I can see clearly now that the deeper my relationship became with God, the more I noticed hateful and unhealthy relationships. Nevertheless, they were sprinkled in with good times too, so I had a hard time reconciling it all at the end of the day. These people were not just my husband’s family anymore, they were mine too. Good, bad, or indifferent, I’d come to love them, dysfunction and all.
A couple of times however almost became dealbreakers, before the actual DEAL BREAKER. One of our poker nights in the shop, all of the adults were enjoying the game except my mother-in-law who was inside making the kids coke floats and popcorn. But all of a sudden Faye who was nine years old at the time, was standing next to my chair in tears with little red splotches all over her face because that’s what happens to her when she gets super upset. And she was, but it was anger. She looked me right in the eye and said “You’re a liar!” Everyone was shocked because that was very out of character for sweet little Faye. I asked her what I had lied about and she proceeded to say “I told her she was going to Heaven, but Nana said she wasn’t.” I jumped out of my chair and took her by the hand and tried to calm her down on our walk back to the house. I explained that Nana believed differently than we did and ensured that she was going to Heaven. That was the only cross-interaction I ever had with my mother-in-law. I told her it wasn’t her place to tell the kids that, they were all being raised as Christians and she should respect that. It was a hard situation to navigate and one that would cause friction with my husband’s middle sister and me later.
A couple of years later my oldest sister-in-law had really begun to spiral in her drinking addiction. She was grieving the loss of her ex-husband, the “love of her life”, and self-medicating with alcohol. There had been multiple run-ins between her and I, her parents, her siblings, her friends, and basically anyone she knew. We were all worried about her, but her parents pretended everything was “fine”, so it put the rest of us in a real predicament because we felt we had no way to get her help without their acknowledgment and support. She’d had fallen and broken a rib once and her best friend had to take her to the hospital and was worried sick about her. She called her parents to let them know what had happened, but they offered no help and that wasn’t the only time they’d been approached about what was happening either. They continued to ignore it even though it had become dangerous to her health and the well-being of her daughter. It got so bad that my middle sister-in-law orchestrated an intervention and asked me to write a letter and several of her friends were there for it as well. However, there were only a couple of us who read letters and she just giggled and thanked us for caring, then did her best to convince us that everything was fine. A while after that when things hadn’t changed for the better, but instead for the worse, my middle sister-in-law and the best friend of my oldest sister-in-law, decided that she should go to some kind of treatment facility. They asked me to “help them” find a place, but I ended up being the one who actually found a facility for her to go to. When I called to tell the middle sister about it, she asked me to call her dad and ask him to pay for it, because she was “at work and couldn’t call from there”. As I write this, I realize how naive I was in that moment. What she was actually saying without saying it, was that she didn’t want to ask him herself, and with good reason, because he was furious with me when I asked, but I didn’t know that until later when he blew up at me on Thanksgiving. That weekend we had arrived at their house on a Friday night and we had just sat down to eat when my middle sister-in-law began to tell us a story about a man she met online and said that she’d gone to meet him and some of his friends at a bar all by herself. I’ll admit right here and now, I have a big mouth and even bigger opinions when it comes to the well-being of my loved ones. I was incredulous that she’d gone alone and proceeded to tell her that. Suddenly my father-in-law barked at me, “Leave it to you to be so judgemental”. I knew then, that he was also referring to me asking him to pay for the rehab for my other sister-in-law. Apparently, he thought that was a grand scheme I’d come up with on my own as if I was just over here trying to tell them how they should all be living their lives and of course, no one else was going to own up to their part in it. I was mortified. Sad, hurt, furious, all the emotions at once. I pushed my chair back from the table, went up to our bedroom, and began to pack up the things we’d unloaded from the car just a couple of hours before. Ray came up to check on me and was ready to get right back into the car and head for home, but also trying to reason with me that we’d be driving right into the ice storm we’d just barely avoided. My father-in-law came up a couple of minutes later and made a half-hearted attempt at an apology. Ray called him out on his behavior and he denied that he’d been harboring any ill-will toward me. I swallowed my pride and ultimately agreed to stay because Ray wasn’t wrong about the ice storm and I wasn’t going to put my kids in harm’s way over the whole ordeal. We spent that night, but the next day instead of staying and eating Thanksgiving dinner with the rest of the family, Austin and I went to Chili’s to eat by ourselves. Afterward, we went back and loaded the car, and headed home. None of them ever spoke of it again, they just swept it under the rug as if it had never happened. Just like all of the other hatefulness, drinking problems, and dysfunctional behavior.
I don’t ever want to be judge and jury for y’all or anyone else. I’ve been judged myself, by those same people, but genuinely only meant well in both of those situations. I loved both of my sisters-in-law very much and only wanted good for them. Even if it meant sticking my neck out for them, even if it meant having hard conversations. That’s what I was raised to do, show up for the ones I loved. I didn’t know that they didn’t consider me one of them. I was simply someone their son/brother was married to, and I’d be around as long as he kept me here… That’s one of the hardest lessons in my life still, loving people more than they would even consider loving me. The older I get, the more I realize how special my family is. We were so blessed that all of the generations before us handed down the intense love and ferocity for each other and that we were to share it with the ones God brings into our lives. It doesn’t say that it will always be reciprocated though, and that’s the hardest part for me. We’ve barely scratched the surface of this story, thank you Lord for loving me despite myself, or the people who couldn’t see the value in my love for them, or for the ugliness that continued for years, and most of all for the redemption from it all. With you only Lord, I’ll get through it all, by the skin of my teeth.
Isaiah 55:8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.
