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rainy day in october…

Published on by Mae @ Rainydayinmay

This morning I sat in my yard crying, out in the rain.

Several weeks before this weeping crumble, my husband and I returned from vacation to learn one of the stray cats who hangs out near our yard had given birth to two kittens. By this point, the kittens, though adorably dependent on their mama still, seemed to be coming into their own. We were shocked. We hadn’t even known she’d been pregnant.

To tell you the truth, we had actually thought she was a he, a he whom we have aptly called Arthur for nearly two years.

Once we realized our mistake, Arthur became Bea Arthur, and we both became smitten with Bea’s adorable babies…

There was a bit of drama not long after, when we learned the babies had been trapped in a neighbor’s garage for three days. We rescued them and everything seemed great. In fact, on the last day of September, as I folded laundry neatly into my suitcase, I saw them following mom around and trying their first attempts at nibbling some of the food we set out for the ferals. In a life season of so much unknown, these two little clumsy kittens brought much joy…

The next day I drove to Michigan to sit at my mother’s bedside for her last days. The week before she’d been hospitalized. On the day that I scrambled to pack my suitcase, she’d been released into hospice and the prognosis was days left, at best. For ten days I held her hand, brushed her hair, laughed with her as she rallied, and cried silent tears as she lashed out. Alzheimer’s is an ugly monster. Many friends who’d lost mothers reached out with advice drawn from their own experiences. A commonality among their words was how, though hard, the process of death and closing those days could be truly beautiful. It seemed crazy, but then for four days she rallied and I saw the sunlight of beauty everywhere. It was after the rallying faded, when her illness once again consumed her and the memory of my face was washed away, that the beautiful was replaced by something I can only surmise as sinister.

Like a switch, we transitioned into a dark and triggering time.

After ten days, I make the trip home. The dark days were difficult. I’d said my goodbyes. There was nothing left to do.

My first day back, as I went out to feed the cats, I saw Bea Arthur and her baby-daddy Tom. Something seemed off, so I tuned in and watched. Seeing the two of them show up, (at their safe, comfortable, feral distance) was not abnormal. As Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday sightings, walks, and evening encounters seemed to still be just the two of them, we began to wonder if something had happened to the kittens.

We have wildlife around. Raccoons, skunks, foxes, and a rogue coyote from time to time. We’d been concerned for them from the beginning, but when we’d stumbled upon Bea and her sister nearly two years ago, they were starving babies themselves. They wouldn’t let us near them, and everyone we phoned said if we caught them they’d be euthanized. Instead we built a heated shelter and feeding/watering station at the back of our yard and watched them grow up.

We did what we could. Even so, it is devastating to think of something happening to those two babies.

Through last night and this morning Bea Arthur stayed hovered beneath a bush near the shelter. Rain came, puddles formed, inching closer and closer to her. Still she stayed there.

Perhaps it is the weight of stagnantly waiting for my mother to leave her life. I was exhausted before that journey began, but now I am feeling so much more so. Also though, there is this other season of loss forever tattooed on my insides. The miscarriages, lost children, aching and empty arms…

There we were, rain falling all around us, this lost mother and me. Her babies seemingly gone. Heartbreak. I tried to pour love into her, as our gaze held tight, a sea of rainwater and grief pouring all around us as we sat suspended there. A cat and a woman, both having lost. Both knowing such struggle.

Was I projecting onto her? Probably. But also, she seems to have been through a hurt that led to the scars of which I’ve carried for so, so long.

Today, October 15th, is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day. This evening marks the International Wave of Light, where candles are lit at 7 pm, light casting globally in remembrance of significant loss. The dark, dreary skies of my city today feel appropriate. For the stray mama tabby and for myself. For the many other women who’ve lost, falling asleep beneath these street lights–expanding unfathomably beneath this entire sky.

Loss is hard. Waiting for it and surviving after it.

I don’t have anything wonderful or wise to say. I’m sad. I remember. I remember the hopes and dreams of motherhood. I remember the few beautiful moments with my own mother, amidst the sea of abuse and trauma.

I remember two clumsy kittens climbing all over their mother…

I remember and I’m sad. It’s terrible. Some days are like this, and that’s ok.

Even when it is hard, we have to pause to remember.

moments…

Published on by Mae @ Rainydayinmay

these days find me in Michigan, suspended in time. Michigan has always been funny to me because, at least in the small, suburban town we lived in, change and growth happen but also they don’t.

So much of it lives frozen.

Back in Idaho (my real home) growth plays out like explosions of development, extravagant new neighborhoods, and a continual flow of new residents migrating to the Gem State. Every visit feels like the first half is devoted to comprehending the changes with the last half being a little dedicated to mourning the loss of farm land and nature.

Michigan isn’t like that.

It is the same gray skies. The same odd people, speckled a bit here and there with genuinely good souls. It is the same restaurants (mostly), same shops, same traffic lights and imbalanced feel. The same.

Within that suspension is my reason for being back–my mom…

My mom is living in her last days. This path began with her unresponsive, the hospice team certain she’d only last a few days. Then, when covid restrictions allowed for (finally) in person visits, it seems the hair brushing, foot massages, and in person reality reached deep inside and pulled her back.

She’s still dying, but that journey has become more than a matter of days, and those days have begun to look like laughter, silly stories, precious memories, and old school karaoke performances. Some days she eats and drinks nothing, other days she downs three glasses of apple juice in a matter of minutes. It’s unpredictable.

On one hand, I want to be by her side as she goes. If she keeps this revival up, that won’t happen, and I’m really sad about that. I don’t want her leaving alone, feeling abandoned, even though I’m not even sure either of those things are where she’d be. On the other hand though, I am DEEPLY loving these moments with her. As her hands and feet ombre into deeper shades of blue, I continue memorizing how they feel in mine. When her Alzheimer eyes find me, recognizing the girl they see, I feel myself hanging there in that lifetime that exists between us.

She was never the perfect mom, but she has been my mom. For better or worse, I’ve never lived a second of this journey without her breathing somewhere, beneath the same moon as me. Even though the last several years have felt like this eternal grief of losing her to a disease ravaging her presence, she was still here. (until covid restrictions anyhow.) But now, now…

I can’t even begin to process it.

And so, while I am sad that it is looking more and more like I won’t be by her side at the end, I am so thankful that I’ve been here collecting these moments.

To be honest, I am also terrified to leave because I want all of the moments.

a surviving memorial…

Published on by Mae @ Rainydayinmay

I did some dumb stuff as a kid. Now, looking back with the wisdom of a full-grown human, I’m sure that I was looking for attention of various kinds…

I was really young, perhaps six or seven, when I–in a fit of anger over being locked in my bedroom–decided to stick a metal hairpin into an electrical wall socket. Not only did this act blow the power of our single wide trailer home, but it melted my thumb and forefinger flesh to one another, the hairpin painfully sandwiched in the middle. The pin shaped scars lived to tell their story in my fingerprints for decades…

I’ve already shared my old, weather worn couch and rattlesnake story. No need to go back there here. *shudder*

Throughout late middle and early high school I did the worst of it. Like many girls my age, I was in pursuit of not only parental love and attention, but the attention of boys too. A boy’s attention warranted the sort of popularity that my naive self had determined was most validating.

I wanted to feel valid…

I also, having arrived at this point in my life from a foundational origin of childhood trauma, took my pursuits for love secret steps farther. Cutting, carving into, and burning my body primarily. Punishing this self for the ways in which I saw it had failed me. Fingers down throat, diarrhetics, deprivation of hydration or nutrition–of enjoyment… As bad as those choices were, they weren’t the sort of dumb teen stuff I am referring to.

I’m talking about vegetable oil and sunshine!

Together.

This body lathered in cooking oil while laying out with friends… peaceful afternoon naps in the cozy sunlight where I barbequed my flesh to the point of black, blistering char. The swimsuit criss-cross design became the ornament of my skin. Twenty years later my back still shown that X. Now, nearly three decades after that brilliant summer habit, while the difinitive lines have faded, the freckled clusters of scarred open spaces still tease that the kiss of a shape may live on forever…

There’s the scar on my nose from tumbling stubbornly down a hill…

The painful, cystic deformity I will live my entire life with because I insisted on wearing size 5 1/2 shoes, while my feet naturally filled a 10.

The scars from childhood– both living on the surface of this shell but also veining deep into the inside, have shaped me. They’ve taught me to walk with caution, to show myself grace, to actively love this body… to try and send love out into the world.

Some of the scarring stems from the consequences of my stupidity, but also from the recklessness of others. They stay with me, altering my person in seen and unseen ways. I am neither the melted flesh of my careless choices, nor the result of cruelty rained upon me.

I house the remnants of what was– I am the relic…

flower…

Published on by Mae @ Rainydayinmay

Like so many of us, I’ve spent weeks swept up in the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Podcast. It has been unexpectedly triggering, validating, freeing (sort of), and oddly explanatory of so many experiences and emotions that just didn’t make sense.

I was a little girl when I received my sexual education, though in retrospect it wasn’t very education based. It was pornographic, abusive, damaging… It was at the hand of an adult male, while on my mother’s neglectful watch. My innocence was exchanged for her house payment and spending money.

I was a teenager when I learned about sex. I was taught that I was damaged because of what had happened to me, and that my only hope at a life was to convince someone to marry me. It was implied that the likelihood of someone falling desperately in love with me was non-existent. Though the motivation for this belief may have been my lazy eye, the fact that I wasn’t pretty, my big-boned body, or my bad breeding–the message I received was that I was tainted–crumpled up garbage. My virginal body was intended for one man, the man whose rib I held, and that was ruined.

I was ruined.

I loved all the boys. While I was completely capable of having solid friendships with members of the opposite sex, the truth was that this small voice in the back of my mind would often sabotage my thoughts by reading into subtle conversations and gestures. I was being groomed within the suffocating culture of a patriarchal oppression to zero in on anything which could make someone find me loveable enough to marry, so when one of my close guy friends innocently triggered that voice, I would spiral. It was always my fault. Always. I was left feeling so stupid and unworthy, every single time.

By the time I was seventeen I had felt decimated by rejection a thousand times already. The deepest of these was with my high school best friend. There was so much confusion woven throughout the trust and bond between us. A part of me, deep down, knew that if he could never love me, I was doomed. He knew me better than anyone, including my most protected flaws, which I tried to hide from the world. It had been made abundantly clear, both by my mother and my teenage legalistic upbringing, that I was nothing without a ring on my finger and a man by my side.

As a newlywed, several years later, I sat in on churched conversations about how it was my responsibility to please my husband. If I didn’t, he would cheat and I would be to blame. If I didn’t keep myself attractive to him, those same rules applied. If I had a friendship with another man, I was being unfaithful to my husband and responsible for the sins of everyone whom I’d caused to stumble with their curiosity about us. If my husband had a friendship with another woman, it was none of my business, but if it became adulterous, while it was still none of my business, it would be due to my inability to please my husband.

To complicate matters more, I was less of a woman if I could not provide my husband a baby (which I couldn’t), and if my sexual abuse had affected my sexual health at all, it was my sin and I needed to repent and fulfill any of my husband’s fantasies.

As a child I existed to meet the lustful needs of a man and it seemed this was all I was good for as an adult too.

At Seventeen years old, I went off to college to find a husband. I CRINGE about this now. While this notion had not only been suggested as my “next step”– there was not a soul in sight encouraging me to do anything else.

Once I was married, I was invited in to the “funny” conversations that other Christian couples had about their sex lives. In fact, I can honestly say that during my church attending part of life, I have heard more dirty jokes within the settings of sermons or small groups/Bible studies than outside of it. As a survivor of sexual abuse whose very body was bartered, shamed, guilted, mutilated, and manipulated again and again–I never found them funny. Did the wives of such “humourous” men find them funny, or did they laugh and play along because they’d been conditioned to?

There is so much damage that has been done within the Purity Culture realm of patriarchal religion. It did not begin there, and it didn’t end there either. Women have been viewed, seen, and treated like meat consistently. I could really rant on and on about that for a long time, but that wasn’t the point of sharing this here.

So what was the point? Mark Gungor once, by his own confession, instructed a woman to perform oral sex on her husband as a means to get him to church. From the way he tells the story, she seemed very uncomfortable with the act of that. He bragged about this story while speaking in Scotland (i believe) in front of both men and women. You can hear the men, in the audio clip, roar with laughter. He went on to tell the women attending to go home and give their husband’s oral sex and keep them happy, to which the men’s laughter resounds again. Though he was far more vulgar about it than the affiliations of Christianity I came up in, the message was the same:

My needs, wants, or desires did not matter.

I existed for the will of a man.

Discarding me would be my fault.

I did not matter. Period.

My sexuality was a joke.

I experienced this at fifteen when the staff of the Children’s home I was in manipulated and shamed me (by using a photograph of my dead grandfather) into lying about seducing a boy to have sex with me. We did not have sex.

I experienced this at seventeen when I became pregnant and was kicked out of Bible college for sexually immoral behavior while my boyfriend (husband now) was permitted to stay.

I experienced this time and again within a religious space that had no desire to help me heal, process, or navigate through my own abuse issues while attempting to be the best wife I could possibly be, existing to please my husband. I was a series of internal triggers and explosions, hiding on the floor of my closed and scratching my skin until I bled.

When, five years into our marriage, my husband did leave me for another woman–I was the one left answering the questions. I was the one that people blamed. It was me. The unstable, immoral girl who got pregnant at seventeen and kicked out of school. The group home kid. It all fell on me. Considering my history, what could they expect? And the fact is, I loved a lot of those people and they were just as lost within the indoctrination as I was. I was missing. Maybe they were too.

While I am no longer missing, there are so many things that still rise to the surface, catching me off guard. There are days when the weight of growing up in this way feels like it will never stop retraumatizing and challenging my worth.

This is my the long-story-short of my purity culture story.

Scissors…

Published on by Mae @ Rainydayinmay

There is this not enough theme ribboning throughout my story.

Sometimes its satin curl weaves with the abrasive too much-jagged stretch of twine.

Not enough daughter, yet whose presence was too much.

Not thin enough, the world seeing this body as too full.

Not pretty enough…

Mom enough…

Good enough…

Smart enough–rough fraying edges intermittently choking out the lustrous band of sheen.

The ribbon–smooth and feminine– serves to remind of the delicate beauty I could never be, while brown jaggy frays define the ways my very love and self are undesired… unwanted.

These truths, contrasting, weave around the divine core of self.

The hands who have embroidered my inadequacies tighten their grip

Pulling, constricting my airway

As breaths become scarce, my search for you grows frantic.

Darkness, black and muggy, settles in, my eyes no longer able to adjust.

I think of you now, picturing your face.

Those kind eyes and the warmth of your smile.

My mind’s eye travels to your hands, fingers laced firmly around their handles, and they sit tightly in your palm–

Scissors.

In the instant my vision connects with their silver blades, peace floods me.

Memory can be a powerful thing.

Peace settles over me–I feel myself slipping into the surrender–becoming one with the tangles of pink satin and scaly twine…

In the dark I hear the door followed immediately by your nearly out-of-breath voice, “I’m sorry I’m late! Traffic!”

Snip snip.

The woven reminders will come again, their handlers eager to pull tight.

Today though, right now, their remnants lay scattered at our feet.

I am here.

You are here.

I can breathe.