Category: marriage

For the love of a good film…

Published on by Mae @ Rainydayinmay1 Comment

I have never been very into sports. Sometimes our American culture can seem so sports obsessed that my disinterest would almost feel like an unpatriotic act of rebellion, but it isn’t like that, I promise! While sports may not always be my thing, shouldn’t it really mean something when a sports movie touches my spirit in a profound way?

There have been films which have left me a weeping mess, such as the Blind Side. Although it could be considered a “sports movie” for me, the profoundness was more about the brokenness and love. Maybe it has little to do with sports at all, and I just get deeply immersed in the heart of what lies underneath. Creed was like that, for me. I went, begrudgingly, because I love Michael B. Jordan and I was stirred so deeply that I still think about this movie regularly, 3 years later. Within it I absorbed so much about courage and hope, during a season in my life which felt very void of those things… That is what makes movies truly special, really. They serve as these illustrations of the spirit we often need to step out in, wherever our own journeys have us. Sure, they entertain us, but the really good ones do something more. In the case of Creed, the threads of redemption, forgiveness, unconditional love and our mortality motivated me to fight for the life I wanted, regardless of those current circumstances. When my family and marriage were a total mess, I was reminded that it would not always look that way and I was not powerless. I will always be grateful for what this story represented.

In just a few days Adonis and Rocky will be here, once again in Creed II. Have you seen the trailer? It gives me chills every single time, I for one can’t wait!

About The Movie (Synopsis)

Life has become a balancing act for Adonis Creed. Between personal obligations and training for his next big fight, he is up against the challenge of his life. Facing an opponent with ties to his family’s past only intensifies his impending battle in the ring. Rocky Balboa is there by his side through it all and, together, Rocky and Adonis will confront their shared legacy, question what’s worth fighting for, and discover that nothing’s more important than family. Creed II is about going back to basics to rediscover what made you a champion in the first place, and remembering that, no matter where you go, you can’t escape your history.  The film releases in theaters on Wednesday, November 21.  #CreedII

What about you? Do you love sports movies? What is your favorite?

Thirteen going on eternity…

Published on by Mae @ Rainydayinmay1 Comment

Hello and happy friday! I am joining up, once again, this week with Kate and the collection of talented contributing writers for Five Minute Friday. This is the practice where Kate throws out a one-word-prompt and we creatively (and unedited) free write for five solid minutes and then link up to share with others. This week’s prompt is Thirteen…

I hope you’ll read and then hop over to the link up and check out others!


 

~

I was barely thirteen the very first time I woke up, on a birthday morning, in a completely safe place.

I was thirteen when he told me I was his girlfriend and we celebrated our fifteen beautiful days as a “couple” by avoiding eye contact and passing weird notes with stick figure drawings through friends.

It was at thirteen when I stood in the dark fitness center closet and had my first kiss with a boy, spit awkwardly strung between us like a ribbon. I loved him, I knew I did. I couldn’t wait until we were one day married with babies at our feet. We wouldn’t, though he did give me the gift of redemption. He redeemed something dark and terrible and gave me the age appropriate gift of a first kiss.

Thirteen was the first age when I spoke with confidence about my pre-group home life. So much sadness had stolen my power and silenced my voice, but when just one stood in support, they came back to me.

Thirteen is the age when I finally allowed myself the clarity of beginning to process my mother’s true person. It was ugly and uncomfortable, confusing and terrifying, but necessary. We must walk through the hard parts to be able to drink in the truly good ones…

I had been thirteen weeks along when a rush from my head to womb told me something was wrong. It was the darkest moment I had ever seen my husband stand in, and the agony etched within his wailing and the creases of his face still haunt me nearly a quarter of a century later…

She was thirteen when she made a choice which forever altered her adolescence. For years, as parents, we’d held at bay that this day could come, and when it did we were ill-prepared. Some things, no matter what you know, you’re never ready for.

I was thirteen years into my motherhood when I had to walk away from it, from her… So much failure, so much dysfunction, so many roads undesired led me to the hard choices. Staying would lead to something far worse, leaving would lead to irreparable damage. I was of no use to anyone in a home where he did not want me and she could not not hurt me.

It was thirteen hours of weak vitals and unresponsiveness from a sixteen year old child, as her father sat wrecked beside her bed. Tubes chained her to the reality that self-destructive choices can destroy, do destroy, will destroy eventually… It was well over thirteen hundred miles away that I sat, her mother, helpless and shattered. There is no coming back from your daughter’s near death… There is no relieving him of enduring that alone. Even though the distance was what he’d wanted, I hated that for him.

The fasting journey to save my marriage and place all of my active trust and reliance on God lasted thirteen days. I’d planned for ten, but God had asked for more. On the fourteenth day my husband packed my car and I came home. (On the first day this had seemed like the most far-fetched outcome. Miracles happen.)

It was thirteen months after I was brought back into my family, that those of us in residence became just two. He and I. The beginning of us as two becoming one- and then family, parents, house full of love and laughter and hard things and life, and back again to two.

Neither lucky, nor unlucky, it’s a number marking minutes, moments, breaths, beats and things.

Thirteen…

~

Letting Go, a lament…

Published on by Mae @ Rainydayinmay8 Comments

This year of letting go has been brutal.

I am left raw and bleeding, stripped away layers of love, of life, of skin and  laid ready for something new. The new is hard, terrifying… I love the old, the old like you.

When I knew, to my core, that this year would be the one for letting go, I feared the most that the end result would be you. I feared this down deep to my soul, but that intuitive certainty seemed to whisper this truth.

Here, in the almost middle of the year-long-journey, I have already released my grip on so much.

So many habits, a friendship, crutches and dark things long gone now…

The thought of you too, as it grows clearer and clearer, makes me want to take back the whole plan.

I can’t do this.

I can not let you go…

And yet, as I loosen my grip a little, I realize I am the only one holding on anyway.

Just me.

It is just my hand there, fingers clinging to your loose one.

You let go a long time ago, but then I wonder- scared to ask, had you ever held on at all?

To let go of the love means also letting go of the lies, which should seem like a good thing, shouldn’t it?

It does not.

The losing you part has never been a parcel of my bargain, and yet, it seems this is what it comes to anyhow.

How?

I truly don’t know.

My chest is so tight from the fight to breathe, I want to kick and scream, to conquer your demons for you so that you can learn to love me again. Assuming, of course, you ever did. I used to believe it, but beneath the crafty way in which you seem, I am beginning to doubt that too.

I know, I can’t do that… I won’t even try. They are your demons to release or draw nearer, and they are what you’ve chosen. I am not.

I am not.

I will repeat the words until my insides cease throbbing.

I will stop allowing patterns to blanket me, which have only slowly ripped me apart.

You are yours now, you never claimed me.

In the deepest way possible, I am gone.

Entombed within this landscape I have woven- painting it beautiful so that you had somewhere safe and whole to belong- I cannot think about what comes next. Whatever it is, I know that the course of us changes forever, again.

Forever, always.

Words meant for something spectacularly earth shattering, in the best ways- not like this.

I did not wish this, I did not want it.

I do not want it.

But you do not want me, so why hold on, anymore?

Good-bye being lied to,

Good-bye being lied about… (This will still happen, of course, you seem to know no other way of making it through a day, but perhaps this will finally not affect me like it always has before.)

Good-bye disrespect,

Good-bye raised-fist-shattered moments and brutal words, spread like meat hooks, within the crevices of my mind.

Perhaps I’ll make it to the clouds, finally able to exhale…

Maybe instead I will struggle again, day in and out, never catching a break.

Either path it is, I guess is better than naked and lonely, splattered there on the ground.

I’ll show you my brave…

Published on by Mae @ Rainydayinmay5 Comments

www.rainydayinmay.com

Brave to you will likely look very different then it does to me…

I was recently challenged to consider the bravest thing I have done. I thought, instead, of all of the courage and bravery I have seen in the people I know and love. I have friends who have literally chased down muggers/assailants. I have law enforcement friends. I have inner-city-teacher friends. I know several people who travel the world, adventuring into unknown and remote locations… (I recently read a story about an Anaconda, in the Amazon, that stalked someone in the water. It STALKED them. Snakes are in the wild, unknown and remote locations. This is a problem for me.)

My sister Joy lives in a beautiful home in south-eastern New Mexico. (she also has snakes who stalk and intrude on her life) My son is a soldier, as are so many friends. I know a beautiful soul who is a surrogate. The list goes on and on. I see bravery demonstrated so regularly and, when I look at myself, I feel like there is no comparison.

And therein lies the issue. There IS no comparison. My brave won’t look like yours. While it may have been brave for me to fight for my marriage and stand by my husband after infidelity and betrayal, it may be brave for another woman to walk away from a similar situation… And that is the thing about courage- no one else gets to decide it. A soldier, in and of itself, does not make them brave. A soldier who is willing to protect us and fight for what is right, even if it costs him his life- THAT is the brave part. Courage and selflessness in the face of danger is their brave. We can define ourselves a thousand ways, but brave will never be located in the title.

My brave can be found in my pursuit of motherhood long after I lost my uterus. I was shattered, but did not give up.

My brave can be seen within the moves I’ve made, the jobs I’ve taken.

My brave is there, beyond my comfort zone. In the once-awkward situations, the stranger-conversations, the elements of life just beyond my natural limit. I have grown to push myself there, into that place. Sometimes it is downright nauseating.

My brave is rooted deep, in my writing. To be authentic, raw and displayed does not come naturally, but it is the only way that it feels right.

My brave may have been born the day that I realized it was up to me to stop the patterns of sexual abuse that were happening within my childhood. There was no shame, only a concrete knowledge that the more  people I told, the less likely it was to happen again.

I told everyone.

It never happened again.

Perhaps the most ironic part of each one of those things though, is that they never felt brave. They often felt woven with elements of worry, anxiety and more than a healthy sprinkling of fear. Second guessing was my second nature during the seasons that, upon reflection, reveal themselves as brave. Bravery often makes me feel like I need to throw up, pass out, curl up in my bed and hide… The list goes on and on, but never have I though Woah! Now that, Misty, that was one mighty fine act of bravery! And it’s pretty unfair for me to hold myself to another soul’s standard of bravery before I’m willing to label it is as such.

Maybe you scale rocky mountainside’s for fun, eat nails for breakfast and only date psycho clowns- if so, my list probably seems pretty mild to you. (I’d also like to point out that two of those three things aren’t brave, they are reckless and that’s not actually always a fine line. Sometimes it is a gigantic 8-lane interstate.)

I don’t know when I’m brave, always.

I am pretty sure I could sit here and list out the ten-thousand ways I have felt and acted the opposite, just this month.

I’m working on accepting my brave for what it is. I’m learning I don’t need my neighbor, brother, husband or friend to call it brave, for it to be. Most importantly though, I know to my core that I need the brave list to be growing longer, by the day, while the other list grows smaller and smaller…

So that’s my plan.

(Minus any and all snakes, anyway.)

What has your brave looked like?

 

Obstacle vs. Victory…

Published on by Mae @ RainydayinmayLeave a comment

Statistically speaking, it was seven miscarried pregnancies, a tiny sneak peek of uterine cancer and a medical procedure to eliminate any chances for the same sort of bad, (or much, much worse) to occur…

Humanly speaking, I was a shattered twenty-four year old woman having an emergency hysterectomy after my heart had been ripped from my soul and trampled on seven different hellish times. My body was worn, my womb twisted, scarred and reaching it’s expiration date…

The two perspectives belong to the very same story, but they each tell an entirely different tale.

In the midst of the story is infidelity, adultery, deceit, abuse and so much more. The bad moments, the broken and bloody miscarriage moments last a lifetime- there, shattered and bleeding on that lime green tile floor. By my now ripe age of forty-two I have lived at least a dozen lifetimes, it feels…

And yet.

This humanly statistical story of life and luck-gone-nightmarishly-wrong did not end with the loss of life, loss of womanhood. It continued and holds, within it’s oxygen bound chapters, reconciliation, redemption, reconnection, three lovely little childhood souls without a mother and this aching mother’s heart without children to love. Mine is not a statistical story about loss, but gain. It is not about hopeless longing, though it did contain that then. Instead it is a story of a miraculous weaving, of a family that grows despite the odds. Imperfect and yet perfectly real.

This is my story. We all have them.

We have all had hardships which stood between us and something bigger, something looming impossible. We’ve all known our greatest obstacle- and our stories did not end there.

Rocky is a timeless tale still loved and embraced decades after its creation. This is because Rocky’s story resonates with us. After all, isn’t that why art exists, to connect us with our inner-self, our God, the world around us and each other? Art opens and exposes us…

And just like our own stories, art never ends.

I am really excited to share with you about Creed 2… (like, REALLY excited!)

www.rainydayinmay.com

PRIDE. LEGACY. FAMILY.

This fall, there is more to lose than a title.

In Theaters Wednesday, November 21st

Official Synopsis:  Life has become a balancing act for Adonis Creed. Between personal obligations and training for his next big fight, he is up against the challenge of his life. Facing an opponent with ties to his family’s past only intensifies his impending battle in the ring. Rocky Balboa is there by his side through it all and, together, Rocky and Adonis will confront their shared legacy, question what’s worth fighting for, and discover that nothing’s more important than family. Creed II is about going back to basics to rediscover what made you a champion in the first place, and remembering that, no matter where you go, you can’t escape your history.

Release Date: November 21, 2018

Director: Steven Caple Jr.

Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Wood Harris, Russell Hornsby, Florian “Big Nasty” Munteanu, Andre Ward, Phylicia Rashad, Dolph Lundgren

Writer: Sylvester Stallone

Distributor:  MGM, Warner Bros. Pictures

#CreedII

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