Blossom Blog

Once upon a time there were two young lovers who wanted more than anything to be together. He was twenty, she was seventeen. People thought they were crazy, too young, too dumb, and much too poor to be getting married. They didn’t care what others said, they knew…they were determined…they were willing to do whatever it took to be together. So on July 17th, 1982 in a small country church, these two looked at each other and made a promise to become one…an Us.

Today Calvin and I are celebrating forty-three years of Us. I look back on those two younglings and think sometimes, no wonder people thought we were crazy! We knew absolutely NOTHING about what it would take to be an Us, to nurture an Us and certainly not how to cherish and protect an Us. We had both watched our parents seemingly make it work so what was the big deal? I laugh now at my own naive innocence and ignorance. What follows it the Story of Us…the bad…the ugly…but more importantly the beautiful and what it took to save Us.

I will start by saying that this is my rendition, my perspective filled mostly with the lessons that I have learned. There is of course another perspective because there is another’s rendition, Calvin’s. I can only speak from my heart….maybe one day I’ll ask him to be a guest writer sharing his.

The majority of our first year married was spent apart. Calvin had joined the military and was off training and I stayed with my parents. In March of ’83 we moved into our first home, a small very modest one bedroom apartment in North Carolina. One year later Calvin received orders for a three year deployment to Germany. During those years we started our family with the birth of our sweet baby girl Jess. Two years later Josh was born followed by Patrick. Grace blessed us seven years later becoming the best surprise we have ever gotten. By the time of Patrick and Grace’s birth Calvin had gotten out of the army and we had returned home to Georgia to be closer to our families. Calvin had finished college before getting out of the military and I after returning home. We lived the usual predictable lives of most American families, we worked, raised children, became grandparents, and made many precious memories. We also felt the challenges that all families have to face. One of the greatest was dealing with the pain of Calvin’s mother’s illness and death, followed by my mother’s just one year later. They were both wonderful women, respected and loved by all who knew them. They etched grooves on our children’s heart that will never be forgotten. You never know the power that a mother has over her family until it is missing and looking back, I now realize that the pain of their absence opened up cracks in us that had been held together by the glue of their great love and prayers over Us.

Ten years later…

Calvin and I have always loved spending most of our time together outside. Even in the most uncomfortable weather, that is where you will usually find us. On a spring morning in 2021 on our back porch in that sweet little house on Hillcrest Avenue our world as we had known it was forever changed. I was told things I never thought I would be told….I released years of piled up feelings that I had been too afraid to speak. Afraid that if I ever opened up that box there would be no closing it. Looking across at each other both stunned and heartbroken, we couldn’t help but see the vessel that had once held Us, our marriage, broken and completely shattered.

Over the course of the next six weeks we numbly just existed. We were fully aware of the fact that we were at a crossroad and that after such a rough detour, nether of us were confident or assured of which road was the right one. As more was revealed in the following weeks, it became a battle not to just cash in my golden ticket and run! Running was familiar and comfortable to me, I had figuratively ran from anything that was just too difficult to deal with and if I am being honest, I had dreamed of a golden ticket out for many years. I had also been something of a professional rug sweeper. Anything I didn’t want to face, under the rug it went until the rug couldn’t hold any more and I tripped. Landing facedown, knocked out with the reality that I had some hard decisions to make and they were not going to be comfortable or pretty.

Over the course of the next year we made the decision that we…Us, was worth fighting for. We had way too much at steak to walk away. Everything we had build together was so beautiful; neither of us wanted to let it go. The phrase “I love you more” became our new mantra. Because I had previously done much self reflection and study, I knew this was NOT going to be easy for either of us! We both had major personal demons to face and conquer before we could ever even think of rebuilding Us. Probably of all the lessons, the major one that I was needing to learn was, grow the hell up. Now keep in mind that physically I was 57 years old at the time however, emotionally I had been letting a 10 year old little girl sit in the driver’s seat. This of course wasn’t conscious. I know now it was a way to keep from being responsible…if I felt something uncomfortable or if something didn’t work out, it wasn’t my fault! I outsourced every last ounce of my power to others so when shit hit the fan I had someone else to sit in the hot seat…take the blame. Everyone… Calvin, my children, my friends, my family- all figuratively received a portion of the responsibility of making me feel loved, secure, worthy, enough…fill in the blank. Never realizing that I could never have full authority over my life without first taking full and complete responsibility for my life, this went on for way too long.

There is a process that I read about in the devotional, Seeing Beautiful Again. A precise process where potters take broken pieces of pottery and further break them into a dust. This dust is then taken and added to the new clay, making it not only stronger, but even more beautiful than before. After reading this I thought, what a great analogy to how God is able to make ALL things new. We, through the strength and power of His mercy and grace, are able to take the broken mess that we have made in our lives and transmute it into something even more beautiful than we could have ever imagined. Those old broken pieces do not have to be sharp, painful reminders of what was and what was lost. Through our willingness, they can be used revealing an even greater purpose.

When I think about those two young lovers 43 years ago, I no longer am heavy with grief of broken dreams and promises…. now I smile and am filled with such pride, joy, and gratefulness. We didn’t always get it perfect or even right, but we were willing. Willing to rise and try again, surrendering to God our brokenness. The shattered vessel that we saw four years before had held all the hurts, the betrayals, the resentments, the disappointments. Now that vessel has been beautifully remolded now holding all the goodness, the joy, the precious, the unconditional love, the sacred, the holy…that vessel is holding Us.

I want to share Brene’ Brown’s manifesto from her book Rising Strong. I pray that we can all get comfortable with the uncomfortable in our story. That we never hide attempting to avoid shame but that we become vulnerable in sharing what we are walking through. It is only when we can share in one’s pain that we get the privilege of also sharing in their joy. God’s blessings and love to you all!

https://brenebrown.com/art/manifesto-of-the-brave-and-brokenhearted/