I Know This Much Is True

There has been a series of storms making its way across our state (although people in Missouri and Alabama were hit much harder). The weather has consisted of one or two days of sunshine followed by one week of thunderstorms (with CONSTANT thundering) dotted with spots of hail, and followed by unbearable heat. Get up, dry off, and start all over again! The weather is somewhat indicative of what has been going on for me personally. I am incredibly happy in my new home and happily looking to the day when our family truly becomes complete. Wedding plans have taken a back burner to the bigger issues that we are making our way through. The greatest feeling, however, is that both Ray and I agree that getting married is the heart of the matter and all of the details surrounding that ultimately make no difference between us.

Adjusting to being here has been easy in some respects. I expected a bigger cultural shock, something along the lines of when I lived in Toronto, but things have transitioned nicely. The most difficult part has been my relationship with my families. My mom seems to still be in denial that I moved in the first place. I hear from her very rarely and when I do it's as if I am speaking to a stranger. She doesn't share little stories with me or laugh about something silly she's done. She seems distraught, distracted and uncertain of how to talk to me. I know she is unhappy that I am living with Ray and not married, and she is equally upset that we are now 609 miles away in Arkansas. I don't blame her and I don't offer big excuses for my life. The truth is I have lived a lot of my life trying to keep afloat while things hit me from side to side. Even before Kevin died I was violently ill when I was pregnant with Gloria, then after he died I developed fibromyalgia in the midst of intense grieving. Let's also keep in mind that I was also a brand new mother to the most perfect little girl. Since then I have tried to take the wheel back, however a lot of other things have kept me from ever feeling independent. The house I bought was perfect but more than I could handle financially in the end. My fibromyalgia has been a constant plague, keeping me from pursuing friendships or jobs that I might have truly excelled at. I do no re-iterate all of this to give a "poor me" story. The truth is that a part of my biggest frustration was simply the feeling that I could not get a handle on my own life, my health and my future. Powerlessness is a disease that infected every area of my life, so it seemed.

Ray and I went through our own situations to end up together. There are so many things that I truly believed and lived by when I first met Kevin. I won't say that I was naive, stupid or wrong or that I was perfect and pure. I'll just say that the circumstances were totally different. I love that I have that first love story, full of innocence and wonder. I am thankful that I had a best friend like Kevin who could grow with me and allow me to be true to all of the ideals I had set before myself. In the same way that I won't say I was naive then, I won't say that I am jaded or broken now. I am in a different circumstance. My love story with Ray is deliciously complex, full of all kinds of compromises, challenges, and triumphs. He is so different from me and has come from such a different life. We always laugh to ourselves that the first few months we knew each other we were looking at each other "through one eye, as if to say, 'Are you for real?'" We came to the table as two grown adults, confident in who we were and hesitant to give up any of our hard-won beliefs. We clashed a lot more, because we had lived through enough to realize that nothing ever truly comes easy. Life is not a battle necessarily, but it also is no cakewalk.

There are some fights in life that are worth going to the mat for. There are some things that as I get older and gain experience I become less concerned with worrying over. Ray and I are both of the mindset that life is too short to be constantly unhappy over everything. We try to be slow to anger and quick to laugh. By the time we both let our guards down we realized how much we had known all along, but hadn't been ready to accept. It is hard to be on the other side of righteousness in the strict sense of the word, but it is also a reflection of how I have grown and changed. I had the easy romance where everything went the way it was supposed to, and while I do not regret any of it, ultimately it left me stripped of almost everything. It forced me to redefine my inner "I know this much is true." Now, I can say with confidence, Ray is my other half and made me happier than ever imagined. We were meant for each other, I know this much is true.