Mary and Elmer, Wonzell and Charles, Pam and Paul and a Nana

     I woke up this morning at 2:15am thinking about my family and my certainty that God knit us all together. That He chose us to be to family. And in that place, I began thinking about my Mom and Dad. About Paul's parents. About both our childhoods.

     So now, at 4:27 a.m., I still sit in the dark in front of a fire with thoughts and memories that will not stop and so I write...

    

     Mary, my mother, is writing down her story. She is being strong and brave and sends me pages that make me weep. Her childhood was hard, her Father was an alcoholic who came in and out of their life' most of her childhood. Mom had 3 sisters and then years later, Grandma and Grandpa had 2 more children. Two boys. My mother had to grow up fast. Too fast. As she send me her stories, the tears I wipe from my cheeks are sometimes from heartache, and sometimes from joy. My Mom is a good story teller. She telling me things that's she has never told me before. She is doing it for me because I asked her to. And I love her for it. 
     Growing up, everyone looked at my mother. "She's so pretty," girls would say when she came to school for things. "She looks like a movie star,"  I'd hear my friends whisper. And I did think she was  beautiful, but to me, she was just my Mom. 

     I didn't know when I was little that she was fragile, but "Handle with Care" was stamped across her spirit even then. My Dad always knew it, and part of me did too. 
     Mom and Dad married young and had four babies in six years. We were Mom's world. She played with us, read us stories, and we played lots of records. We sang and danced, and Mother sewed. She made clothes for herself like the ones Jackie Kennedy wore, and she made Easter dresses and school clothes for my sisters and me. Ron was her first. Her only son. I was born 11 months later. Lori followed two years after me, and two years after Lori, came our baby, Kaylynn. 
     I love to dance and sing because my mother showed me the joy she got from doing those things. I love stories because Mom didn't just read to us, she made books come alive. And I love the way I love and mother the way I mother, because my mother showed me how. 

      Elmer, my father, made me feel safe. I learned to trust because he was trustworthy. He left the house in a suit every morning and came home every night at 5:30 as Mom put dinner on the table. He was gentle. He was funny. He fixed skates, light switches, dryers, bikes and cars. He rescued kittens from inside walls, killed opossums, and saved feather-dyed baby chicks that caught fire in the garage. He showed me how to catch fireflies and he took scary out of thunderstorms. 
     Dad taught me to play. I played harder with my Dad than I have ever played with anyone else, and I can still feel the velvety grass he put under my feet ever summer of my childhood if I close my eyes. And boy...could Dad laugh. It was the infectious kind. I know all little girls think their Daddy is the most handsome man on earth, but mine...Oh...mine was! His smile would light up a whole room.
    

     Wonzell, Paul's mother, was born and bread a Texas beauty, but her father left their family to be with someone else and broke her heart. At sixteen she had a secret wedding to Paul's father, and Paul's brother, Charles B., was growing in her belly when she received her high school diploma. At seventeen, Wonzell was a wife and a mother. The next year Paul was born. Four years later, she had David and eight years after that, she had a baby girl who they named Charla, and their family was complete. 
     I will never know what it felt like to be in the skin of Paul's mother on that fateful day, but the decision she made changed the lives of her children forever. I grieve for all that was lost inside their room in the dark that tragic morning, and I must trust God for the things I will never know. I think about her often because she gave life to the man I have shared a life with. Sometimes I wonder, "Would she love me?" I never got to look into her eyes. I never got to ask her what Paul was like at three. She never got to hold our children. Paul's children. She never smelled them. She never got to know their hearts or see their smiles. I have missed her. 
     

Charles Brockton Payne, Paul's father,  is a man I have missed most of my life. I believe I would have loved him deeply. I can't explain it, but I know that he too, would love me. Sometimes knowledge just comes. I see something in the eyes of the handsome man who fathered my husband when I look at pictures of him. I can't explain it better than this, but I long to sit beside him and hold his hand. I want to feel him hug me. I picture him weepy in love, just like his Paul is, with anything concerning our children or grandsons. He got so much taken from him that morning. So very very much. Did he ever see it coming?

     

     I have spent more of my life with Paul than without him. Forty-nine of sixty-eight years. And his life is the most beautiful picture of redemption that I will ever see. And that is my gift. 

     Paul was fifteen when his Nana gave up her life for theirs and moved from Cleburne, Texas to Oklahoma City to care for four broken children left behind, and their lives went on.

     At 17, Paul met a free-spirited, guitar playing, Maxi-dress wearing girl with long hair bleached as white as snow. He thought she was beautiful. She was me. 
     We dated. We fell in love. We made plans for a life. 
     Weeks before our wedding, Charles B, Paul's older brother by one year, committed suicide, and Paul's life stopped again. He was 20, I was 19, and this time, we planned a funeral together. 5 weeks later, our wedding happened, and with broken hearts we began a grown up life with Paul's brother, 15-year old. David. He wanted to be with us, so Nana, now full of grief and 63, took eleven-year-old Charla back to her home in Cleburne to give her the only life she knew how to give.  A few months later, I found David locked inside his bedroom and Paul had no more brothers.  
      I never knew things like this really  happened except on TV or in books, but they do. They could have been other peoples tragedies, but they weren't. They were ours. And all of these lives ended before they really even started. But God knew every detail and breath of every single one of their days, and I know that. There is something people say sometimes, "God will never give you more than you can handle." And here I would add, "Well, it sure seems like Paul was given a lot." And he was.    
But we are still here, walking our road in Faith, and our story continues to thrive with struggles and laughter and love. 

     And Paul? He recently came across two shoe boxes of love letters written between his parents over the course of several years. Some were written while his Dad was away finishing college, and more when he went to  New York City studying to be a stock broker.

During the time he was gone, Wonzell was back in Cleburne staying with Nana. 

     These letters were such a beautiful gift as Paul read them out loud to me in bed one night. During many of the latters. Charles B. was four, Paul was three, and David was growing inside his Mom's belly as Charles and Wonzell's words to one another were spoke into the air around us. 

   

     And Nana is now living her last days. She is tired and ready to go see Jesus, and Paul is now preparing to speak about the woman who sacrificed her life for four grandchildren.  At her passing, people gathered from California, Texas, Virginia, Utah, and Washington DC to celebrate a life of suffering, sacrifice, laughter and love.

     Hard memories were spoken aloud to adults who once were children and now have adult children of their own. But the shelter and protection of God's presence in their lives was identified  and known, and we were able to praise in places beyond our imagining.

     Life...it simply happens.

    And Paul did handle all the things he got as best he could. But he didn't do it alone. God knew how much he would need, and He gave him all those things.

     And so ...We are here.