A Run Between the Rain Drops: A Texas Love Story

By Linda Hoard

Have you ever wondered if a life nightmare situation can ever be turned around? Join RexAnne in her wild life journey to find the way...

RexAnne, in an epic love story of good vs. evil based on a true life story, survives mental abusers, betrayals, and terrorizing experiences with her drug-addicted, alcoh

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Apr 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887383620

Linda Hoard

Linda Hoard is a published Christian author living in the quiet, piney woods of East Texas with her husband, a tiny toy poodle, and a rescued forest kitten. She has a B.S. degree in business from the University of Texas at Austin, Texas, and writes with years of experience from personal biblical studies and a wealth of background research into the behavioral sciences.

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Contents

PROLOGUE

Chapter 1—TOUGH BEGINNINGS

Chapter 2—BENJAMIN JAMES SNOWDEN (BIG JIM)

Chapter 3—CHASE’S STORY

Chapter 4—BACK TO THE RANCH

Chapter 5—THE WATERMELON FESTIVAL

Chapter 6—REFLECTIONS

Chapter 7—U.T. AUSTIN

Chapter 8—ASHTON HAMILTON

Chapter 9—THE SECOND DATE AND FORWARD MOTION

Chapter 10—COLLEGE CONTINUES

Chapter 11—NEWLYWEDS

Chapter 12—DENTAL SCHOOL

Chapter 13—DALLAS

Chapter 14—FIRST HOME PURCHASE

Chapter 15—CORPUS CHRISTI

Chapter 16—FRESH STARTS / FRESH PAIN

Chapter 17—THE NEW NORMAL

Chapter 18—RUNNING BETWEEN THE RAINDROPS

Chapter 19—FLIGHT

Chapter 20—JOLENE

Chapter 21—RACHEL’S VISIT

Chapter 22—KISSES AND A GIFT

Chapter 23—LAS VEGAS NIGHT AT THE YACHT CLUB

Chapter 24—WE NEED TO TALK

Chapter 25—DR. BRANDON SMITH

Chapter 26—THE BAY HOUSE

Chapter 27—FOREBODINGS

Chapter 28—GATHERING STORMS

Chapter 29—CONFRONTING REALITY

Chapter 30—COASTAL TERROR

Chapter 31—HOSPITALIZATION AT HOME

Chapter 32—MADNESS IN THE NIGHT

Chapter 33—GOD IS A PILOT

Chapter 34—FINAL EVIDENCE

Chapter 35—A PRICE FOR PROGRESS

Chapter 36—REAP WHAT YOU SOW

Chapter 37—PORT ARANSAS

Chapter 38—MIRACLES HAPPEN

Chapter 39—THE STORIES

Chapter 40—THE GIFT OF PROMISES

Chapter 41—PLANS

Chapter 42—PREPARING TO LAUNCH

Chapter 43—NEW BEGINNINGS / HAPPY ENDINGS

EPILOGUE

INVITATION TO FOLLOW JESUS

PROLOGUE

It was not until I, RexAnne Rhodes, began to write my novel in 2005 that my life’s accumulated wisdom began to soak its pages. Somehow I had been set free to write the story, not as others would have me see it, but as I saw it…in its cold and harsh realities and in its awesome grandeur and beauty. It was real now…the story I must write. The weekend at the Luther Hotel in Palacios, Texas, had been the determining factor. The welcomed retreat in the old hotel built in 1903 facing Matagorda Bay had made all the difference. The long, rambling structure, now a Texas Historical Landmark, had once been headquarters for early land developers. In days gone by, formal orchestras serenaded guests at mealtimes along the front porch, long since demolished. Pictures of early American movie stars lining the stairwell to the second floor gave evidence of a glamorous past for the beautifully aging hotel. Its homey furnishings and kind, welcoming owners were all the comforts I needed to stop the writer’s block and release my story for the telling. The story that must be told…the God-story…the part of my life’s work not yet completed…the adventure that I had both lived and survived…the epic tale that I was born to write…the fictionalized memoir, based on true happenings, which I had been hesitant to tell…all of those things.

Later in the day, I walked an easy few blocks to downtown Palacios from the Luther Hotel and sat at the front table of the Outrigger restaurant. I ordered a basket special of Buckshot Dawson’s famous fried catfish poor-boy sandwich and overheard a local, Possum Henderson, recount endless tales of Palacios history, along with other assorted gossip and town folklore. Possum, as I heard the restaurant owner call him, was apparently a regular at the Outrigger and was glad to talk to any new face walking in the door. If you sat within earshot of this colorful local, you were included in his conversations or served as an audience for his storytelling. Being a writer, I was glad to listen.

Legend has it, began Possum, that a Spanish ship was wrecked off the coast of Texas near Palacios. The sailors saw a mirage that looked like three palaces, and they swam to shore where the palaces appeared to be arising in the sand. As the men got to shore, the palaces mystically disappeared. Those same sailors named the area Three Palaces, or Tres Palacios, in Spanish. The name of the town, unlike the original visage, remained, he concluded.

As I listened to another life sojourner’s tales and assorted colorful babble, I quietly contemplated, once again, that my story must be written. Haven’t we all chased a mirage, so to speak? I thought to myself. Haven’t we all gone on a quest to complete our lives and follow our dreams, no matter how grand or small? We all have our stories, and I knew, once again, that mine was worth telling. I had a book worth writing. I had long felt that every human encounter in our lives was in some way a divine appointment and that the strangers we meet have something to teach us. To me, this chance meeting was an additional affirmation and all the encouragement I needed to continue with the writing of my book.

I finished my meal, pondering how visions and dreams become real after the vision is first seen as if we bring something tangible and visible into being from an unknown dimension.

After paying my tab, I headed back to my second-story room at the Luther Hotel for a quiet evening of writing. I stared out the open window from the small but quaintly appointed Victorian-era room, and the sound of the calm Gulf waters, with their mystical rhythm, quieted my soul. A meditative quieting of my mind was necessary to draw the details of the story from the depths of memory, where I had safely chambered them. I peacefully sat down to write at the small table overlooking the bay as the winds of a late spring norther blew steadily through the screen window of my bayside room. I slipped into my writer’s trance, assisted by the lulling, swirling, hypnotic sounds of the coastal breezes rustling through the leaves of the old magnolia tree just outside my open window. The fragrance of the fresh bay winds was intoxicating. In my meditative state, the seagulls’ enchanting evening lullabies called to me to write…write…write the story that must be written. I must tell the tale, free my soul, and open the pain chamber once and for all to reveal discrepancies of understanding and the preponderance of good and evil in all who had been players in the God-story I was born to write. I must tell the tale of the exciting life lived in the faithful following of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and of a sinner saved by His grace. It was a tale worth telling, and so I began.

As God impregnates the tiny acorn with the DNA magic to produce a mighty oak, so He gives to each of us certain gifts or talents. One of my gifts enabled me to see through to a person’s heart. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I had encountered some of the most evil, diabolical spirits devised, living in the hearts of people I cherished, including the husband I had dearly loved, who was the father of my two beloved daughters.

Greed, ruthless ambition, jealousy, pride, dysfunctional family, betrayal, love gone wrong, drugs, alcohol, murder, and the triumph of a persistent spirit seeking God were some of the raw components in this epic tale waiting to be told.

I would write my embellished work of fiction based on many real-life happenings, written to protect the privacy of the evil ones, with no revenge in mind. I owned my life story and could never have imagined what others would do to me in my one, small life as I served God in ordinary ways as a loyal wife and devoted mother.

Deuteronomy 32:35 (KJV)

To me belongeth vengeance, and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time, for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.

Chapter 1

TOUGH BEGINNINGS

Deuteronomy 31:6 (KJV)

Be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid of them! The Lord your God will go ahead of you. He will neither fail you nor forsake you.

I, RexAnne, do not remember hearing the shot of the gun that killed my mother, but I do remember aspects of that dark morning in the back bedroom of our tiny home in East Texas. I do recall the tiny pool of blood circling underneath my bedroom door as it trickled slowly and most hideously down the hallway from the bathroom where Ally, my birth mother, had shot herself and ended her troubled, young life. I do remember the police officer crouched beside me, holding me back and restraining me from running to my mother again. My poor beloved mother, who lay dead on our bathroom floor from the gunshot wound she had delivered to herself on that depressing morning in Texas, the third year of my life.

It was a hard jumpstart to life, and the truth of the matter is, things did not get much better for a long, long while. As my grandfather, Big Jim, would say, What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, RexAnne, and on that day, the long, long road to my strengthening had begun. My mother’s personal struggles with my mentally abusive, invalidating father had ended, and now my young life would continue without her sweet face and loving ways. Sometimes, life has a way of making one grow up really, really fast, and my young life was forever changed that day.

I have only hazy memories, visions, and feelings as experienced through the eyes and mind of a three-year-old child, but I do remember that she, my mother Ally, was a kind and loving person. I recall that my little sister, Rachel, had been asleep in her crib beside me in our bedroom that dreadful day in Texas when my mother breathed her last breath and left me to deal with the treacheries of life with my tyrannical, always angry, demeaning, invalidating father, Sam. Poor Rachel was only a year old and had been born an ill child with asthma that nearly took her life as it accelerated into pneumonia more than once. I suppose Ally’s death was an event precipitated by an overwhelming profusion of difficult circumstances, many of which I will never fully understand, as I was so very young when it all took place. Guns do not kill people…people kill people, and Ally shot herself. When I look at the circumstances, I see the unfortunate combination that made the accessibility of my father’s gun turn into a most tragic happenstance. A temporary problem was given a devastatingly permanent solution. My little sister’s life-threatening illnesses and the demands of a three-year-old were a heavy load for my mother. Add to that mix our absentee father, Sam, who slept in the same house with us but worked long hours in the East Texas oil fields to provide our living, and you have an ominous setup for potential issues. My mother, Ally, had no human support with her child-rearing trials, and when my father, Sam, was home, he was always angry, drinking beer or scotch, and mentally and emotionally abusive to all of us. Psychologists describe Sam’s personality dysfunction as that of being an invalidator. One of the common side effects or collateral damage to the spouse of a person harboring this treacherous and highly toxic behavioral pattern is suicide. It was a recipe for disaster, and our family was one more validating statistic to those studies.

All of these elements tipped the scales and brought my mother to the decision that taking her life with Sam’s Colt 45 was in her best interest. Her parents had warned her years before not to marry Sam. Suicide may well have appeared to Ally to be the only way to ease her pain, but suicide has an ugly, consuming landscape, and the issues that are left to the survivors are devastating. There would be emotional scars that would never completely leave, remaining as a shadow-life lurking within the depths of my soul. The pain would lessen over time, but the scars would remain on the background palette of my life…scars invisible to the eye externally but sheltered deep within my soul and hidden in my imagined pain chamber. There were the goodbyes that never got to be spoken and so many, many questions left unanswered, even though a suicide note was left spattered with her precious blood on the bathroom sink. The note was actually sweet and not vindictive at all, with the last line, written to my father, reading, The babies need you. All wording in her final note pointed to a resigned feeling of lonely abandonment by her husband when she so needed his help with a critically ill infant and a three-year-old. There was no raging, written, venomous note of reproach but rather more of a resigned statement of her overwhelming and helpless despair in the face of too much life pressure, with no sign of human assistance coming to her in any real way when she needed it most. She saw no light of loving assistance or forthcoming resolution to her predicament. She had lost all hope.

And what was I supposed to do at three years old with all this pain of abandonment, the first of a long list of life betrayals? I silently stuffed my pain into an imagined pain chamber, where all other unresolved, unexplained hurt would sleep until it would be somehow, someday, reconciled, processed, healed, and released. I would find myself waiting for that day of resolution regarding the painful episodes of my life experiences, searching the faces of new acquaintances, places, or events. Who was coming to save me from all this pain? I kept looking for my mommy to come through the door with open arms to hug me, but as I looked deeper into my imagination, I could never see her face again. She stood in my child’s imagination as a person with no face, which I later believed was God’s merciful way of hiding the reality of what damage the gun had done to her beautiful image on that tragic morning. My young mind had totally, mercifully blanked out the horror of it all, which I had, apparently, witnessed as a three-year-old.

Until that hoped-for day of resolution of the extreme pain was realized, I determined to silently hide from it. The adults in my life played the game of an intentionally fraudulent life with me as if nothing had ever transpired. No lengthy explanations, no fond shared remembrances of my beautiful mother, and certainly no professional counseling was ever offered. It was the hushed family sorrow and disgrace which no one spoke about, swept neatly and completely under the carpet of topics disallowed for further discussion.

I developed a quiet, subdued, and thoughtful nature, seeking happiness as I could, running between the raindrops of tears and childhood despair and keeping the pain locked deep, deep inside my personal pain chamber. I was the guardian keeper of the key to my dreaded pain chamber, and the more I hid my pain, the better I felt. I could not control all the insanity of the adults around me, but I could manage the key to the chamber of pain within. After all, there appeared to be no use in discussing something so horrid with anyone, as no one ever offered answers to me that came anywhere close to quenching the fire and terror of my painful loss. My father, Sam, wanted no discussion of what had transpired, which added even more horror to my predicament. Where did I fit in without her? How could the loving, guiding sunshine of my life have vanished so completely without telling sweet little loving me goodbye? She was my sunshine, my everything. Her abandonment through suicide was a hollow point bullet through my heart as well. Though I was the survivor, it left me severely wounded and clinging to the land of the living in a tailspin, with no sense of direction.

At night, with streams of private, hidden tears on my pillow, I folded my little hands and prayed to an invisible God that my mother had taught me about. She told me His name was Jesus and that He was good and kind and that He loved me. I prayed my simple, child-like prayers every night, hoping that He would save me from my terrible, chambered pain and the fear of life with a very dysfunctional, tyrannical, and angry father. The child inside of me needed comforting beyond measure, and this mysterious God was all I could think to cling to. It was a parting piece of knowledge my beloved mommy had left me.

Life is a precious gift from God and certainly worth living, even with its low spots. I wish Ally could have talked to someone who could have helped her have the courage to hold on for better days and a better answer than the one she chose. It was both her loss and ours and was definitely a permanent solution to her overwhelming but temporary issues. There are always answers to life’s most distressing issues, but sometimes we must suffer a bit and patiently wait for them to come. Had she had a more compassionate, perceptive, and kind husband, perhaps her fate would have been different. I like to think so. Kindness matters.

My early remembrances of Sam, our father, are not good ones. I recall the harsh severity of his disposition, his ugly temper, threatening demeanor, harsh whippings, and the feeling that nothing I did was ever quite good enough for him. Navigating life around Sam was like attempting to explore a bottomless pit with dimensions I could never quite fathom or a minefield of hidden treacheries. It was impossible to second-guess his harsh rules, which only he formalized, and walking on eggshells around him was our daily way of life. His relentless impatience, volatile temper, and controlling ways, coupled with driving, military-like demands, which no young child could possibly comply with, were the first and lasting impressions I had of my father. Never enough…never good enough…I could never be enough. His performance-based, conditional love kept me in a never-ending life of striving for a goal I could never quite reach. Double backflips of compliance were never enough to satisfy his unquenchable, insatiable, and unreasonable expectations and requirements. He was the Pharisee and Sadducee of my existence…all law, no mercy or grace, and conditional, performance-based love at its cruel, critical, and brutal worst. I lived with a cloud of rejection and turned inward more and more.

I remember being banished from the dinner table at a family Thanksgiving meal because I complained to Sam that my Sunday shoes were too tight and pinched my feet, such that I could not enjoy my meal. Through my tears, he loudly admonished the voicing of my feelings and with a totalitarian, hideous fit of rage, roughly grabbed my arm, jerking me out of my chair at the family meal with all of our guests, and cast me from the midst of the long-awaited family festivities to remain an outcast in my bedroom. Shame, blame, and guilt were favorite manipulative and controlling behavioral tools that Sam used daily. I remember my sweet mom, Ally, sneaking in to console me a bit later as I lay shamed and isolated on my little bed, my pillow soaked with a river of my little girl tears. This was the last Thanksgiving I had with her as she held me tenderly and dried my tears. She removed my Sunday shoes, which had grown too small for the rapidly developing feet of her three-year-old. Ally quietly substituted my house slippers and held my hand as we walked back into the dining room together. Her kind ways were a balm to my soul and a constant antidote to the angry, harsh severity of Sam’s ugly, domineering temperament.

After my mother’s death, Sam was relentless in stifling Rachel’s and my anger with the harsh touch of his controlling, dictatorial personality. Sam reigned with a steely hand to stifle the essence of our burgeoning personalities in an attempt to bring us into military-like submission. I was born with the God-given and American right to a voice, but I squelched that right until adulthood many, many years later. Sam’s my way or the highway straightjacket pattern of tyrannical fatherhood was the paradigm of early learning my sister and I were ushered into. His harsh disciplinary ways remained throughout our childhood and on into our teens. It was autocratic tyranny at its worst. It is funny to think how differently it affected us as sisters. I guess the two-year age difference cast each of us into different, and later conflicting, patterns of relating to Sam, to one another, and to our world.

I, for the most part, was the compliant one, rocking no boats, while Rachel showed early signs of a seething, underlying, angry, rebellious nature, which eventually would lead to an early and abrupt departure from our home in her teens. In retrospect, she was stronger than I was in rebelling against such a tyrant as Sam. In general, I chose the path of least resistance and submission to our most behaviorally dysfunctional father.

Sam had been in West Texas on a deer hunt the day I was born, and for some reason, we were never truly in sync from that day forward. I always bore the feeling that there was a subliminal preponderance of evil in this man and an unexplainable lack of balance in the persona he portrayed to the general public, our church family, and his business associates. It was a Doctor Jekyll/Mr. Hyde sort of scenario. You had to live with him to see it. He was very good at the charade of normalcy in the workplace and at church. After Ally’s death, Sam was increasingly hard on Rachel and me. I feel certain the acceleration of his wrathful ways was a form of misdirected anger that Rachel and I were recipients of as a result of Sam’s new and unwanted job of single parenthood. The evil nature that dwelled within Sam would surface again and again to dominate and subdue our developing personalities, resulting in my turning inward and becoming very submissive and non-confrontational. Rachel became more irrational and rebellious in nature and began to exhibit strange and sometimes alarming behavior. I oftentimes felt that he possibly never wanted children, or at least that is how his harsh, impatient ways made me feel. It was as if I were a job he had not signed up for.

As time passed, I became very quiet, thoughtful, and studious. I found solace in my studies and attaining excellent grades in school, which made Sam happy. Superior performance and meeting Sam’s expectations were the precursors for acceptance from this man, our father. It was conditional love, at best. There was an inner conflict I bore, which kept me torn between keeping Sam happy by avoiding his wrath and experiencing the full and wonderful growth denied me by such an overbearing personality as my father. The conflict in my soul would remain dormant for many, many years, like a spring seed waiting to sprout in warm sunshine but held in bondage under a crushing layer of thick ice and snow.

As I finished my writing and closed my journal for the evening of the first day at the Luther Hotel, I reflected on patterns of evil in this world, oftentimes unnoticed by others, that were as mysterious and yet consequential as other more blatantly explainable life forces could be. I pondered as to when or if the evil finally turned upon all perpetrators, encompassing them with the just desserts they so readily deserved. At what point did the bad seeds sown grow to strangle the gardener of the treachery? Was there a calculated, unseen formula in the code of the universe of the reap-what-you-sow scenario, which had been set in place by the Almighty God that my mother had taught me about? I pondered this Jesus whom I had begun to tearfully pray to while alone in bed at night by the age of three.

I sipped my last steamy cup of Bigelow Earl Grey tea, slipped on my softest T-shirt, and climbed into the silky, smooth bedding of my comfortably refurbished hotel suite. There was no need for air conditioning as the pleasant coastal breezes continued to pulse through the open window of my room in rhythmic waves of velvety serenity.

The confirmed certainty of my life purpose in writing my book propelled me into the deepest, most luxurious sleep that I had experienced in a long, long while. My trip to the coast provided the final boost of clarity I had sought through prayer. We all reap what we sow as an inescapable precept of our existence, as the Bible relates. The principle is written indelibly into the code of the universe by its Creator and one that would be played out over and over and over again on the pages of my book worth writing…a book that mattered.

Chapter 2

BENJAMIN JAMES SNOWDEN (BIG JIM)

If there was one thing that could brighten my world, it was a trip to see my grandfather, Big Jim. He was my mother’s father and a true light in my childhood. My mother’s early death had scarred all of us for life, but Big Jim’s sunny disposition and loving ways somehow caused me to know that everything was going to get better for me. He gave me hope…the happy anticipation of good. If Big Jim could go on without her, I surely must be able to find a way to overcome my pain from her loss. I gained strength and courage just by being in my grandfather’s presence. He tried to see the best in everybody, though I later learned that he had advised my mother not to marry my father, Sam. Big Jim was a huge piece of love and always had a story to tell. After listening to all of his stories, one would wonder how any one man could have lived it all. Big Jim was just plain big. At 6'3", he was a physically large man with big, bold, exciting stories. He was an authentic Texas cowboy who loved Jesus. There was a lot Big Jim had been forced to overcome in his life. His own father had died when he was fifteen, and his mother died the following year, leaving him to practically raise himself. He would always tell me that what did not kill me would make me stronger, and I listened and remembered all the words of wisdom the old man had ever spoken to Rachel and me during our summer visits to Stockdale. It was as if he had taken his branding iron and branded God’s words on my heart. They were encouraging words that I would later recall during the storms of life that were my destiny to face. He had not wanted my mother to marry Sam but had not been bitter toward Sam about her suicide. Big Jim was not one to harbor grudges, was big on forgiving others, and was quick to grieve her death and concentrate on loving his granddaughters. His emphasis in life was to move forward, no matter what life threw his way. He was resilient, encouraging and kind, and an angel of light in my young life.

Life’s tough on all of us from time to time, ladies, Big Jim would say. "It’s just different stories for different folks. But God is good, and what you must remember is that the rain always comes before the rainbow. You must always hold on through the trouble spots, and just when you think you can’t hold on any longer, you must tie a knot at the end of your rope and hold on tight. You’ve just got to learn to run between the raindrops. It’s all about moving forward in life, girls. You will have mountains to climb and dark valleys to walk through off and on throughout life. The Bible says, ‘In the world you will have tribulation’ (1 John 5:4, ESV), and if the Bible says it will be so, it will be so. God’s nature is one of truth, and therefore He cannot lie. The Bible is a reliable source of absolute truth, and it has an answer to any question we might have in life. The problem is, most Christians do not take the time to read God’s love letter, the Bible, so they stumble and fall over many life issues."

I guess our grandfather really wanted to get the perseverance messages across to Rachel and me early on because of our mother’s suicide. Big Jim encouraged us to change our thinking from discouraging thoughts to positive and hopeful ones when we encountered life’s inevitable issues and to connect with God through prayer for spiritual solutions to our earthly challenges. He was always pointing to God, faith, courage, and hope. Most of all, he did not want us to give up on life as our mother had. He taught us by his words, his actions, and his prayer life before us that we were important to him, the world, and especially to God. He taught us to know that we had a plan and a purpose to our lives, which had nothing at all to do with either of our parents. We had come through our parents, but we belonged to God. He wanted us to know that God had planted seeds of greatness in each of us, much like a tiny acorn is implanted by God with the code to become a mighty oak. It was the same for each of us concerning our personal destinies in life. He taught us that our personal destiny was ours to discover, not to allow anyone to control what we ultimately did with our lives and that it should only be between us and God.

When I questioned him as to how I could better know what God wanted for me, he would always tell me to get really, really quiet and pray. The still, small voice that Christians know as God’s Holy Spirit speaking to them would come to me, Big Jim would say. He went on to say that I would not be able to know the Voice until I listened quietly for it in my heart after much prayer. He told me that it would probably never be an audible voice, although it could be, but usually, more of an inside knowing. Big Jim taught me that this big, invisible God, who was a Spirit, loved us and wanted His comforting Holy Spirit to live inside of us, to comfort, guide, and know us personally. He told me that Jesus was a gentleman and that He would not push Himself on people and that I must ask Jesus, myself, to come into my heart, to be my Lord and Savior, and to forgive me of my sins. And so, I did. I extended the invitation and began to believe.

By simple childlike faith, it all made sense to me. Rachel, on the other hand, was skeptical and made fun of our grandfather behind his back and refused to talk to or pray to or worship anyone she could not see.

Accepting that God is a Spirit takes faith, and Rachel was not able to get there in her faith walk. I told her that if she had faith in the reality of gravity, which was invisible (when she fell off her bike and invisible gravity pulled her to the ground), she should easily be able to use the same faith to believe in a God, who was just as real. And that God, who had actually designed the concept of gravity, but whom she could not see, loved her dearly. Rachel just did not choose to understand, and there was nothing more I could do for her. It is all about our choices.

Rachel and I were the innocent victims of Ally’s desperate act of suicide, and Big Jim was concerned about the lifetime impact it would have on his granddaughters. He wanted his granddaughters to be overcomers and to be able to live happy, productive lives past the trials of life that he knew we all must suffer through in this world. His love for us was sufficient to make us feel wanted and needed and assisted in the healing of our broken hearts, which were scored with traumatic abandonment issues.

As a young girl, it was always hard for me to imagine why a mother would want to give up and not stay around to watch her daughters grow up. How could she want to miss being a ballet mom or buying our pretty prom dresses or watching us ride bareback across beautiful Texas pasturelands on cool summer mornings in Stockdale at Big Jim’s? The thought of my sweet mom never seeing Rachel’s and my children one day, her future grandchildren, really was especially painful. Some of my questions just never received good answers. A whole