Freak Rain Downpour

I posted to Facebook a very, very short video on August 14, 2020, sharing a freak rain shower in the bright August late afternoon sun. My soul sister made a comment along the lines of at least we were able to get inside quickly and get into fresh clothes. Which we didn’t do. We just air dried. HA! We’re at a stage in life where we don’t care about things like dry clothes. Lol

I started to reply and it suddenly turned into this crazy comparison thing that just didn’t belong in a comment. She has a young son and I have a teen son, so we’re naturally at different parenting stages and what we notice first about and in our lives. We are also extremely different people and always came at situations and circumstances from different viewpoints.


Despite this glaring difference in who we are, we’re still best friends after meeting 23 years ago this month during our senior year of high school and we don’t give a crap if someone has a problem understanding how the fact that we are soooo crazily different actually made us sooooo crazily close and unbreakable.

Yes. Seeing a super tattoed, gothic dressing, pierced up metal head giggling and hanging out with a boot wearing, drawling cowgirl with a bandana and a handkerchief and a mens wallet, covered in the occasional dirt and grease on her clothes is an odd sight. We are fully aware. Get your eyeballs back in your heads and your jaws off the ground and move along.

Anyway, on to my post now...

I was recently telling my son that temperature and weather and, well, even the temperature of the house... it’s all different. Rain isn’t rain isn’t rain. Snow isn’t snow isn’t snow. 72 degrees isn’t 72 degrees isn’t 72 degrees.

And as odd as that sounds, there’s truth in the madness of the statement. Today’s rain was freakish, out of nowhere, instant mini rainbow causing, with warm droplets bouncing and glittering everywhere, and yet in other parts of our area, not a single drop of rain was to be found. From another perspective, a rain shower from this past weekend was quite frightening because it was super dark, featuring really damaging high winds, and was accompanied by thunder and lightning. And then there’s the rain storms that are drizzly and never ending and cause runny noses and sneezes and just plain misery.

I will take a drenching rain like today with its vibrancy over any other kind of rain. It was the stuff you want to run around in and jump into rain puddles and laugh. We see television and movies recreate that feeling with slow motion scenes of kids playing in the water from a busted fire hydrant on a scorching inner city day. Water is life, and those days remind us of it.

But life is also dark and dingy and dangerous and sad and morose. The thunder and lightning of terrible storms remind us of that and we don’t like to be reminded. Morose and sodden days remind us of all the things that make us sad and disheartened. We don’t like that either.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this and I don’t need to break it down with snow or the 72 degrees. Unless you need me to. Because 72 degrees is an oddly specific temperature. Just ask and I’ll share. (HA! You don’t want me to. Trust me. Those comparisons are surely as long as the rain explanation. We’ll move along then.)

So after all that, I want to talk about perspective. Last year I worked on my ‘first’ planner using a BuJo style (Bullet Journal for those unfamiliar.) I learned things about myself I didn’t like. I was then put in a position where my only choice was to resign from a job that was slowly killing me mentally and emotionally anyway. I found new employment and at the same time, received an invitation to interview with my dream employer.

My confidence was shot but I was going to give it my all. I slowly built my professional confidence back up, all while failing to fix the personal things I was still screwing up.

Then came some tough love. For once, I didn’t get angry and defensive right away. I thought about what was being said to me. I put myself in their shoes, and truly tried to see their side of things and not just say I was. And I was appalled at how I’d been behaving my whole life.

And that’s when life started to change. It was slow going. Gaining the trust that I wasn’t going to revert back to the old me right away. Hoping that eventually they would step up in the ways I had asked for. Working towards happiness. Together. Finally.

And in all of it, I was getting things accomplished, done, off my never ending To Do list. I wasn’t drained after an 8 hour shift anymore. I wasn’t struggling to fit my dad or my kid or my marriage in and around work. I was successfully using my planner, keeping up on my email, completing craft projects. Learning how to use POWER TOOLS!! Helping my husband with his projects.

Rain isn’t rain isn’t rain. Sometimes the road to winning the war is found in understanding the why behind the experience. It doesn’t have to be simple acceptance. If you understand the ’how did I get here’ part, you can usually also find the ‘how do I unravel and undo this’ part that brings the W.

Freak rain storm = Deeper understandings of life. This is how my mind works. Yup. I’m weird. Don’t act like you hadn’t already noticed.