A new start

In life there are many different types of endings. There are the ones that make you laugh, make you happy, make you sad and cry, the ones that leave you wanting more and then there are the ones that are not really an end but rather a new beginning. But life is not all about endings it is about all the new beginnings. 

I am here to say that I am starting the next chapter in my life. Raylyn and I are no longer together and I do not see this as a sad ending to our story, yes at first I did, but I see this as a great start for a new chapter in my life. All I can say is that I'm happy now really in truly happy, I can finally be me, I can try new things, and I can start living my dream.

I have always believed that God puts people in out lives for a reason, sometimes these people are just meant to pass by, stay for a short while, or be there our entire lives. And even though the reasons may not always be clear to us we just have to trust his will and follow the path he has laid out for us.

So this is not where my story ends but where a new one begins.  

Our First House

I don’t know many people who at the ages of 17 and 18 own their own house, but we do. I remember a year ago searching for the perfect house. I think we looked at a dozen houses a weekend. Then we found it, well so I thought, it was the perfect! It was a cute little two bedroom one bath, nice kitchen, the perfect detached garage for Raylyn to have his “man cave” in, the sweetest little back yard and deck. I thought we had found the perfect house for us to get started in but then it came time for the inspection and all that came crashing down. Everything was wrong in this house, I mean EVERYTHING! The guy who “flipped” this house just made things do and tried to cover up his sloppy not to code work, I got so upset. I thought we would never find a house after that. Then we pulled in the drive way of this tacky little red white and blue house trash under the steps and old paint cans on the front deck, inside the walls were these crazy ugly colors, the kitchen was old and very outdated and the back fence looked like it was falling apart, the only good thing about this house was the remodeled bathroom. But it was perfect, I could just picture me and Raylyn living here, I could see us having our first baby here, I absolutely loved it. I was so excited when the inspection came back good and I couldn’t wait for us to get started painting over those ugly colors and updating the kitchen.  Looking back now I am so glad that first house didn’t work out because we live in such a good neighborhood we have the BEST neighbors who take care of us, we live in a great school district for any future kids and we have a back yard and house big enough for us to get a puppy!

December 22

“I Raylyn Ayers take you Stacie Ledbetter to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, to care and protect, to comfort and encourage you, and to stay with you, for all of eternity.”

 I will never forget the sound of Raylyn’s voice while reading his vows or the smile on his face when I said I do or that feeling when we kissed for the first time as Mr. and Mrs. Ayers.  Yeah it wasn’t the wedding I had always dreamed about but it was PERFECT! There are no words that could ever describe the way I felt knowing Raylyn would never have to go back to that place ever again and I was going to get to spend the rest of my life with my prince charming. We aren’t perfect, yes we have our fights but there will NEVER come a day when I will stop loving Raylyn, he is my everything and I could never ask for more.

I hear wedding bells!

Okay so trusting Raylyn’s dad to come up with most of the plan was a big mistake since there turned out to be not much of a plan after all but oh well. The night we planned to leave we lucked out since Raylyn and his brother were left home alone. This made it really easy for Raylyn’s friend to drive by pick him up and make their way to meet me and Raylyn’s dad.  Then this is where things made a bad turn and I thought our plan wasn’t going to work and I would never see Raylyn again. Of course since Raylyn left his mom and step dad a note letting them know he was with his dad so they wouldn’t worry about him, they found out pretty soon where he was and they started blowing up mine, my moms, Raylyn’s dad’s and just about anyone else’s phones demanding that Raylyn come back home. Then Raylyn’s dad being an idiot instead of heading to N.C. goes back into town to meet a friend, why he felt like this was the best time to hang out with his friends like a little kid I don’t know but I was ready to just leave him behind and jump to plan B, take the notarized letter from his dad saying it was okay and go to Las Vegas and get married there without his dad.  Finally after about an hour we finally got on the interstate and went on our way. Then of course we got lost. How his dad managed to get lost I have no idea since we were following the signs but I guess in the time me and Raylyn dosed off he took a wrong turn or something.  Finally we got back going the right way and made it but it was two in the morning and we had to wait until eight for the courthouse to open so we parked the car and me and Raylyn went to sleep. When we woke up we went and found the courthouse which with our luck was under construction and a lot of the offices were closed but once again we lucked out since the ones we needed were open. Now we start filling out paper work and what not and that’s when it hit me, I AM ABOUT TO GET MARRIED!!!

What to do next?

So now that the planning has begun Raylyn brings up his father, who I have been told can’t help us because of his own person issues he is facing, but I push that behind me since I don’t know what all Raylyn has been told about his father because he has never talked about him before. Then Raylyn tells me that he had been talking to his dad and he can help us but he wants me to go talk to him first. Okay so now I freak out just a little bit, one because of the things I have been told about him and two Raylyn wants me to go meet his dad WITHOUT him. But because I love Raylyn I agreed for me and my mom to go talk to him since I am NOT meeting this guy by myself. So that Friday after school me and mom go on our way to go meet Raylyn’s dad and yes I am extremely nervous about this since Raylyn has high hopes that after I talk to his dad he will be able to fix everything. So we meet his dad and he made a really good first impression because instead of it just being Raylyn’s dad, my mom and me which could have been really weird he took us to his mother’s house. This made me feel a little bit better about this whole thing. We talked for long time and granny brought out the baby pictures (Raylyn was a CUTE baby, you know you have cute babies then you have CUTE babies) but after all that talking all I got out of it was that Raylyn could try to come live with his dad but there was a possibility that it wouldn’t work. So the next day I talk to Raylyn about everything I learned at his dad’s and Raylyn then decided it wasn’t worth the risk that it wouldn’t work, so we made a decision that would change our lives forever……we decided that we would go ahead and get married now. This was a big deal for me since I have always wanted the big fairy tale wedding but if giving that up to get married at the courthouse was the only way to help Raylyn then I was willing to throw my big dreams away. Now the researching begins to find a county somewhere, anywhere where Raylyn would only need one parent to sign since he was only 17 and his mom and step dad signing the papers, well that was OUT of the question. I looked and looked and called and called to the point that I broke down thinking that this was never going to work when finally I found a little county in North Carolina where we would be able to get married, you have no idea how excited I was. I let Raylyn and his dad know what I found and the papers they needed to get together and we started planning our trip to little Murphy, North Carolina.

Too much for one girl to handle

Now that I have finally found out that Raylyn was living in an abusive home I didn’t know what to do next, all I knew was I had to help him. Seeing him, the guy I’ve liked for years, being hurt like that hurt my heart. So I decided that this was not something I could take on myself so I went to the one person in my life I know I can go to for anything, my mom. I asked her what I should do because this has apparently been going on for way to long and I couldn’t just sit back and ignore the fact that Raylyn was being hurt both mentally and physically every day. So me and mom came to the agreement that this wasn’t something that we could take care of ourselves so we called someone we knew who could. After talking to them we knew that the best thing to do would be for Raylyn to go to DHR and report his abuse since going to live with his real father was not an option. So the planning began. We decided that one day I would pick him up before school and we would go talk to someone at DHR about this situation.  So once we got to the DHR office we waited for what felt like to long then finally someone called out his name and he went back to talk to someone. I on the other hand still had to wait and wait and wait but at this point I didn’t care because I thought I was waiting so long because someone was going to get him out of this situation.  Finally Raylyn came out and got me and I thought this meant good news. Then the lady went on to tell us that since he was 17 he had just one more year left before he is 18 and can move out and since he has put up with it for that long what’s one more year. Okay I promise I’m not one to yell at people but I wanted so badly to give this woman a piece of my mind. How could she say that I mean really! Raylyn just sat in her office and told her it was so bad he has tried to kill himself many times just so he wouldn’t have to put up with it any longer. So we left seeing as they wouldn’t do anything for him and went back to school. Well it’s not long before his mom finds out what he did since DHR called to make her aware of her sons “suicidal state”, yeah because that’s the big problem, right? You would think the lady at DHR would have enough sense to know that when a kid comes in her office to tell her he is being abused by his parents and they don’t know he came to talk to her to not call his parents since it would make the situation worse, you would think but I guess not. Raylyn at this point never wants to go home again since he knows what is going to happen when he gets home. So with me being afraid that it’s going to get worse I go to my best friend since she knows everything and we, along with Raylyn, came up with a plan to run away. No I wasn’t the biggest fan of this idea, I had no reason to be running away, I’ve never even thought about running away but I couldn’t let Raylyn go back to that place. This was our only hope.

Football Season

Now our summer is coming to an end since he has football practice in the morning and I have color guard practice later in the day. With our conflicting schedules we aren’t getting to see each other as often as we were used to but we decided that even if we only got to see each other for a few minutes every day then that was okay since some is better than none. Once school started the only time we really got to see each other was when we were passing each other in the hall, when we were getting something out of our locker or if we were lucky on Thursdays football practice would end around the same time as band practice did and lucky for us we parked almost right beside each other. Yes we would get to see each other on some Saturdays or Sunday after noon’s but it still wasn’t what we had grown used to over the summer when we were together every day. So soon I started having band competitions on Saturday and Raylyn was such a sweet boyfriend since he came to all the ones he could. Little did I know the day of Morgan county night of bands when my color guard friends got me out of the house that was the day Raylyn asked my mom if he could marry me! I know most people don’t think anything about that anymore but to me it meant a lot that he loved me enough to ask my mom. So by now I have put that hurt look in his eyes on the way back from the beach behind me since I hadn’t seen it since and he never said anything. But then about a week or so after he asked my mom if he could someday marry me I started to see that look come through every day. One night when he called me he sounded up set so I finally asked him what was he not telling me, what was going on at home. That’s when he broke down, I never pictured Raylyn as the kind of guy to fall to tears but he did and I was scared. He started to tell me how he couldn’t take it anymore that life wasn’t worth living if it was this hard. I couldn’t understand why he was saying this so I very timidly asked him to tell me why. And that’s when I learned why he had that hurt look in his eyes. And for the first time with him I had nothing to say, it was all I could do to keep from crying too.