Happy "RE"Birthday To Me :) part 1 - my mess

This is going to be more of a serious blog than the other ones I have posted so far...so if you are looking for a laugh scroll down.... but this is probably where you are most likely to get into the Mind of Mel lol. And my friend who read this and were there for it, if I left anything out please feel free to comment hahah and my feeling won’t get hurt if you want to remind me of how stupid I was hahah!

I'm having a hard time deciding where to start! I guess I’ll start in March of 2006. This was when The Deer Creek branch was started. I was called to be the activities committee chairman for the ward. We had to build the ward from the ground up. This is when I met some of the most amazing people the Lord has to offer :) We had a super fun ward and the most amazing bishopric around..... I dare anyone to challenge me on that :) Bishop Johnson, Brother Crosby and Brother Fossen seriously are three of the most amazing men that I have ever met! I was so blessed to get to work with! I was even more blessed that I got to work especially close with Brother Crosby! I had to run a lot of my activity ideas past Brother Crosby and he was always there to lend a helping hand. Sister Crosby, his wife was in the ward also and she and I hit it off too :) I want to be just like her when I grow up... in fact she jokes with me that she is me, just, we will say 20 years earlier hahaha! I love the Crosby’s! They are like my second parents! HAHAHA remember a couple of times their daughter April would call to talk to sister Crosby and she always just happened to be with me hahaa! I went over a couple of times to help the Crosby’s set up their Christmas tree and decorate for the holidays. I don’t think that I can say enough nice things about them or even put into words the special love that I have for them!

HAHAHA I love this picture! That is sister Crosby helping me get the ribbon right on my Halloween costume. haha and she was a flower and Brother Crosby was a bee! hahaha THATS WHY WE LOVE THEM!!!! We had so much fun working hard and building the Kingdom of God in Rancho Cucamonga.

I don’t remember exactly when, I believe it was at the end of 2007 or maybe 2008 but Brother Crosby made and announcement from the pulpit on a Sunday that he had been battling with cancer for a few years now and they felt like now was a good time to let us know.  I cried when he told us and I found Brother Crosby after to ask him how bad it was and if he was just being nice and telling us he was better than he really was. He told me it was up and down but he assured me that he still had plenty of time because we had a lot of work to do still. I smiled and hugged him :)

Then I went inactive :( I had been dating a nonmember, Fernando, for about a year at this point and I started going to school at CSUSB full time and working full time. I was very busy and sadly, I allowed my church attendance to be what I gave up. Every Sunday I would receive a message from Sister Johnson or Sister Crosby asking me where I was. I knew that I was not doing what I was supposed to be doing and I didn’t like to hear about it so every time a member of the ward reached out to me, i kicked back at them. I know at this point that I had offended a lot of people but my heart was sooo hard at this point that I didn’t even care if i was hurting the people who probably cared about me the most. Luckily I was blessed with friends who also knew me well enough to just let me do my own thing. I still saw lifelong friends Chrissy and Mary regularly and they knew me well enough to just listen and let me be a punk haha they never judged me but just loved me and listened to my frustrations even if they disagreed with me.
 I was so blessed to have a Relive Society president who was also my best friend, Bonnie who I should email almost every day at work. I told her about what people were doing that was pushing me away. I was getting letters, emails texts, random visits. I felt like I was under constant surveillance haha! It was really very irritating (if you are Mormon and reading this... DONT do that to inactive people it only pushes them away) so at that point even when i could go to church I didn’t want to. I had gotten very mean. I will admit it. But i had always planned on coming back to church and i would make the occasional visit to sacrament just to keep people off my case. Bonnie just emailed me and listened to me and did what she could on her end to get people to stop bugging me. She has told me several times that she always knew I would come back. I thank God every day for the people who had more faith in me than I had in myself.
So, let me tell you about Fernando. He was not a member of my church. I met him while I was working with the YMCA and we had fun. I was so happy and I loved him very much... in the beginning.

We were together for 3 years and things were really hard between us because i was working and going to school and he was too. He was not an emotional person and i am a very emotional person. He never wanted to talk about out problems but i needed too. HAHA some people who are reading this are probably looking back and remembering all of the times I called them crying because I didn’t know what to do. Once you spend 3 years with a person it becomes very hard to just let it end without fighting for it... and trust me we fought haha. But at the same time, things had gotten better and in 2009 i was happier with him than I had been in a long time. We were even talking about getting married. He is where I got my love for Hispanics from... well at least his family. I LOVED his family! They were the sweetest people! He is the one who introduced me to the Dodgers and gave me my love for baseball. So, people ask me why you stayed with him for so long if you fought so much. Well because we still had some really great times :) and they were getting better!
Until September 2009. Just a couple of weeks before my birthday, I got a call from my friend Tanya (who knew me and Fernando). She told me that we needed to talk, She told me she had a conversation with a friend of hers who worked with Fernando too that made her think that Fernando was cheating on me. I called him from work to ask him if it was true. He denied it and said he would never hurt me that way and that those girls are just drama and he wouldn’t do anything to risk our relationship like that. So I believed him but I made him promise me that he wasn’t lying. I told him that i don’t want to hate him but if i find out he’s lying id never talk to him again. He swore that he wasn’t. I asked him if i went to the school and talked to the girl he was accused of cheating on me with, would she tell me that nothing happened. He said they are drama and she would lie to me too and he asked to just stay away so that I wouldn’t get caught in the middle of it. He had never lied to be before so I believed him and i trusted him, I knew he would never do anything like that to me so I promised him that I wouldn’t go.
My friend Nadia, at work told me that I don’t really owe him anything and that I’m going to want to know for sure or it would always be nagging in the back of my mind. I knew she was right so I didn’t the boldest thing I have ever done in my life and I went down to the school to talk to the girl. She was really very nice and she was very honest with me. She told me that yes she had been seeing him but she didn’t know about me because he told her that we broke up a long time ago and that he and I were just friends. So apparently he had been cheating on me for about 4 months... no wonder things were getting better between us, he was feeling guilty! I called him and he wasn’t even man enough to answer the phone. I’m glad now that he didn’t pick up the phone. But I just wished him good luck in life and I’m sorry I wasn’t enough for him and asked him not to call me or to talk to me. And he hasn’t.
OUCH! That hurt soooo bad. I was a freaking mess! I didn’t know what to do! I don’t even remember what I did! My poor friends who had to listen to me! I must have sounded so pathetic! I NEVER thought he would do that to me! It blindsided me. Luckily, we had a long weekend that weekend for Labor Day. So i spent the day with my sisters and her friends just to get out of the house. I was still numb but trying to get on with my life. It had just been like 2 or 3 days but I was determined not to let it consume me.
While I was with them on Labor Day, I got a call informing me that brother Crosby had died. OMG. I remember thinking to myself, heavenly father! Can’t I get a break? I lost it. I was a mess. I didn’t even know where to being to even deal with this. I had been inactive for the last like 3 years! Brother Crosby never got to see me come back to church! I never got to hug him that one last time or tell him that I loved him or remind him of how much I loved him and how much he meant to me. I had so many different feeling all at once! Hate, anger, betrayal, denial, sadness, mistrust, loneness from Fernando and then to lump on massive guilt, grief , sorrow, regret,  more sadness and loss because I lost a great friend. I didn’t even know where to begin to pick up the pieces of what was left of my heart.
I went into work the following Monday and talked to my boss who was a member of my church as well because I didn’t know what else to do. Bishop Johnsons’ father had passed away so he was out of town and I needed so SERIOUS help. So I talked to my boss and i told him everything. He and i were not close but I was very grateful to have him there because he did help me a lot. He reminded me of the plan of salvation and that I would see Brother Crosby again and that Fernando is a wanker. I cried and he just helped me remember who I am and helped me come up with basically a plan of attack to get my life back in order. He called his brother in and they gave me a blessing and I was sooo glad that they did because from there I gained my clarity (I’ll explain that in part 2).
So, as part of the healing process, some of the Deer Creek OGs (Original Gangstas) who helped form the branch back in march and knew Brother Crosby really well decided to hold a memorial service for him in the park a couple of days later. We all gathered together to eat thrifty ice cream (he worked for them lo) and to make a notebook for the Crosby family and to share our favorite memories of Brother Crosby with each other. It was so nice to see everyone! We all cried and laughed and cried haha.... then the Crosby family showed up including Sister Crosby. She spoke to all of us and told us how we had kept him alive longer than they had planned because we kept him busy and alive. She looked around at everyone in the room. When she got to me her eyes filled up with tears. She pointed at me and said "He wanted to know why! Why you never came back." and i lost it! I was so ashamed I couldn’t even look one of my favorite people in the world in the eyes! She was hurting so much and I was i no place to even be there for her. I hadn’t spoken to her in such a long time! I felt terrible on top of terrible! I can’t even explain it. This i guess is what they call rock bottom.
Everyone slowly made their way over to Sister Crosby to offer their condolences to Sister Crosby after everyone had finished talking about Brother Crosby. As everyone left I cleaned up and said my I’m sorry to some of my friend that I had offended. When pretty much everyone was gone Sister Crosby came and found me and gave me the Sister Crosby look. I started crying again harder than I had cried during any of it. I just hugged her and we cried! I told her that I was so soooo sorry and that i am so sad that he never got to see me do any better and that I wasn’t there for him and that i never got to say good bye and that he never knew how much i loved him. She grabbed my crying face while I was bawling and through her tears she told me "he does Melaney he does. He knows it now." I made her a promise right then and there that I should be better! That he would know that I am doing better and I promised Sister Crosby that I would not let her go out the same way. I promised her that she would see me change and that she would see me do better. I learned a lot that night about unconditional love and forgiveness. I was so amazed that Sister Crosby had just lost her husband and here she was telling me that I would be ok.



I keep a copy of this picture framed on my nightstand in a frame that says "Good Things Will Happen Today" It just reminds me of the promise that I made to myself  and to Brother and Sister Crosby That I would do better and that they would know it.