Slapped by Scott Stapp

It’s funny how sometimes, I’m just going about my day and doing regular things and suddenly BAM I get stopped in my tracks, even if only for a moment.  Today, I ventured out to the food store during my lunch hour.  I always have the radio on in the car – I am addicted to satellite radio – so on the way back to the office (the huge 3 minute or so drive) a Creed song comes on.  And I hear the line “how quickly life can turn around in an instant” and my eyes filled with tears before the lyric was even totally out of Scott Stapp’s mouth.  I’ve always been moved by music, no matter what the genre or song I can relate to a lot of what’s out there.  But this just bitch-slapped me hard-core and I couldn’t believe how one simple line hit me as hard as it did.  And even as I sit here now, I want to continue to cry because I connect with those words on such a deep and painful level right now.  My entire life changed, my center shifted, when my mom died; even though I was prepared for it, I knew it was coming, my life changed and I don’t know if I’ll ever get it back to the way it was.  I don’t think I’ve been the same person since we found out she was sick; everything changed the day I saw her walk through the door of the doctor’s office.   I don’t know if I’ll get back to that person I was; I hope that I can find my way back because the person I am right now is snappish, has very little patience and sometimes just wants to be left alone so desperately that I go in the bathroom and cry my eyes out into a towel so no one can hear me.  I had those types of moments before, just like everyone else, but they seem to be happening a lot more often these past few months and it would make me happy to see them gone.

How do you find yourself again when a piece of who you are and a piece of your history just ups and leaves your life forever?  How do you feel like you aren’t walking around in your transformed life like it’s a bad V-8 commercial?  How do you get back to being okay all the time, instead of whatever this is.

My Brain is a Defiant Child

My mom’s death has impacted all of us, each in its different way.  My sister and I  think that the impact on my dad is pretty deep; it appears that he’s now more aware of his own mortality and, I think, he feels like his days are numbered.  He says things now like “if anything should happen” a lot; my sister said that anytime he brings up meeting with the bank or his financial advisor he says it.  I think it stems from two things – he thought he was going to go first, and he didn’t so now he’s thinking “any day now”; I also think that there might be a part of him that hopes he’s next sooner than later.  And that part sucks mostly because I don’t know how I could take it if my dad died within months of my mom – I think my sanity would be compromised for sure.  He doesn’t want to be alone.  He’s been with my mom since he was 16; they lived across the street from each other until they were married and they remained married for just shy of 59 years.  He’s sick, he’s constantly at doctor appointments and every few months he goes into the hospital to have the artery in his arm opened up for his dialysis treatment.  He’s on who knows how many medications, he has a pacemaker, walks with a cane and he’s going to be 81 in a few weeks.  And his wife died.  And so did his son.  It’s a lot for someone to take and maybe, somewhere deep in his mind is the thought that he’s okay if he goes next and if he goes soon.  He sits in the house every night, alone.  I can’t think that he enjoys that silence, due to how it came about. 

I saw him today; I’m lucky enough to work close by so we can have lunch from time to time.  He said that, at some point, my sister and I need to go through my mom’s things – specifically her jewelry.  My mom was a bit of a jewelry whore, she really was and I don’t think she would deny it.  She loved diamonds – LOVED them.  When my sister got engaged (both times) she commented on  how small the diamond was and she really wasn’t happy that my sister accepted the rings – I believe she called the first one a “diamond chip”; she was pleased with the size of mine at just about a carat.  Anything under a carat wasn’t worth it as far as she was concerned. She had a lot of jewelry;  there was a time when she was a frequent Home Shopping Network fanatic and ordered from there at least once every week or so.  Some of her stuff isn’t worth anything monetarily but all of it has some type of value. Whether it’s the ring she waited months to come back into rotation on HSN, or the ring she got on her 16^th birthday from either her mother or her grandmother, it all has value.  There are things that I gave her, or that my sister gave her, that we’ll probably just divvy up according to the purchaser.  Other stuff, I guess we’ll see.  I am reluctant to do it.  Very reluctant.  There is still a part of my brain that thinks she’s still alive.  And it’s easy to do since I never talked to her on the phone; well, never is a strong word.  It was rare that I talked to her on the phone.  And since I hardly ever go to the house these days, it’s easy to pretend that she’s just not around or that she’s reluctant to get in the car or on the phone.  That part of my brain is like a defiant 2 year old who won’t put down the iPad to go to bed (sorry, recent experience with that); it yells NO and thrashes about when told it can’t have what it wants.  I know how to handle a 2 year old in that mode, but my brain, I’m not so sure.

Keeping up relationships

It's not easy doing this grieving thing and keeping my relationship on track. I've been a total bitch some days; sometimes for a lot longer than just a day. It's definitely taken a toll on us and who we are as a couple. He can't feel emotionally connected to me if I'm always distant. I can't feel emotionally close to him when all I'm doing is crying on the inside, yearning for solitude. But that s how I am sometimes, and it sucks. I don't feel like I can control it, which is also really hard for me since I'm a total control freak. I feel bad that he's stuck watching me on this journey. I can't take him with me on it, I wouldn't want to even if I could. But still. How do you stay happy and connected and maintain your relationship when you've lost a loved one? It's hard work, I will say that much.

Sometimes I'm a Bitch

I tried really hard – really hard – to not be a total byatch this weekend, and I think I failed miserably overall.  I snapped at Rob and at Emily for stupid reasons; I had an attitude the size of a small country and no matter how hard or what I tried, it wouldn’t totally go away.  I tried deep breathing, I tried to remember WHY I was being so snappy and I tried to image what my mom would say if I had an attitude with her (there was cursing involved and I think she would have said something like ‘get a clue’ or ‘hello!!’), I even tried to distract myself with other things like going for a walk and feeding ducks in the yard.  But nothing worked, it was like I was on auto-pilot and had forgotten the code to get back into control.

As I sat with Emily at bedtime last night, I cried.  I cried in the dark, quietly so she couldn’t hear me.  I cried because I’m just that sad, still.  I miss my mom and I missed her this weekend. She should have been sitting on the couch between my sister and my dad, watching as Emily “ooooo”ed over the surprise gifts she got for her birthday.  She should have been given a party hat as Emily passed them out and decided what color everyone should have (I think my mom would have gotten purple).  She should have been there to see how happy she was to see everyone; she should have heard her say “baba” to my dad when she tried to get his attention.  But she wasn’t there, or at least it didn’t feel like she was; no amount of wishing will bring her back in the physical form, I wish she could have shown up in whatever form she’s in now, though.  I’ve read accounts and I’ve seen the stories on TV – when someone in spirit is near you, you feel cold and you get goose bumps.  There were no bumps of the goose variety yesterday; there never are.  Almost six months and nothing.  I thought she would be with my daughter on her birthday, and maybe she was, but she wasn’t with me that day and she wasn’t with us this weekend – and if she was, I didn’t know it.

Sometimes I do truly feel like she hates me, or at least doesn’t care about me now that she’s gone.  And I’ve said it before – it’s one thing to feel that way when your mother is alive, it’s a whole other thing when she’s dead.  In death, she cares even less about me – at least that’s how it feels; she had stopped speaking to me before she died, she was mad at me, and I’m pretty sure she blames me for her going into the hospital so she most likely doesn’t want to be around me.  I get that, if she would be with anyone it would be my dad, but still.  I thought she would somehow be around for my birthday, for my daughter’s birthday.  But nothing.  I miss her more than I thought I would, more than I thought I could, and it doesn’t seem to matter.  No amount of crying or bitchiness or snappishness changes the fact that she’s gone and she’s not coming back in any way, shape or form apparently.  I thought that her threat of haunting us would have come to fruition by now, but now it just feels like a bunch of smoke blown up my behind for all those years.  All I hope for, every day, is that where ever she is she is happy and healthy and with people that she loves.  Everyone deserves that, even her and even if she does hate me.  I just want her to be happy. 

Searching for solitude

I’ve been holding in the need to cry for days now.  There just isn’t a “good” time to let it out.  On the way to daycare in the morning?  I’ve silently cried on that 15 minute drive and it doesn’t help, as there are constant decries of “MOMMA” from the back-seat.  On the way to work from daycare?  The three minutes isn’t enough time and arriving at work with tears still in my eyes is never a good look.  Behind closed doors at work?  Ummm…..no.  I’m at work and I will only do that if I can’t stop myself.  On the way home?  Again, silent crying as my child yells my name from the back seat just doesn’t help and actually makes it worse.  At home?  I have no time to myself to just sit in a room, alone, and cry. Cry as loud and as hard as I want and need to.  I just need to cry.  I guess this week has taken more of a toll on me than I thought and now, all I want to do is stand in front of her grave and cry and ask why, and tell her that I hope she doesn’t hate me – some days it feels like she does – and tell her how sorry I am that I didn’t do more and tell her how much I miss her and pray, as I do most days, that she can see my daughter and that she is with her in some way.  Some days, I just can’t take the grief; it truly is overwhelming and takes over everything.  It’s like a big black hole that just sucks up everything that’s even remotely good or happy and it’s gone – poof.  All that’s left is this black empty sad feeling and I just need to get rid of it; the only way to do it is to cry my eyes out until they hurt.  It sucks, but it works and it seems like it comes around every couple of weeks now.  I guess that’s better than daily.

How do you do it?  How do you manage a life – a job, a child, a relationship, a family, dinners and lunches and breakfasts, chores like laundry and the cat litter box, and dropping off and picking up of a toddler at school, an ailing cat who is obviously on his way out after being in my life for 15 years – and grieve for a mother that, on some level, was resentful towards you right before she passed away suddenly (even though you were just trying to do the right thing)?  Sometimes I think I juggle it all fairly well, and there are other times that I think I have dropped every ball that I have in my hands and I all I want to do is sit on the floor and watch them all roll away into the dark corners of the room as I sob uncontrollably.

Feeling like I can’t take the time out of my life to care for myself, sucks.  All I want to do today is leave here, go to the cemetery, cry for a bit, and then sit on my couch and veg out or go to a park and sit on a bench with a cup of coffee and watch the ducks float in a pond.  I don’t want to be here today.  I don’t want to be around other people on a day like this. I don’t want to hear the voices around me, I don’t want to pull off conversations about work related or unrelated topics.  I just want to be alone with my grief and deal with it.  But I can’t do that.  I have things to do here, and at home.  How do you grieve and handle your responsibilities all at the same time without letting anyone down and without anything suffering (other than yourself)?  I wish I had the answer to this question.  Maybe this would be easier to handle if I knew how to do it, but I have absolutely no clue what the hell I’m doing and I wish I could ask for help, but there’s no help to be had.  No matter how many people want to help, or how they try to help, there really isn’t a way to make this better.  Some days it sucks, and some days it sucks a little less, but it always sucks.  No one can make it better; there is no magic formula to make it go away.  My mom is gone and some days, that fact is the small print and other days it is written on a huge billboard that I can’t take my eyes off of.  Today, is a billboard day.

Resemblance

Looking at a picture of my daughter from her birthday the other day, and I always have to smile because I just adore her so very much.  Today, I looked at some of the ones that school sent to me again, just because.  And there is this one, where she’s wearing her birthday party hat and she’s looking at the mini-cupcake in her hand with this little smile on her face and she looks so much like my mom.  She just does.  And as I write this, with a lump in my throat, I realize just how much I miss her in everyday activities like looking at a picture and in the big moments like celebrating a 2^nd birthday.  Big and small moments alike, I miss my mom no matter what.   My mom was stubborn, strong-willed, sometimes very nasty, funny, smart; she loved reading books and loved anything to do with ancient cultures in Italy and Egypt.  She wasn’t a very lovey-dovey mom, although sometimes she came through with caring and emotions.  I hope my daughter has inherited her smarts, her love of reading, and I am pretty sure she inherited her smile; Emily has my smile, which I noticed yesterday, and I have my mom’s.  Every time I look at her from now on, I will see a little bit of my mom.  It makes me cry, which is great since I’m sitting at my desk at work (ugh), but it also makes me happy too.  Right now, it’s still hard for me to picture my mom without looking at an actual picture.  To see that smile and to realize it’s my mom’s, makes me feel like I will have a piece of her with me as long as I have my daughter with me.  That’s kind of cool. Sad, but cool. 

Celebrating Without Her

Today is a little bittersweet for me.  My baby turns 2 today; my mom would say that she already turned two because she was born at 12:24 in the morning.  Today was her due date; I was also born on my due date, and I was born at 12:16pm – which my mom found to be ironic.  Today, I miss my mom a little more than I usually do most days.  It makes me sad that she’s not here to call my daughter, she’s not here to have cake with us this weekend.  She’s not here to say things like “look at Grandma’s big girl!”.  I wish more than anything that she could be here, or that she could at least somehow let me know that she’s here and that she’s with Emily today.  But there’s been no sign from her and I don’t know if I’ll get one today.

Today, I hope that she is with my daughter.  Today I hope that she can see her laugh and smile as she runs in the sunshine with her friends; I hope she can see her enjoy her birthday lunch of pizza and cupcakes.  Today, I hope that she knows just how much she is missed and just how much I wish she was here to share in this day with us.  I hope she knows how much it hurts to not have her here.

Father's Day

Today we celebrate the Dad. The guy that raised us, cared for us, kissed our boo-boos & scared away the monsters at night.

My dad didn't really do that kissing and scaring stuff but still, I celebrate him today. He's been through a lot in this life and today is the first Father's Day without my mom. She used to take him to lunch today, or make Sunday dinner for him; whatever he wanted. Today, he just wants to come over and see my daughter. If that's what will make him happy, then so be it. Today, I here to help him and support him. Mother's Day was hard, I hope today isn't any harder for him.

So if you're reading this and you are lucky enough to still have a Dad, call him and tell him you wish him a happy Father's Day. Thank him for the big and little things and let him know how important he was and is to you. You never know when it'll be the last one you celebrate so make every day like this one count.

Relaxing on the Coast

I've been quiet this week- we took our daughter on vacation for a few days to  Maine. She loved it, which was great and so did we.  The food was great, the house we rented was great, it was pretty stress-free overall.  I think we all needed some time away to relax, get away from the messy house and the smelly old cat and the running around constantly to get things done that - in the grand scheme of things - aren't that important.

I watched my daughter marvel at the ocean and splash in tide pools.  I watched as she fearlessly wanted to walk and climb on the top of a mountain without help.  I was in awe of her, more than I usually am.  And it was a distraction that I needed and welcomed; I went days without feeling that void and that emptiness.  I did though pause, at least twice, to look up at the sky and hope that my mom could see it.  I can't show her the pictures of the crashing waves, or of my daughter standing at the top of a huge rock laughing and I can't tell her about the first time she said "owl".  But I can hope and pray, of which I did both, that she could see it as it was happening.  I stood on huge rocks of pink granite with tears in my eyes saying (out loud because no one was around and the toddler was happily splashing around with her father) "We miss you every day, and I hope that you are here now because she is having so much fun and it makes me sad to think that you're missing it".  This was not one of those "holy crap that's amazing" moments; I did not see an eagle fly over, a seal leap out of the sea or any other misc natural phenomenon that could be misconstrued as a sign.  It was quiet, except for the crashing waves and the yelling of my name in the background.  But still, I hope.  I hope that somehow she was there, but I will never know if she was.  It's been 5 months and still, I feel nothing but that void.  I keep hoping and praying and hoping some more, but there's no response and no magical sign from beyond that she's here.  So maybe she's just too busy with Pavarotti or Raymond Burr to pay any attention to me.  I hope that's all that it is.  See?  There goes that hope again.

Creating memories in my head

It’s a bad dead mom day already, and it’s not even 9am.

I was in the kitchen this morning, making Emily’s lunch, when all of a sudden I had this vision in my head.  I was sitting on a couch in my parents’ living room, opposite my mom who was sitting on another couch; she had on blue shorts and a white shirt with her hair pulled back like it always was.  Emily was standing next to her and I was saying to my mom “yeah, and now she roars like a dinosaur too” and my mom smiled and laughed and I asked Emily to show Grandma how a dinosaur roars and she did it and my mom smiled.  I don’t think she ever said anything, but as I thought about this conversation – when I got to tell her all of the things Emily does now and that she’s missed since she died – it felt like I was catching her up on things because she just hadn’t been around.  I don’t know if my brain was thinking this is what I would have done had she been in the hospital this entire time, or what I would have done had she just been on a long vacation this time entire time. Neither of those are actual possibilities; she wouldn’t have had the money to go on a five month long vacation (my dad is very cheap) and she wouldn’t still be alive had she not died when she did.  I know that.  At least a part of me knows that, but I guess a part of me just doesn’t or chooses not to and wishes she was here so very much that it ignores that fact that no matter what, she wouldn’t be here now anyway.

I also thought about that voicemail that I have saved from my birthday last year.  I am pretty sure it is the only recording of my mom’s voice I have.  I know what she says and I can hear it in my head without playing it, which makes me cry.  I miss that voice.  I miss the accent, I miss the melodrama that came over the phone so very clearly sometimes and I miss her laugh.  I wish she had laughed more often than she did, she had a great laugh.  And a cough, lol.  She always coughed when she laughed a lot because she had a post-nasal drip that was constant; I do the same thing, for the same reason.  I miss her every day, no matter where I am or what I’m doing and today, it’s just a bit harder than most.  And days like this make me feel very lonely, on top of very sad.  We’re about to go on a family vacation and I wish she was still here to see the pictures and to hear the stories about whatever craziness Emily gets into.  I miss my mom so very much today.

Daily struggle

Sometimes I feel like because I’m not a total wreck on the outside, that I’m expected to just be fine.  I feel like just because I’m not crying my eyes out all the time, I’m able to hold myself together most days, that some people think I’m okay.  I get out of bed every day, I go to work and I look put together, I take care of my daughter and get her ready and off to school, I give her lunch and snacks, I play with her, I put her in bed.  I function so I must be just fine. But I’m not.   Every day, I miss my mom.  Every day there is something that says she’s not here.  Sometimes it’s just a thought or a reminder, but sometimes it’s something that just screams in my ear and makes me want to crawl into bed and cry my eyes out.  Those days aren’t as frequent as they used to be, but they still come and when they do, they come on hard.  But I still do a pretty good job of looking like I’m okay on the outside, even though inside I am fighting the urge to fall apart.

I love my boyfriend very much; I knew we would spend the rest of our lives together the day he walked through my door for the first time.  He’s my soul mate, if they exist of course.  I’ve never wanted a life with anyone the way I’ve wanted a life with him.  But there are times that it feels like he forgets that my mom is gone and I’m a mess.  Sometimes I just want to scream – “I HAVE A DEAD MOM” – just to get my point across.  Sometimes, he can be selfish (I think every man can be on some level) and because of that it makes me feel like I’m not important, my needs aren’t important and what I’m going through takes a backseat to whatever his issues are.  I don’t expect to be front and center, priority one all the time, but sometimes (like now) I should be.  My mom died and I struggle, on some level, every day with it; but that doesn’t take priority over anything.  Yes, he watches the baby when I go to the gym now; he thinks the gym will help with my stress level (I’m just looking to get rid of the extra pounds I put on by my cookie-ladened diet of the last few months).  And generally if I want to do something on the weekend alone, he’ll watch her alone.  But when he wants to go away, and I say things like “this is hard for me”, he might as well roll his eyes and leave the room.  He makes me feel like the struggles I have aren’t important; his struggles are more important than mine.  They aren’t more important, they’re just different and it is very hard for me to know that he doesn’t feel that way.