This weekend I was a miserable bitch. I did all that I could to stop – I even went so far as to go into the bathroom, look myself in the eye (in the mirror) and say “stop being such a bitch already, wtf!”. I seriously did that because I couldn’t stand myself anymore. I also walked out of a room to breathe and to get myself to calm down because, again, I was being an uber byatch and couldn’t stop. I don’t really know why. Well, I guess underneath it all I know why – I have a dead mom and I’m pretty pissed about it, pretty sad about it, pretty upset that I can’t think of the holidays without wanting to cry. I know how this process goes. I’ve been down a similar road but still, that history doesn’t help me now. You’d think I would somehow be able to tap into those memories and get myself grounded by knowing that there are better days and the light at the end of the tunnel is NOT a freight train. But no. I can’t seem to apply that experience to this, even though that experience sucked too and I know that it gets better but right now, it doesn’t seem to matter.
I can’t stop myself from thinking about her, and that’s making my day-to-day difficult. I think it’s because I can’t stop thinking about my dad, and how hard the coming months will be for him and how much harder that will make it for me. I know that I shouldn’t fixate on anything like this – it’s all out of my control and it’s in the future, albeit the not so far off in the distance future. But it’s hard not to. It’s hard not to think about what was going on right here, right now, a year ago and what will not be going on right here, right now in the present. It’s hard to not think about her because she was a part of my every day, whether I liked it or not. Especially a year ago, when all we did was argue about stuff like her eating habits and changing Emily’s diaper enough during the day when they watched her and no I didn’t introduce juice yet and no I’m not planning on it, and when are you making that doctor’s appointment and what did you eat for breakfast and lunch today – do you actually think that’s enough food?? But in the end, no amount of food could have saved her. Who knows, if she did eat more it might have fueled the cancer and it could have spread faster, she wouldn’t have been here for the holidays. When she was on the feeding tube in the hospital, they were giving her plenty of nutrition but she couldn’t put weight on because of how quickly the cancer was spreading; she would gain some, and then lose it as soon as they backed off of the fluids they were pumping her with. It was in her bones in that last CT and it hadn’t been there a week before. A week. 19 days before it was just nodules in her lungs. That last CT showed a huge mass in the front of one of her lungs that wasn’t there just three weeks before. Three weeks. It amazes me how fast something so horrible and devastating moves around in your body.
But today is a new day. And I need to look at it that way. Yeah I’ve been pretty wretched lately, but that doesn’t mean I have to be horrible today. Right now, as I type, I don’t feel overly horrible which is an improvement and right now, I’ll take whatever I can get. And with that, Sarah Bareilles’ “December” comes onto my iPhone…..gee, thanks for making me sad(der) Sarah, awesome timing!! (Quickly reaching out to phone to change song to….Little Black Dress…that’s about a stupid man, so that’s better.) Must stay focused on the upside of things and not think about the downers – the holidays, her clothes in my house that she never got to wear (which I washed this weekend – fun times), my dad. Yeah, not going there right now. As my toddler would say “Momma, NO NO”. Complete with crossed arms and a foot stomp for good measure.
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