Barnmaven

Then

We were gods when we were young. 

We were bulletproof, invincible.  We rode our horses like fearless warriors, going over, around or through everything in our path.  We weren't afraid to fall. 

When we drove at night, moonlit and headlamps off, we didn't believe in the laws of momentum and motion.  We just believed that we could fly.

We believed that love conquers all, that if we wanted something bad enough all we had to do was keep trying and we could make it happen. We believed in the American Dream, in the power of prayer, that friendships would last and love was forever.  We chalked up every failure to experience and plowed forward, knowing that success was just around the bend.

It is a subtle erosion, to wake up one day and find the superhero's cloak has drifted from our shoulders, trampled in the muck by the onslaught.

Somehow we find ourselves in a place where gravity and dissipation are more true than faith or hope or love.  The downhill slope has turned into a tiresome trudge up a hill covered in loose shale.  Without our noticing, it seems, we changed.  One day the scales fall from our sunken eyes and we find that nothing we knew about ourselves, about our world, about our lives was true.

Then was an illusion.  This is the reality.  Now it is time to grow up.

All the Aftermath

We sit in our lawn chairs along the waterfront or in the parks, children on our laps and holding hands.  We murmur our appreciation as the flowers made of fire burst and throw sparks down into the water against the black night.  We don't notice the dogs, the cats, frightened and running as far and as fast as they can from the cannon shots.  Its not until I see them on my way to work the next day, small and still on the side of the road, that I contemplate that even the things we do which seem so harmless and fun leave a wake.

Yesterday marked a year from the morning when, driving the back roads to work, I found a suicide victim.

Because of a doctor's appointment, my route to work yesterday took me past that dirt road and I could see the top of the hill where last year there was a white car parked with a man's body sprawled behind it.   Every time I drive by that hill I look for a car parked up there my mind grapples with the image of hiking-boot clad feet sprawled on the ground.

When someone dies, life goes on, much the same.  It seems callous, but the world can't stop.  We still get up and drink our coffee in the morning, feed the animals.  I still make the long drive through the hills with the crop dusters going about their business, looking for an open space to pass the onion truck that holds me back.  Yes, life continues on, apparently unperturbed, but if you know where to look, you can find the ripple of loss. 

The visible wake of the living is easy to identify.  We make messes, we create smiles or tears, we make noise, make things, buy things, clean things up and throw things away.  The wake of those that have gone is somewhat inverse, like a sweater turned outside in.  It is measured far more by what is not than by what is.

A year ago I was consumed with trying to learn more about the man who picked a night the cannons booming and the firecrackers popping would disguise the final crack of the shotgun as he took his life.  If I had known then what the year ahead would bring I might have felt a kinship with his brothers as they mourned their loss.

For the rest of my life that still, frozen moment in time when I realized what I was seeing at the top of the hill will be as much a part of the July fireworks as the memories I hold of my brother and I as children, lighting sparklers and showering the driveway with their fire.  Once upon a time we were young and full of life, shouting our joy at the wonder of sight and sound the fireworks created.  We were brave, lighting fuses and waiting until the last minute to dash away to safety.  Once upon a time we left a magnificent debris of color and echoing laughter in our wake.    Once upon a time, a man I never met while he was alive lit bottle rockets with his brothers and covered his ears with his hands when the firecrackers popped and crackled.  Once upon a time, when the sweater was still right-side out.

The day after the fireworks we sweep up the charred bits of paper and the discarded pop cans, we hose the burn marks off the pavement.  We drvie in circles around the neighborhood, calling for our missing dog or cat, hoping they were one of the lucky ones who found a safe place to hide.  All the while we press a palm over our hearts where the ache of grief resides.

 We deal as best we can with all of the aftermath, that which is seen and that which is not.

 

 

 

 

Public service announcements:

**If you or someone you know is suicidal,please call the national suicide prevention hotline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255)**

**On the fourth of July please keep your dogs and cats indoors**

 

 

 

Remembering Fransie

 

Fransie was an artist, a mother, a daughter, a birder.  She had a rich laugh and a devious smile.  She loved unconditionally and she appreciated things about you that you didn't know anyone else noticed.  She could be sweet and innocent and sewing costumes for the high school drama program one minute and flipping you the bird or doing body shots in the corner the next.  She was the ageless paradigm all women contain within them, innocence and knowledge and the power to make men kneel all in one broken vessel.

We worked together, and in the misery that environment created, we bonded.  We bonded over lunches, walks, Sci-Fi Fridays and an uncountable number of glasses of wine.  We bonded over faith and disintegrating marriages.  We needed one another, we helped one another, we carried each other when we felt we could no longer go on.  We looked past the worst in one another and always sought the best.

Her cancer was found in the spring of  '07.  Treatment almost killed her - surgery, radiation, and then chemo to which it wasn't discovered until almost too late that she was allergic.  When she finally recovered, she told me more than once, "I'm never going through that again.  If the cancer comes back I will only request comfort measures."   And when it did, she was true to her word.  It was her right to choose this, I never questioned it.  Suprisingly, the minor chemotherapy and pain control gave her a lot more time than anyone expected.  She and her children left New Jersey behind and moved to Texas to be nearer parents.  I know she relied greatly on - and was deeply grateful for - their love, care and support these last several years.

I was so surprised to get the email from her mother yesterday.  I guess I got used to her ability to exceed our hopes.  Just a few days ago she was still forwarding me emails with funny pictures or meaningful words that touched her.  While I always knew Fransie was fighting a battle she couldn't possibly win, I hoped for a miracle.  We all did. 

Whenever we talked, even though I know she had a lot of pain and that her ability to enjoy the things she loved was becoming more and more limited, she would still laugh and still wanted to know how I was doing.   The last time we talked, a few weeks ago, I had no idea how near the end she was.  She sounded then as she had many times over the last few years.   She was tired, but she still had that unique quality in her voice - a little sad, a little funny, a little wry.  We talked then, as we often did, of her faith and her firm belief about what happens to us after we die.  Even when she got mad at God, even when she couldn't understand why she had to go through all of this, she believed.  "I know that my treasure is in heaven," she would often say.  

And now she is in the arms of the One she trusted to carry her through.

She leaves behind her daughter, her son, her parents, her son-in-law, her friends - all of whom have been deeply touched and blessed by her love, her laughter and her heart. 

Fransie, I know you don't want us to be sad.  I know you want us to remember you in the things that you loved - in the wildlife you captured so beautifully in your art, in the birds you loved to watch and name, in the wooded paths and in the shallow ocean pools teeming with life.  And so I will. 

 

Where does it go?

I listened to Ann Tyler talk about her new book on NPR this morning.  Some of the plot is the result of the emotional processing she has done since losing her husband fifteen years ago. 

Tyler recalled her feelings around the loss, saying, "The thought that came to me was: 'I just don't understand. Where did he go?' He was this exuberant man who was a real enjoyer. And that's just gone without a trace. It's just not possible."

I considered my own exuberant SG, and thought about how quiet and how much more bland life is when he is not here. I tried to imagine how it might feel if he were never going to be here again and failed.  Put in the context of my brother's death, though, I think I understand.

I think love is a feeling but it is also a physical thing,  a set of behaviors and actions. Its both organic and contrived, innate and created.  I consider the love that I feel for my children, for my parents and other family members.  It is embedded in my bones, that love.  I've loved my parents and trusted them for my whole life.  The love I have for them is one of the cornerstones in the foundation of everything I've ever done and everyone I've ever been.  Loving my children came as naturally as breathing.  And when I think of them, shape their names in my mouth and picture their precious faces in my mind, a bubble of feeling that is too large to fit inside me wells up inside.  That feeling is love and joy and pain and worry and warmth.  Its the sum of all we've experienced together, all I hope and dream, all I fear.

Love seems a complicated tangle of physical sensation, emotional turbulence, concrete action and wishful dreams.  But what do you do with love when the person you love is gone? 

SG isn't here, but he's still here.  So I love him but I try not to think about how much I love him because it makes his everyday absence too uncomfortable.  I try not to think about how much I miss his touch and his physical energy.  I'm filled with love and pain, all tangled up and constantly needing to have the ends sorted out and tied up into a manageable knot.  That pain, though, is somewhat tolerable because the separation is finite.  He is coming home eventually, he's not gone forever. 

For the brother I've lost, though, what do I do with that love?  Its still there, full of hope and fear and memories.  I still had things to say, hugs to give.  I ache for wanting to hear the sound of his voice.  The enormity of what sits bottled up inside of me begging to be expressed, but without the human target of that expression, creates a feeling of pressure in my chest that is actually physically painful.  What do you do with all of that love you have for someone when they will never be here again to receive it?

Its not just the spirit of my brother that I loved, but the physical reality of him: His face, his eyes and smile, his unique nose and the shape of his hands; the voice that I could recognize instantly over the phone line that evoked the image of his face in my mind.    The human expression of all that he was shaped his physical presence and created the ability for us to relate to one another, to bond as family over meals and stories and shared experience.  The love my brother and I had for one another was reciprocal, had shape and meaning, helped to create the person that I am today.

And now he is gone, and the love we had for one another, what happens to that?  I don't know where to put it, I don't know how to properly express it.   What does it mean to the concept of "relationship" when one of the people in the relationship is gone to a place that we cannot go and cannot yet understand?

I see my children in one of those rare moments when they put their childhood fighting aside and I realize just how very close they are, and try to imagine one of them without the other and my heart crumbles into dust.

I have so many questions and so many feelings.  As yet I lack the understanding that I suppose will only come with time.  Just as love has a shape and a physical sensation, so I now understand, does bereavement.

Am I supposed to be over it already?  I hope not, because if grief is finite, I'm doing it wrong.  If grief is uncomplicated, I'm failing miserably.  My grief has a slippery volume knob, it won't settle at any one point on the dial.  Sometimes I can't hear it, and then some event or memory jostles the knob and it becomes so loud I can't bear to listen to it.  It goes quiet now for days at a time.  I sometimes even manage to forget about it to the point of no longer remembering that he's gone.  And I think of some future event and I imagine everyone who will be there, naturally including him...and the air is sucked out of my lungs as I realize thatwill never again be my reality.  Our reality.

 

 

Kill a groundhog, save our sanity

We woke up a week ago tomorrow to three inches of snow on the ground and frozen, crappy roads about half the way of my 45 mile commute to work.  The irony of this is that it wasn't that long ago I was begging for snow, and the minute I woke up and looked out the window, all I could think of was strangling a small burrowing mammal in Pennsylvania.

Over it now.  Enough with the winter already.

And then yesterday and today, I've had to drive with my windows down because its so warm.

Ahhh.  Spring.  Or as we like to call it in the Tri-Cities, mud season.

The arrival of snow was mitigated by the arrival of my parents, who returned this week from their annual winter sojourn in Yuma.  This was the last one for a while, my dad is increasingly less mobile, it takes an act of God to get him on an airplane, and the 1200 mile drive is getting increasingly more difficult for him.   I'm selfish enough to be grateful for this.  Their annual October departure is really hard, and not having family nearby makes me feel a little empty in the middle.   Now they're home, and not surprisingly I notice the absence of my brother far more acutely.  There's an empty seat at the table, we all know it, and we all struggle with it in our own way.  They're back though, that's what really matters right now.

Their timing was excellent, as SG left Friday for a six week job in Arizona.  (ARIZONA:  You are on notice.  Please stop borrowing the people I love. Thank you very much.)  I hope this is the last road trip.   He's starting a new venture when he gets back, and I'm hopeful that it will work out well enough to keep him from ever needing to do another outage.  Life is full of The Crazy as it is, and not having him here to balance out the Doing of Things That Need Doing makes for a very busy me.   Plus, the last couple of road jobs had him gone so very long, it was really a low time for me.  I'm struggling with it, I suppose I should know better, but there it is.  I hate it when he's gone.

I've managed (as usual) to complicate things by taking on two horses on a care lease.  I wouldn't have normally done this, because we all know I don't need two more horses.  These girls, though, are in need of some TLC.  Their owner is a very young woman who has had some issues and some difficulty, and they haven't been receiving the level of care they need.  They're severely underweight and need some vet care.  Sweet mares, both of them. 

Its never not a zoo around here.  Sometimes it surprises me how well SG has adapted to my chaotic life.  I think he has nerves of steel.  Or perhaps he can cope with it because he knows he can run away every few months and get a little vacay from the cray cray.  God knows I wish I could have one.

SG's departure and the bigger sense of loss I've felt around my brother with my parents return have me thinking about loss and the changing nature of life.    As David Richo reminds us in The Five Things We Cannot Change, "everything begins and ends," and you know - the beginning is always the easy part.  The ending not so much.  I took Tasha, my brother's dachshund, to my parents today so that they can care for her while SG is gone.  (She's used to having someone home, she's elderly, and I am gone 11+ hours a day when I'm working.  She needs someone to keep company with).  She's doing really well, considering, but we all know its a matter of time with her.  Truth is, its just a matter of time for all of us - and for all things  in our lives and in our world. 

Everything changes and ends.  Its a simple fact of life that its hard to embrace some days.  But I know that fighting it only leads to increased pain and stress.  Accepting it just means I can grieve and then, at some point, let go.

Its just...the last few months seem to have been so filled with loss.  My brother, SG's grandma, a close family friend, Hercules, a smart and talented blogger, someone's husband, someone's father, someone's wife, someone's child I read about in the paper. Half my chickens.  Even famous people who I normally wouldn't think twice about, but when your mind is dwelling on loss, their passing seems to only compound the egregiousness of it all.  I'd just like us all to have a break, thanks, even knowing that its not at all likely.

The changing and ending aren't always bad things.  Winter ends so spring can arrive with the scent of growing things on the warm breezes and the return of the birds and eggs in the chicken coop on a regular basis.  Spring ends so we can bask in the heat of summer and enjoy the great outdoors in all her glory, and then summer bows her head and gives way to the lovely burnished hues of fall.   

The seasons and all of nature, they just roll with it.  As should we all.

The snow fell and I right along with it

Finally, it came.  Boy, howdy, did it come.  We got a good six inches between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.  School was delayed, meetings were cancelled, we pretty much didn't leave the house except for putting the kids on the bus and getting them back off. 

The kids had a blast playing in the snow.  All Wednesday it was the perfect snowball snow - fluffy, just wet enough to stick together to form a ball.  Race Car man quickly got over his aversion to socks when he discovered how cold his feet got in his snow boots without them. 

We found out Wednesday night that school was cancelled for Thursday and the kids were beside themselves with the excitement of playing outside all day long.

We woke yesterday to a light freezing rain that continued all day long.  It left a two-inch layer of ice crystals on top of our snow and coated every tree, fence, mailbox and vehicle in a sheet of ice. 

I did leave the house, though.  Had to.  We we were out of dog food and milk, two things that in this household are required to keep the earth revolving around the sun.  And then, I had the followup appointment for Race Car Man's evaluation.  He had to retake one test series, and then we met with the psychologist.

I answered a lot of questions.  My son answered some questions.  The doctor was kind, measured, and very patient.  As he interviewed me, he completed an evaluation.  We clarified some questions.    He will compile his report and send it to us, probably in a week.  But of course, as a parent, you want to know the answers to your questions, even if you think you know what they are. And so I asked him.  And he very kindly and gently shared the results of the evalution form he had just completed with me.

I've had to learn some new phrases about myself over the last couple of months - some easier, some harder.  I've had to learn how to say "I am a wife" after a few years of wanting to be anything but. 

I had to learn how to say "My brother is dead" and saying it still causes a surge of anxiety and pain that feels like its going to break my sternum in half.

And as of yesterday, I have one more to add.

"My son has autism."

 

 

 

 

Waiting on Spring

The recurring theme of my depression must be getting old for you, it certainly is for me.  Holy smokes, but its bad right now.  I was driving to work on Tuesday and as I went through the part of town where my folks live - they're snowbirding it in Yuma right now - I thought to myself how much I was looking forward to them being home, and pictured us spending time together, sharing meals.  And the sudden recognition of the jagged hole in the tableau of my family was like being punched in the stomach.

The situational depression and the seasonal depression are an overwhelming combination.

I've never tried so hard to conceptualize what happens after death as I have this last month or so.  In my heart I know my brother is in a better place.  Sometimes I can feel him as if he's just this close.  I get a strange sensation in the top of my head and it feels like if I just reached out my hand I could actually touch him.  And I realized that he's OK, its just that I am not because I have to go through the rest of however long this life of mine is going to be without him. 

There was always the four of us.  Many branches, many relatives and friends, but at the core of it, us four.  For good or for bad, we know each other better than anyone else.  All those years together,  loving, fighting, growing.  Sharing meals.  Sharing triumphs,  losses, experience.   Four corners.  Four posts holding the roof on the house that is our little family.   With one of the posts missing, the ceiling tilts madly, dizzyingly and feels as though it might just fall in.

That's when I have to try really hard to just stop thinking about things.

There are antidotes to this.

They DO help.

Trying to capture some video of Gizmo wrestling with the big dogs and laughing hysterically because I simply CAN'T post the bit where he's taking advantage of Roscoe being distracted by T-Bone and frantically humping him as fast as he can.  Gizzie simply doesn't grasp the fact that if either of those boys had a mean bone in their body he'd be the hors d'oeuvre they choke down before dinner.

Having Juliet adamantly pl0p down on the keyboard of my laptop because she has decided its time to stop working and start petting. 

Watching my husband rock I'm So Excited on Just Dance 3 for the Wii and laughing until the tears come.  Its so sweet and touching and completely hilarious all at the same time. 

Being cuddled at night by a dachsund, a Chihuahua AND a cat, all under the covers and all pressed so tightly to various parts of my anatomy that I can't move.

Joking with my dad on the phone.  Hearing my mom's voice.

Drive-time conversations with my children.  The hugs that seem to never end and yet don't last quite long enough.  The "I love you too's" that always come, even when they get a little exasperated with me telling I love them every five minutes.

When the moments come when I feel overwhelmed by the I don't understand WHY's and the sensation of falling and the choking sobs, these are the things that pull me back up and into the daylight. 

So I'll watch the dogs play and I'll pet the purring cat and I'll hug my kids and dance with my husband and talk to my mom and dad.  Spring is coming.  I'll get through this.

Where happy lives

I've been on a Buck Brannaman kick lately.  I've watched the documentary at least three times, and blew through his biographical book The Faraway Horses in about two days.   My trail riding partner Michelle and I are making plans to go watch him give a four-day clinic this June.  We've signed up for the incredibly long waiting list to ride, knowing that we likely won't get to do that, but also knowing that just watching him work with other people and their horses and listening to him teach will benefit us a lot in our own horse journey.

Buck's observation that whatever issues a person has in other areas of their lives will be reflected in their relationships with horses.  There are some incredibly concrete examples of this in the movie, and I'm sure many more on the 300+ hours of tape that hit the cutting room floor.  I see it in my own life. 

The mare I bought on a whim was sensitive.  More than sensitive - she would bolt at the touch of a feather.  If it was evidence of my own troubles that I added a horse to my barn that was drama personified, it was at the same time evidence of the working of God (or the spirit or the universe or whatever name you might give to Him) bringing me the challenges I needed in equine form to help me become a more balanced, calm and compassionate human being.

My standard approach simply did not work with her.  I had to learn a whole new sense of feel.  If all it takes to get your horse to respond is a half pound of pressure on the lead rope, why would you start with fifteen pounds?  And so I had to learn how to start with the smallest amount of energy and increase it only to the point where my horse responded to it.  I had - and continue - to learn how to recognize exactly when that response came in order to reward with a release more immediately.  To help my horse be able to make the connection between those two events.

And I took that mare as far as I could, and then my gelding entered my life, and while not the flight risk that little mare was, he is still a sensitive soul.  The only way to help him - and me - grow was to continue along that path.

And as I have worked on my issues through my horses, I have seen the results carry through to my home and work life.  I am not the same person I was two years ago.  I am a better parent, a better partner, a better employee, a better boss.  I'm not in such a hurry anymore.  I don't feel this frantic sense of urgency, I don't feel the need for everything to be resolved or understood NOW NOW NOW.  I am more in tune with others and how they react to me and to the way life unfolds around them.

Still, there are challenges.

The loss of my brother and the annual winter doldrums have brought a sluggishness into my days, a lack of desire to get out of bed in the morning, a heaviness of heart that makes doing the things I love seem less inviting.  And so I am learning that in order to keep the happiness in my life growing, I must apply some discipline.  In the same way that we make the wrong thing hard and the right thing easy so that our horse can learn in the safest way possible what it is we want from him, I need to create pathways for me to continue to do the things in my life that create joy and not those that simply lay waste to the potential of my life's moments.

I know that the terms "discipline" and "joy" might seem mutually exclusive, but I'm absolutely certain that there is a relationship between them. 

If I want to maintain a level of fitness that keeps me healthy, that provides the endorphins I need, that gives me the energy and mobility I need to be an active parent and to enjoy my horse, I need to be disciplined. 

If I want to make sure that my relationship with my horse continues to grow and develop, I can't just get on him once every couple of weeks and expect that's going to benefit either one of us.  I have to have the discipline to get out there a few times a week, even if its just to do groundwork or give him a good grooming.  He needs to have my attention, he needs to feel useful in order to be truly happy.  The time I spend with him is incredibly beneficial to me, it is one of the foundation stones of my own happiness.

Spending time with my husband and my children makes me happy.  But sometimes, especially when I'm feeling pulled under as I am lately, it seems easier to give my attention to a book or a social media stream or an email I want to answer.  Finding the joy in my relationships means applying discipline to the amount of time I spend online or disappearing into a novel.

Sometimes it is as simple as saying, Stop doing this and start doing that instead.  Sometimes I need to be even more authoritative with myself and schedule time for my joy.  Put it on the calendar, make a date with my husband, make plans with my kids or with a friend. 

And most important of all, I must take the time to savor those moments with the people I love, doing the things I love.  Death reminds me that life can be brutally short, that there might not be another time to express my feelings to someone, to hold their hand, to wrap my arms around them and hold them tightly.  Death reminds me of the pricelessness of moments spent doing meaningful things, even things as simple as stroking the small dog on my lap --  and of the futility of time wasted over pointless drama or feelings like anger and bitterness, jealously and resentment.

There is no time but now, but not everything needs to be accomplished right now.  Happiness waits to be found in being mindful of the way that I spend my time. 

This post was written in response to the question How do you plan to create happiness in 2012? from BlogHer's Life Well Lived section.  

Goodbye, hello, and letting go.

I can barely recap the month of December without feeling exhausted.   I will say, attempting to not sound trite, sappy or maudlin, that like so many prior years in my life, 2011 started with much promise and contained many surprises, both pleasant and not-so-pleasant.   It was a watershed year, year of epic change. It is a year that I am more than happy to put behind me.

I am sitting on the floor of my living room, coffee cup on my left and mimosa on my right, trying to shake off the effects of last night's wine.  I consider, as I do every year, what it really means when we flip the switch on the ball and a new year begins.  Dates are something artificial that we have imposed on our world to maintain the fiction that we actually control something.  Still, the seasons turn and the earth dies and is reborn every spring.  That promises us that something hopeful is around the corner, even as we suffer through the withering and dying of the winter months.

I had such expectations for 2011, such hope.  And because it is my nature to be hopeful, I have hopes and dreams for this year.  But because I am older and because I now understand more viscerally the nature of life, I feel the need to be cautious as well.  I tighten the reins on my hopes, hold them in check.  And yet...

I have been working with my horse on his collection and his need to charge forward.  He is young and full of energy, and you learn over time that although it seems counter-intuitive, holding your horse back is the surest way to make him feel as though he needs to go faster.  Because he is a prey animal, the more you try to trap him, the more he will try to get free of you.  Over time, if you allow him his freedom, guide him with your legs and your seat and your voice, trust him to be himself, he will trust you enough to relax when you release him and to allow you to check him when that is what you want from him.  He will trust that when you are done needing him to stop that you will let him go.  You will find, together, a harmony and a partnership wherein you don't need to hold him back and he doesn't need to get away from you.  And inside that bond of trust and respect, you will both grow.

In the documentary Buck, Buck Branaman says that our relationships with horses reflect the issues in our lives.  As we develop our skills to read and respond to our horse and our ability to establish his trust and his respect, so we hone our maturity in all other areas of our life.  If you can stand on the ground with nothing in your hands and ask a 1500 pound animal to back up with nothing but your energy and intent, and he does, there is nothing in your life that you cannot approach with the same energy and intent.  The first thing that is needed is that you know what you want your horse to do.  The second thing is to understand how you tell him that in a way that he will understand.  Lastly, you need to apply only as much pressure as is required to convey your request.  The moment that he complies, you release the pressure and reward the horse.

So it is in our everyday life.  Know who you are and what you need to accomplish.  Apply as much energy and intent as required and relax that pressure when it is not needed.  How much time have I wasted in my 46 years apply pressure to situations when it was not necessary? 

Something within me wants me to be cautious about my hopes and expectations for this year.  The child within me who was given away, the woman within me who struggled to find herself within a marriage that was wildly out of control, the woman who suffered unexpected and devastating loss, they think that they need me to hold the reins tighter on my hopes. 

The woman within me who has learned to appreciate what is good,who has experienced unexpected and incredible joy, and who has learned to release the pressure gathers them all close and tells them, "it will be okay.  You can let go."

Yes, there will be sorrow.  There will be pain.  There will be days when I fail to do and fail to be.  There will be great loss.  But there will also be great love and great joy, great success and great contentment for me, for my husband and children, for my family and my friends.  For us all.

And so I let go of the check and I allow the hope to blossom fully.  I will not temper it with caution.  I will hope.

I let go.

 

Different and the same

Christmas this year outdid itself in being a reflection of pretty much all of this year - a study in contrast. Joy and sorrow, tremendous love and tremendous heartache.  With and without the people we love.

I did not send Christmas cards this year.  I had created a personalized card with our wedding photo and some pictures of the kids, and had printed them out the morning of the day my niece found her dad's body.  When I came home I could not even bear to look at them, much less mail them to other people.  They are still in a stack on top of the printer.  I don't know when I will deal with them, but I'm assuming at some point I'm going to want to use the printer again.  Maybe I'll just move them to another temporary storage location for a while, perhaps the top of the toilet tank or underneath my stack of incoming-and-undealt-with mail.

Our first Christmas together as a married couple.  That was awesome.  It was the first Christmas of the rest of the Christmases of my life without my brother.  That sucked.

The kids had an awesome Christmas.  I cleaned both of their rooms thoroughly beforehand, discarding old toys and organizing bookshelves and shampooing carpets.  I gently put the gifts they had gotten from their uncle last Christmas in their respective places (Ken, I said it then and I'll say it now -- a BARBIE MAKEUP KIT for a nine year old?  REALLY?  But you're right, she DID love it.  Fine, I'll shut up now.) and the heavy rock that's been sitting on my chest since three weeks ago got suddenly harder to bear.  And then on Christmas morning, in standard kid-fashion, they ripped through the wrapping paper on a few hundred dollars worth of toys and then inquired if those were really ALL the presents? in a most incredulous tone of voice.   I laughed, and then sobered as it occurred to me that there would have been two more presents underneath that tree.   And then I spent the day enjoying the sound of them enjoying their loot, even if it was tremendously annoying to have to get up every five minutes to help assemble something, put batteries in something, or keep one or more dogs from DIS-assembling something.

I had a hard time making phone calls and I didn't call everyone I should have, because if I hadn't already talked to them about my brother I didn't want to have to go through any of it again.  I wanted to only have to say things like "this is really hard" to my mom and dad, because it required no additional explanation, and "I'm doing okay" to my sister, because mostly I was and I knew she would accept this and not push me for more.  And yet there was good news to report also, some awesome successes for my son on an anxiety-reducing medication that has in just a short two weeks made a world of difference for him (more on that in a post to follow).

We spent time with the family that was here and missed the family that was elsewhere. 

Where in Christmases past I have taken whole rolls of pictures (and made you look at them all, too), I took maybe four or five.  Some of the kids opening boxes, and some of dogs being tortured with reindeer antlers (T-Bone thinks you ought to call the ASPCA and turn me in).

It was...almost exactly what I expected it would be.  Easy and hard at the same time.  Different than last year, different players, different in some of the mechanics, but similar in our traditions and our enjoyment of children and family.  Just like all the Christmases of all my life have been.  Different and the same.