Eleven

Time, you thief.

To have held this baby in my arms, and then, in just the blink of an eye, to be looking at this girl--this young lady--to think that I once carried her within me.

How could you?

Know you nothing of ache within your chest that yearns to hold her tight, just one more time--to sleep just one more night with her snuggled up against you?

Have you not awoken one morning to find the last of her baby fat gone and wept all day?

Do you know the feeling of stumbling down a school hallway, unable to breathe or see, having just waved goodbye to your daughter on her first day of school?

What is it that you think you would sacrifice of yourself to keep her free from knowledge of the real world and the pain within it, if just for one more day?

Are not the lines upon my face and creaks within my bones enough for you?

Must you take her as well? Must you continue to take each day and give back to me one less moment of her childhood?

Have you no pity?

To give us these moments, these smiles, this pride, and so quietly ebb up on us, and before we know it, you've cleared out our most prized possessions with not so much as a warning, leaving us with rooms strewn with jeans and lip gloss and softball gloves; rooms that just yesterday were filled with cribs and baby blankets.

Can I not keep you out? If even for a day?

This is how it should be, I know.

This is what every parent would hope and pray for: a daughter, healthy and beautiful, growing into such an amazing being.

I know this, of course.

But it does nothing to ease the young woman within me, standing with a baby in her arms, trying to keep out the thief at the door.

Eleven.

Eleven.
Eleven.

Goodbye

I'm heading to my first home today; the home where I spent my childhood and I'm dreading it.

It's a place where, in my minds eye, all remains the same. The trees we'd play in remain standing, the hills we rolled down still as magnificent as they were when we were small. So many pieces of me remain there, protected from what would come.

Except there is no protection there anymore.

I'm going to walk into my grandparents home, just as I did on Christmas, and nothing there will be the same, for he is gone, and I cannot wrap myself around this. When I try to begin to comprehend him passing, I sob or I start wringing my hands or tapping my chest or rubbing my neck or moving my feet and demand my thoughts to go elsewhere.

I've no regrets to our goodbye; I don't wish I'd said something more or done something differently, just a kiss on the forehead and an "I love you Gramps and I always will" to which he responded, "I love you too. You take care of yourself," his withered hand had grasped mine, "You take care of yourself and those girls and remember the good. Focus on the good." It might be the first goodbye to which I've not later wished for more.
 
I have to tell Big A today, and I don't know how I will do this. I know what the news of this will do to her little heart, and I can't stand the thought of it. I feel like I should know more, like I should be able to cope, like I should be a blanket of comfort for her, but the truth is that my heart is also raw; in ways, I suppose, still very childlike.

I laid on the couch last night and tried to picture what today will be like, but I didn't get very far. My mind went back to so many memories of him that I became lost in emotion and could barely breathe.

Is this adulthood then? Our hearts and minds screaming, sobbing, "no", and our bodies and motions saying, "but you must"?

I don't know how I will do this.

Godspeed Gramps.

Gone

"He is gone".

That simple sentence keeps ruminating through my mind; an endless whisper of what is now true; a constant reminder of what will never be the same.

You can speak to me of memories, but I know them, and I keep them with me.

You can remind me of a better place; I know that he is there.

For the time being, these things do not change what is the truth to me right now, and that truth is achingly painful, and I am indescribably sad.

The simple truth leaves me sobbing in my car, circling the parking lot, unable to stop the car or muster the energy to actually go inside.

This simple truth has me tapping my chest, willing it to take deep breaths in and out and reminding it not to allow the hard jagged sobs that seem to take it over at will.

This simple sentence has me at a loss; has all of my family at a loss, and I'm just trying to comprehend that no matter the days that pass, life will never be the same.

This simple sentence has me begging the world to stop; to pause; just for a moment, and yet this life is pushing me along: bathe my children, do my work, feed the birds, play with the dogs, work with Big A on her pitching and Little A on her ABC's and debate with anyone who will listen why the Tigers should keep Kenny Rogers as a mid-game reliever.

And then finally, there will come a pause, a break in the routine of my day, and in those moments of silence, I cannot help it, I weep.

I'm not a stranger to death or loss.

I'm just not sure that I've lost someone that I loved so much; someone that was such a magnificent part of my life; someone that always brought a smile to my face.

It's difficult to think that I will not see him again; that there will be no more emails from him, no more Tigers games with him, no more hearing his accented voice singing hymns.

I know, that in a sense, he is there; that he exists within all of us.

It's just that despite that truth, the simple one still exists.

He is gone.

And so I weep.

What Comes Around: Karma, Version Two

"Want me to get that"?

"Um, yes. But could you start with her?" I pointed to my neighbors house.

"Sure thing". He went to work, plowing out my neighbor, then coming over and pulling me out of my drive as well as scraping it out for me, then off he went, galloping away, my knight in a shining green pick-up truck.

Gwen, my neighbor, came over with a card for me. "Why do you keep doing things for me?" She asked as I folded the $25 that was in the card back into her hand.

"I can't take your money. What I'm doing for you will come back to me someday, really. It may have already".

Sunshine: The Re-Mix

I've been dealing with things, that, at times, have seemed insurmountable.

I asked my grandfather a few weeks ago, "You know how most of the time you have a sense of the future, of things to come"? He paused, hesitant to answer the wrong way. "I don't have that anymore. It seems so gray."

Then I veered onto other topics; I'm a dodger, a veer-er, an "I'm fine" type gal. It's a huge flaw, for most often it results in spectacular crashes that probably could have been avoided had I just asked for help.

I felt so overwhelmed that I thought I shouldn't even write here, because it's hard sometimes, to put to paper the reality of how I feel; and who wants to be bombarded with more heavy stuff--we all carry our crosses. I want to be the person helping to carry yours; not adding to the weight.

When I jokingly posted below about Little A's recent health scare, I wrote in jest, trying to plaster a smile over my greatest fear; I do that too; smile when inside I'm on my knees, rocking myself.

As an infant, she quit breathing frequently, due to her prematurity, and she rarely slept. There were monitors and 911 calls and breathing life into her, and me hovering around it all, an outsider looking in, shutting down pieces of myself just so that I could sustain.

I told those closest to me that I felt like possibly her reason for fighting sleep was because she knew on some level that it posed a danger to her. Something intrinsic, perhaps. They said it was my own fear-mongering. Who can blame them, I'm a first-degree worrier, too.

She's not doing well--she's been sick daily, she's sleeping erratically, she's crying when she's awake, almost all the time.


Big A turned ten, and when we were putting the candles on her cake, one of the girls laughed when just the number "1" was on there, while I looked for the "0". "Oh, Big A, are you one"? And at that moment, it was all I could do not to cry.

She was one, once upon a fairy-tale. She loved me then, because she had no idea of my flaws and imperfections. I was her world, and now, on most days, it's all I can be not to be her nemesis. I don't have the time to be the mom that I want to be to her, so I try to eek out what I can, but I know it's just not enough; it's not enough.

I want to give her cupcakes for her birthday that aren't four short for her class--who the hell just assumes that conveniently, there are 24 students, since it's the same amount of batter that you have? I want to give her homemade cookies when she walks in the door, and not sad looks when we arrive home at 7:30 and she asks, "What's for dinner"? and I tell her, "I don't know; I just got here, too". ("This isn't her fault, she's a freaking kid, act like her mother, jennifer, and feed her. Jesus Christ. Seriously, you can't even pull together dinner without feeling like you're drowning?") The person inside of me hates me. I hope she never finds me alone in a dark alley.

Some things have happened at work that I'll have to post about later, if at all. I knew that in this field, nearly all of my clients would have major issues and be in need of massive help. I wanted to do it anyway. I wanted to be the person that made a difference to them; peripherally, it looked light and breezy and lofty; in reality, it's dark and heavy.

Last week I was brutally honest with one of my clients; I told him the job market was the worst in the nation and that with his sporadic work history coupled with violent felonies, his placement could take up to a year, if his counselor approved me working with him that long. Instead of trying to deliver hope, I was purposely trying to make him not believe in what I could do for him.

"It's OK, I'm a changed person. I accept that I have to deal with my past, and I'm grateful that you're willing to work with me, not many people are." Who, in that moment, was helping whom? It wasn't I. He proceeded to leave me a voice mail yesterday, telling me that he just wanted to thank me again, and that he was really looking forward to the future. "Fan mail", joked a colleague, "but I was trying to be mean", I countered. She looked at me and rolled her eyes. "Nice try". There I was, trying to be as dark as I possibly could to him, and somehow, someway, he still felt the sun.


And your light, your compassion; it's given me hope and reminded me of things that, somehow, though I thought they were written on my heart, I forgot.

And now, the dawn, the sun, the comfort that there are hands to hold when it's dark.

And most importantly, hope.

I hope you can feel it, too.