a mindf*ck
It occurred to me yesterday that this is the best I’ve ever been mentally and emotionally.
How absolutely fucked up is that? My husband died 6 months ago. I uprooted my entire life. I’m rebuilding from the ground up, in an entirely new state. Almost nothing about my life, except the fact I have two children, is the same as it was in January.
And yet. I’ve never taken better care of myself. I’ve never felt so in tune with who I am.
It feels like I’ve been holding my breath for my entire life and I’ve finally gotten to exhale. And, really, it has so little to do with Pete.
I mean, sure, a lot of it has to do with Pete. He saved me. It’s cheesy, but it’s true. No one had ever shown me such great love and affection and care. I was such a broken person when I met him. It’s not that he fixed me, but he held my hand as I learned how to fix myself. I absolutely would not be the person that I am today if I’d never met him. If I’d never loved him.
But this sense of peace and calm that I am experiencing in this chapter is not in any way due to some sort of relief that my husband is gone. I miss him in my bones. I would trade this feeling in a heartbeat to just have him back, to go back in time and live our old life. What I feel is more like… a certainty. Where I thought there would be “why me?”s, there are “ah, yes”s. Looking back, my life feels like this meandering path that never ever made sense to me until lately. Suddenly, it all makes perfect sense. Every decision I made in life was leading me here, to this tiny, one-room apartment in rural Vermont. I thought I had crafted this world for myself but now… I feel more than ever like I’ve just been being guided along this entire time by fate, the universe, whatever. I was always going to be widowed at 33, always going to be a single parent raising two young boys.
It’s like I spent my whole life so sure I was going to experience some grand tragedy. There were so many signs. I’m no psychic, but I do think that if we really listen to our guts, we find they are leading us certain places and telling us certain stories. We convince ourselves they’re daydreams or anxieties, we tell ourselves we just want too much or too little. But I believe that if we’re in tune enough, we can be lead where we need to go. I wanted my story to end with Pete, in my little suburban Massachusetts life. A “then, they lived happily ever after” sort of thing. But something inside of me told me there were bigger, harder things coming.
And here I landed in this completely new life. I’m no longer a suburban housewife, I’m a widow living in the woods. I no longer own a 3-floor condex, but I’ll be buying some sort of little rural farmhouse. I don’t have my husband, but I’m surrounded by my entire family. I traded a good life for another good life, even if it looks completely different. Even if grief and sadness permeate everything. They won’t always.
Staying positive is imperative. I think of it like a kayak I’m paddling through a lake. The sad thoughts cause me to immediately capsize, leaving me with two options: 1) drown, or 2) flip the damn boat back over and climb back in. It is so, so tempting to choose option #1. It’s so much easier. For me, this looks a lot like replaying the events of Pete’s death on a loop in my head. It’s berating myself for things I didn’t say or do. It’s thinking about how much my boys are going to miss out on. It’s easy to get stuck in the cycle of those thoughts. But when I can get back in the boat, even if it’s a struggle or it takes a long time or I’ve done it 5 times already that day, I’m dry and warm and I can feel the sun. Choosing to get back in the boat and never give into the drowning is what makes every day worth it. It’s exhausting. It’s like learning to work out a muscle. It hurts a lot of the time. But it’s a practice. I stay positive, I stay grateful, I stay looking ahead instead of behind. And I take Pete along with me in my heart.
Above all, I am so proud of myself. Six months ago, if you’d asked me if I was capable of doing any of the things I do now on a daily basis, I’d have straight up just started crying. I had frequent nightmares about having to drive, about having to rejoin society and get out in the world, about having to handle the kinds of things Pete handled for us. And now I just… do them. I make phone calls and I take care of the groceries and I drive all over the place without any fear. I haven’t given up, not once. I start each day ready to absolutely slay it. I don’t always succeed in the ways I want to, but I manage to always make myself proud. Pete would be so proud of me. I wonder sometimes if he would think “where was this when I was alive?” - why couldn’t I have been this strong and capable and unbothered when he was here? But I truly feel like him dying changed something in me. I mean, obviously… but it was like I absorbed some of the best parts of him. I am some kind of Shelbi-Pete hybrid now, and I’ve never felt so capable and prepared.
I try and see each day as a challenge I’m determined to conquer, instead of a mountain I’ll never manage to climb. Either way, my days are going to be full of fighting for success, so I might as well focus on my victories instead of my failures.