a grief storm

I knew a wave of emotions would come crashing down eventually. My grief continues to be like any other weather pattern: it comes when it comes, and it recedes when it’s ready. And I’ve felt the swell coming for weeks. 

And here I am again, having to choke back tears all day. 

I realized Ford turns 11 months tomorrow. He’ll be a year old soon. His birth was so, so special to me and that was before pete died. Now it’s one of my most treasured memories. Coming up on the time of year when I last experienced fresh motherhood and getting to know myself all over again… knowing that it was one of my last significant days with my husband… that just behind Halloween comes thanksgiving and then Christmas and then 10 days after the new year it’ll have been an entire year since I last saw him. And I’m never going to see him again. He’s… gone. 

I see all the dads lovingly dropping off and picking up their kids from daycare. I watch the kids run into their arms with glee. Through the windows, I see them carefully buckling their kids into their car seats. I watch good fathers take care of their children and it kills me. My kids had that and now they don’t. Pete alone dropped Axl off at every single day of preschool before he died. He put Axl to bed every night. He was a really good dad and they won’t even remember that. That breaks my heart over and over again every single day. 

We were supposed to send in family photos to school with the boys. I still haven’t done it. What am I supposed to send? A photo of our family as it is now? Me and my two boys? That’s bullshit. That’s not our whole family. Pete and me and our sons, THAT is our family. And I only have one single photo of all of us in one frame, no one looking at the camera or smiling, my eyes are closed, and it’s blurry. You can barely see our faces.  My boys deserve a better representation of their family of origin, even if it looks completely different now than it did back then. 

Things like this are going to keep happening to all of us year after year- anniversaries, Father’s Day… countless special days that we’ll always be a little left out of, a little awkward about. A little depleted by. The thought is exhausting, much like so many other parts of widowhood and single motherhood that stretch out ahead of me.

I cried watching teen mom because I saw a husband taking his wife to a surgery appointment. It hit me that I no longer have anyone to do that. There are plenty of people who WOULD do it because they’re good people, but I’ll spend the rest of my life asking for favors instead of having a partner to rely on for things like that. I understand people do these things on their own every single day; I don’t ever mean to imply that anything about my situation is any harder than any other single person or parent. I’m just also having to heal from the shell-shock of having had all the help and support and security I could ever ask for and literally losing it overnight. 

I understand why I’ll go months without feeling emotions about any of this. I can feel my brain and body protecting itself from the trauma. I feel the energy that goes into pushing the images of what happened the day he died out of my head. Even now, as I’m writing this and thinking about him, playing like a movie in the back of my mind are the visuals, the sounds, the emotions of that day and the ones they followed. I can’t turn it off. It’s why I stay busy, why I stay medicated, why I can’t think of him the way I want to. Everything is clouded by this thick, sticky trauma and I hate it. 

My sink is overflowing with dishes. I’m carrying at least 50 lbs of excess weight I want to lose. I’m disappointing people left and right, even though I am going going going from 6am to 11pm. I can’t do it all. This is one of those weeks where righting the ship feels impossible, and I just need to let myself bob in the surf for awhile until I get some strength back.