The last day I visited my Mom was like visiting a fairy tale kingdom living under a curse…
The last day I visited my Mom was like visiting a fairy tale kingdom living under a curse…
The boy has finally found a sport he likes. After years of trying football, basketball, and baseball, he tried Lacrosse a few weeks ago and has been happily running around the fields of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachussetts for weeks now. When he played football
I’ve written before how death and divorce can make holidays especially piercing, seeing everyone with their loved ones when so many of mine are now gone.
This is the first Easter in 6 years that didn’t feel like I was being stabbed with 1,000 tiny pins all day long.
I wondered why the feelings changed. Was it time? People love to say, “time heals all wounds,” but I have not found that to be true for me. In my experience, some wounds never heal.
I miss my beloveds all day every day. The pain remains, as big and all-consuming as ever, but the more it tries to pull me down, to destroy me, the more ferociously I create: writing, dancing, filming, creating…
I have learned to live with loss and grief, it is a part of who I am, and though I wish this wasn’t true, it is: grief is also an integral part of my children, and I know they feel the loss a little extra on holidays too.
Then there was the daily dancing for no reason at all. It didn’t matter if things were going well, or the world was crashing down around their ears, they danced together through it all.
I saw firsthand how dancing can instantly change the energy in any situation, shake off stress, tears to laughter, mundane to magic, grumpiness into giggles…
Then again, my Mom is still my Mom, whether she’s able to respond to us in way we understand or not. She is living in a spiritual tender world, a world that doesn’t make sense to me, or those of us currently anchored in the concrete world.
It always takes me by surprise when Mother’s Day rolls around and I feel melancholy. I love being a Mom, but as a daughter, I feel sad.
I want my Mom back.
Is it strange that I want to shrink my Mom and carry her in my pocket so I can have her with me all the time, like a pocket full of starlight that I can throw up in the sky when it seems especially dark?
2021 was the first September 14 of my life where I didn’t send flowers or a gift to my Mom for her birthday. She’s in Memory Care, and the last two years, I sent her bouquets of flowers that she never received. She doesn’t really