Life in progress

Tag Archives: family


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Unparalleled grief

goes on

Flowers for Aaron

Down the street from me lives a lady. I see her often, sitting on her front porch, when I’m going by on my paper route. Occasionally I stop to talk to her – she has a grandmotherly attachment to Alex, my son. In the summer she gives him popsicles.  She never fails to ask me how he is if he’s not with me.

In early January she lost her husband quite suddenly. She has family, two daughters who live with their own families not too far away, who were very supportive, taking her where she needed to go since the driver in the household passed away. When I talked to her about the passing of her husband she seemed to have made peace with the idea that he was in a better place. He left her to live alone with her disabled son.

Today, when I came to her house I stopped to talk and she asked me, ‘Did you hear?’

‘Hear what?’ I asked.

‘My son passed away last week…’ she told me.

Tears came to my eyes before I could stop them, causing hers to flow as well.

Her son was an adult. He had been sick for the past two weeks and was unable to fight it off.  His heart gave out. He was born with a heart defect much like my Alex was.

No parent should outlive their child. I’ve said this again and again and yet, it happens.  How can life go on after that?

How?


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How comments can hurt

It didn’t start as a comment directed at me, but it bothered me nonetheless. The discussion was about a situation in which a man, with a disabled wife and a small child had taken a weekend ‘off’ to visit with friends and came home to find his wife had died. The comment, on a friend’s journal, stated that the commenter couldn’t understand why, if the man loved his family at all, he would need a weekend away from them.

I am a single mother of two disabled kids with whom I live alone. I love them more than anything in the world – but I need time off! By the time their father’s scheduled weekend with them comes around, which is supposed to be every two weeks but is more often not until the third weekend, I’m all but pulling out my hair. Loving them doesn’t preclude the work that’s required to look after their every need, nor does it make up for the fact that I don’t get any more than five hours of sleep a night when they’re here.

Back to the comment: I tried to explain to the girl who made it that it’s not that clear cut – that there are many things that go into the care of the disabled and the very young. She came back to say that she knows – and that she looks after her disabled parents. I fail to see the parallel. In the end I got the last word, telling her that she is a better person than I am.

It’s probably the way the conversation was left that bothers me the most. That I couldn’t make her see I’m not a terrible person and that I don’t not love my kids because I need time to myself to recharge and re-align my emotions, still sits badly with me.

It makes me wonder whether people out there with different problems than I have are just reluctant to look deeper into the difficulties of others or if they simply don’t care to try. It’s this ‘it’s not my problem so you must be doing something wrong to make it yours’ attitude that worries me. At the same time I hope they are never put into my situation, a little part of me hopes they are. Not very altruistic, but there you go. Sentiment breeds like sentiment.


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Bedtime

Why can’t it be bedtime all day?

DSC00123

Trying not to be noticed

It’s the only time he plays quietly by himself…


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A sad state

It astounds me sometimes how holidays have changed for me. As I child I looked upon them with such anticipation – with the same degree of excitement as I see in my youngest son now. He is filled with glee at the thought of hunting for chocolate eggs, even though he won’t eat them. So what has changed? Why am I not able to see life as I did, through the eyes of a child?

I think it’s only because I choose not to. The changes that occur within myself I have the choice to modify. Ah, the disillusionment of adulthood. A sad state of affairs indeed.

I need a glass of wine.


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Published on VenusBlogs.com

I had an article I wrote published today on VenusBlogs.com.

Flying the Coop

I remember the day he was born – or rather the week he was born. He was my first. My water broke slowly over the period of that week and I slept so little that I was able to read a 1700 page novel in three days. When it was time to push (sans epidural – they didn’t offer them in the province of Quebec at the time) I did so for hours before they told me a physical defect in the base of my spine would make it impossible to deliver naturally.

You can find the entire article here.


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Milestones

Life’s milestones come in so many shapes and sizes. While many are like gigantic boulders others can seem like pebbles at first. But even a pebble can create a ripple.

Today my firstborn, my baby, who has somehow so quickly reached a height of almost six feet and eighteen years of age, moved out. A huge milestone for him and what I thought would be a smaller one for me.

But now I find myself thinking about how empty my house feels, even though my other two children are asleep in their beds. There’s no one to call down the laundry chute to say good-night to before I go to bed. I’ll turn off all the lights without worrying if he’ll trip over anything should he get up in the dark. The ripples have spread, just as my son has spread his wings and proverbially flown the coop. Just like that.


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Sad but True

Ever have one of those days when you haven’t had any sleep the night before, and you’re just about to finally fall into bed at 9:30pm and you get a phone call from a customer you deliver the newspaper to (for a stunning compensation of 11 cents per day) to let you know that your eldest son didn’t deliver their paper today (and neither did you because you spent the day in the hospital with your youngest son) and all you want to do is cry?

I wish I could say me neither.


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My mind is a landscape

Mountain

I see a vast plain lying prostrate at the feet of mountains, bowing to their majesty. Mountains which look up, extending their noses, straining to reach the praise of heaven. And a sky so blue, yet feathered with winglike clouds.

I have so many stories inside me, just begging to escape, from fingertips to keyboard. Tales of wanting and of contentment. Of bad behaviour and of good. Of kink and of chastity. And of faraway lands that are waiting to be discovered. Just like my landscape.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system…

I’m thinking about starting up another blog to go alongside this one but for more of the naughty type stories, so I can keep this one more family-friendly. And by family I mean MY family in particular. I think my biggest problem is not knowing how to properly separate the categories on this site, so that I could perhaps keep the nice away from the nasty and vise versa, and just keep one single blog.

Anyone have any suggestions? Advice? Sugar? Coz I’m also out of sugar.