Living in a fog, going through the motions.

Fifty pound weights hanging from my arms I move from one room to another looking for the next great place to take a nap.  That is how I felt and how I functioned last week: Depressed.  Strange to say it out loud especially for me but last week was a steep slide in to a very dark and lonely place.  It isn’t a surprise.  I suspected that it could happen.  In my insightfulness I even predicted it would be somewhere between 9 and 18 months.  It was.  I’m better now but still not great.  March and April are the hardest months of the year for me.  Nearly everyone I’ve ever cared about that has passed, passed during those months.  They are also the two months of the year that are over-whelmed with birthdays.  Sadness and happiness: they are like oil and water.  Incredibly beautiful and mesmerizing but can potentially damage they way our machinery runs.  In private I always struggle during this time of year.  I can remember exactly where and what I was doing each time I learned I’d lost another cherished loved one.  To say I’ve found it difficult to be away from my family and friends is an understatement at best.  Everything I am and everything I want to be centers around those people.  It kills me to miss their birthdays and I suspect is the reason I’ve only managed to send a handful of gifts on time.  It is painful.  I’m overwhelmed with emotion about my kids missing their family.  Every game, every performance is so lonely and emotional.  It hurts the kids so deeply that their grandparents, uncle and extended family aren’t here to watch them.  Who I am is defined by those very experiences when I was a kid and I struggle with knowing that Jessie and Jake will spend so much of their life with only Jeff and I in the stands watching.  How will that affect them?  Will they value family as much as I do?  Even more overwhelming is that Jessie is four weeks away from being a middle-schooler.  The fact that she is growing up isn’t as hard on me as the fact that she is missing such a right of passage with the kids she knows best and still calls her best friends.  There will be a slide show.  It will have laughing and smiling kids throughout the years growing up together and making memories.  Her pictures will be of her alone.  She doesn’t have memories made with these kids yet.  Will she feel alone that day?  Her pictures just won’t fit and it isn’t so much about being different because she is okay with that.  It is more about the feeling of floating.  No longer belonging in

Oregon

but not quite settled here either.  There will be a 5^th grade graduation in

Oregon

.  There is where all her elementary memories are but her pictures will be missing there too.  Here she will be just going through the motions and that breaks my heart for her.  Talking to my BFF Michelle the other night she asked me what I’m going to do about it.  I don’t know.  I’m mending and that’s good.  I know that the best way for me to mend is to get my mind off of the things that make me sad.  I would welcome relaxation, sun and a change of scenery.  I will snap out of it but hearing from home would be good.  For all of you, life goes on.  You continue to get together; you spend time with one another it feels as though we have been forgotten.  We are here and everyone else is there.  It can be very very lonely. 

Comments

[Sarah]

LOTS of hugs!! thinking of you Shari! And missing seeing your smiling face.

[Stephanie]

You know how much I love you...You are AMAZING! You are one of a kind...the best mom, daughter, wife, friend...I could go on and on...The only one I would let have my son for 18 days!!!!
You make a difference in this world and I'm so lucky to call you my friend!

Love,
Steph