Winter

It has been awhile since my fingers have flown across the keyboard longing to express the next thought before it flutters away in the wind of hazy mama mindedness…All along I have thought of the hole in my life that should be filled with my words. I write them in my head while I drive the kids around, shop at the grocery store, stand for what feels like hours or days in the kitchen, and while I listen to the stories of real people every day at work. My life is good. When I step back from it and take it all in I know that. I also know, when I step back to take it all in, that there are missing things. Missing things that would make me feel whole and solid, feet on the ground, mind in alignment, more like me. Writing is one of those missing things. So, now, while the days are darker and darker, while we head straight for the darkest day of the year, while the Christmas lights blaze all around us doing their darndest to chase away the darkness of December, I find my keyboard and I write. Because maybe it would help to take more Vitamin D, maybe it would help to talk to someone, maybe it would help to sit and cry for a minute, but I know it will help to sit and write.

There is grief everywhere I turn. I know that people die every single day, I know that there is great tragedy going on somewhere every minute of every day, but for some reason it feels like right now, in this dark, dark December it is all floating to the surface. I suppose historically Winter has always been a time of death just as it is a time of darkness. We may be able to flash a million holiday lights to combat the darkness, but we cannot combat the death that comes with Winter. Right now death is at arm’s length in my life. It is the sweet little boy that passed away too soon, and the Mama who is my age that left her baby girl and husband two days ago, it is my son’s basketball coach who lost his father, it is the stories I read and the six degrees of separation, but it is not immediate, not my personal grief. I grieve for all of the stories, for the people in my community, for the friends who hurt, but I feel my own personal grief lurking in a corner. My grandmother will be 91 in February and a week ago she fractured her hip. My father was taken to the hospital on the same day that she was because he thought he was having a heart attack. They are both alright. For now. I felt the grief rear up, though; I felt the memories begin to spiral; I felt the pain of last thoughts, last words; I felt the deep, deep fear of being lost in my personal grief. And, all around me I am watching others lost in theirs, sitting in their pain, living in their pain.

When I had my first son I finally understood what it is to live with your heart outside of your body. I was absolutely terrified for his first weeks because I had never felt so exposed, so vulnerable. Every time someone carried him away from me, out of the room, out of the house, anywhere other than right there next to me, I panicked. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, in fact I practically held my breath until he was back in my arms. This morning I put that little baby on the school bus and watched as he walked down the aisle, sat down next to his favorite little girl, and waved while the bus drove off into the icy morning. I felt that vulnerability again in that moment. I imagine there will always and forever be moments like that, so long as I live, so long as my boys walk their path through life and I step back to let them walk. That is my job. I have to step back and let them walk through life and I will, but I do it knowing that they are my heart.

To know love we must know pain. To love is to be vulnerable to the very core of our being. I would never want to live a life without love, so I open myself willingly to the pain because I know the depth of pain is equal to the depth of love. I love deeply and fiercely, so I will hurt deeply and fiercely, too, and that I can live with.