Life Now

There are moments when I don’t think about you at all. Our days are busy and the children always want or need me in some capacity and I just act like a regular mom. It seems to be getting easier, the not thinking about you part. Except when I crawl into bed each night, look at your side and remember that it is going to stay empty. I try to push the thoughts away.

Then there are days where there is a crisis with a family member or a friend and the first thing I instinctually do is reach for the phone to call you. I watch as my hand moves to grab my cell and my brain stops me before I dial, but my heart wants to call you nevertheless. Then the pain comes back and I miss you terribly.

There has been a lot of drama lately and more than once over the past week I have gone to call you. Knowing that I can’t seems to make whatever crisis I am dealing with that much worse, because you are just dead, completely unreachable. I can’t hear your voice and you aren’t here to help me in any way. I miss talking to you and having you as my voice of reason. I miss you telling me that everything is going to be OK. Deep down I really just miss you so very much.

Our son looked at me the other day and said, “Mommy it is almost a year that daddy is dead.” I looked at him and just said yes, that is true. I was waiting for him to say something else, anything else. But he went back to building his Lego City and that was that. It is amazing to me how little we talk about you now. I still ponder whether this is good or bad. I wonder if maybe it is time to open the boxes with your photos. That maybe your image won’t be so difficult to look at and the children need your face around – to remind them how much they were loved by their daddy. But I am a coward at heart and don’t know when this will happen.

Our baby girl starts Kindergarten in two days. You aren’t going to be here to watch her set off with her brand new backpack and go to school like the big girl she has grown into this year. You won’t be here to make fun of me when I fall to pieces moments after I walk out of her classroom. She won’t miss your presence as you have been dead over ten months now – and this is a long long time for her. But me – I will sob extra tears for her growing up and you missing yet another milestone.

The Jewish New Year is also this week. Another holiday I must get through without you. I am apathetic about this holiday – no surprise. I will go to services, go to some meals and do it all for the children. My heart just isn’t into anything these days. I go through the motions for my kids and because it is what I am supposed to do – keep my life normal and all that. But it saddens me that everything I seem to do these days is just going through the motions. True I don’t mourn and cry like I used to. True time makes the pain edge it way slowly away – but life is just not the same and maybe it never will be.

Yesterday I took the kids to the park. I was the only mom. It was only because I have no idea what day it is that at first I couldn’t understand where all the women were. Then I realized it is Sunday – aka mommy’s day off. Dads are home and they are the ones taking the kids to the park while moms do anything but go to the park. I didn’t dwell on this fact – I just pretended like it was a Tuesday. I played soccer with my son and tried to teach my daughter to ride her bike without hitting the fence.

This is just life now. Getting through each day, dealing with any crisis that comes along, showing my children a fun time and trying not to look like the mourning widow I really am deep down inside.