Learning to Dance

It's been forever since I have written on here, but as the holiday season has officially begun, so have my emotions....and why not write them out? The last four months have been the most trying months since my mom passed. Up until then, I was keeping myself busy and going through the motions of every day life. Two years ago, my mom got sick...I spent three months juggling my last semester of college and watching her fight for her life...she passed away...I had to finish two more months of college...I graduated...I immediately moved to Michigan to work for the summer...I got a kindergarten teaching position for the school year so I moved back and started that one week before school started...the school year ended and my summer job began...August rolled around and I FINALLY (one and a half years after I took my mom to the ER) made the decision to start grieving. Since mid-August, I have been going to counseling to work on, first and foremost, bettering my relationship with my dad (I love you), and now that I have finally worked through all of that, I am working on my mother. Up until four months ago, I didn't know what "missing someone so much it hurt" meant. I THOUGHT I did, but I didn't. When something tragic happens, you become numb. You turn your emotions off just to get out of bed and move on with your day. You basically turn your emotions off to survive. In August, I made the decision to take a year off of teaching (and just sub) and to start "feeling." I knew it was going to be a grueling process, and I knew I would need a lot of time for myself to just be a complete mess...and let's be honest, teaching doesn't allow you to be a mess. And as I miss my kids and my classroom terribly, and as horrible as I have felt for awhile now, I am SO glad I made the decision to be miserable to work on myself. You have to feel this way in order to move on with your life, otherwise you will never move forward...you just get stuck in a rut doing the same old thing day in and day out. Working through these emotions during the holidays is something that I would never wish on my worst enemy. The pain some days seems unbearable, but I somehow make it through...every single day. It's amazing to me that I can resist tears and behave "normally" in my darkest hours of grief...and then someone just simply smiles at me, or I see a sign or billboard or a commercial and I completely lose it. To lose someone you love...your best friend...your MOTHER...is to alter your life forever. The pain eases...new people come into your life and you do exciting, new things...but that gap never closes. The hole in my heart from losing my mom is in the shape of her - no one else will ever fill it. My mom will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever....and that is something that I am currently, and have been, working through. Grief becomes a part of you, in everything you do...and now that I am looking at things differently, I see that I will be grieving her for the rest of my life because I will never stop loving her. I have come to learn, and deeply feel, that grief and love go together - you don't get one without the other.

"You will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your loved one. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through. It's like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly - that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp."