Hmmm (Can't think of a better title)

8 months later, and I still have a moment each day where I realize my mom is no longer with us. Every damn time it stops my heart for just a moment and takes my breath away. It feels like being sucker punched, having a ton of bricks on my chest, or recovering from open heart surgery (or what I imagine it to be like after vising the Mr.'s gpa in the hospital). I wonder if this will ever end. Do I want it to? When the day comes that I don't feel this way, will I feel guilty? I suspect so.

On the other hand, I love my life and everything that is happening to and around me. Is this normal? I suspect yes.

First Cubs game of the season. They got the W.

Who Says You Can't Go Home? (Bon Jovi and Sugarland, it's a good song, really)

Childhood home

My first post on this blog was August 2^nd, 2010, almost exactly a year ago. I started the blog to keep track of new exciting things the Mr. and I were doing in the city. I haven’t posted for quite some time, probably because the most recent posts were not exactly upbeat.  I typically have a cheery, sometimes sarcastic disposition, and lately things have not been so. I didn’t want to crowd the internet with ramblings of feeling sorry for myself and complaining. Now I am ready to blog again and talk about the exciting things happening in life, with only a few bits of complaining.

That being said, we are almost completely settled into our new place since the fire. We have been here for about 2 weeks and I found myself thinking that it almost feels like home. Which leads me to the question,  when does “home” become an apartment in a new city instead of your parents’, or in my case parent’s, home? Is it when you leave for college? When you get your first apartment? When you finally have “real person” furniture and belongings? When you feel independent? It really made me sad to think that my dad’s is no longer my “home”. I love my life, my new place, living with my future husband, and being independent. It is very strange, and I just can’t put my finger on it, but I guess this is what growing up feels like. Leaving behind childhood, what you used to know, and growing into a new, better, version of you. What I do know is that I am not that different from the little girl who grew up in Kentwood, MI and that no matter where my Dad lives, I can always go home.

And for a bit of complaining, it really sucks having to say my Dad’s house and not my parents’. I was thinking the other day what assumptions new people will make when they always hear me saying my Dad’s place, my dad this, my dad that.  AND, it is weird that Dad is now living at the cottage and sold the condo. That was pretty hard, because the condo had so much of Mom in it, but I know she is not in “things” rather, in memories and in us. I also can see how people might become hoarders.

Also, can someone please help me get my commas under control? I just never know when to use them or other punctuation!

*And, we set a wedding date: July 20, 2012. More to come on that in the next few posts! I do promise this will not turn into a wedding blog though. 

Can you believe this is our life?

Last November I specifically remember walking home from the EL on a snowy night think about how happy I was. About to be engaged, loving the city life, great friends, amazing family, loving my job, loving grad school, and excited about the future. I often would say to James, "Can you believe this is our life? We live in Chicago, you're in law school, I'm getting my masters degree!" Thursday morning our lives were thrown upside down by a fire in our building and we find ourselves asking again, "Can you believe this is our life?" My mom is dead, our stuff is ruined, we're about to have zero income for the next year, and we need to clean and replace everything, find another apartment and move. WTF just happened? I've been pushing on since my mom passed away saying to myself, "Just make it 'til the quarter is over, just make it 'til June 21 when work is done." I'm pretty sure I'm on the brink of a breakdown. Here are some very cliche but helpful phrases I have been using for self talk:

• Keep calm and carry on
• What doesn't kill you makes you stronger
• God will never give you more than you can handle
• Only you have the power to change your attitude
• Be still and know that I am god.
  
• BREATHE!
• God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference

I just wanted summer to get here so I could breathe, grieve, and just BE. Guess that was too much to ask for, huh?

What are some other good self talk phrases?

Also, a special shout out to the Chicago Fire Department for their speedy response. As James says, "They kicked ass, took names, and rolled out".

Funny How Things Work...

I wanted to call you today. I had some down time that I only get on Wednesdays and I was feeling like I hadn't talked to you for a while. I wanted to ask you how long you can leave thawed chicken breast in the fridge before you cook it. I wanted to tell you what's new with my work and school, and that my neck hurts because I still have that crappy pillow. 

When you have your first broken heart and feel so sad, thinking like you've lost something precious, feeling worthless, like the world can't continue, you think you know what longing is. It is horrible longing for that boy or girl to like you, to realize they're an idiot, to come back to you. That is nothing compared to the longing of grief. Longing for something that you know is unattainable, longing from the pit of your stomach, the core of your being.

Tonight I came across a poem after searching "longing and grief". The poem, "But Perhaps God Needs Longing" by Nelly Sachs was written  about "the longing for a lover and of the disappointment of lost love. After her experiences during the Holocaust, most of Sachs’s poems dealt with the destruction of European Jewry. She used her poems to express the deep sense of loss and grief that she felt and as a form of catharsis for the many emotions that she had experienced during the war years" (Endnotes.com). I felt like I really could relate to this because I have been using writing as an outlet too. It really came full circle because she was a survivor of the Holocaust which made me think of Logotherapy created by a Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl. The basis of his theory was developed during his time in a concentration camp and he posits that:

• Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones.
• Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
• We have freedom to find meaning in what we do, and what we experience, or at least in the stand we take when faced with a situation of unchangeable suffering.^(Wikipedia) 

While I know this grief would not be categorized as unchangeable suffering compared to the Holocaust, I do try to keep in mind the power of  attitude like Frankl's theory suggests. But it's hard.

I apologize because this post was very scattered and in no way, shape, or form cited correctly.

Cheeseburger in Paradise

Photo: www.crazybeautifulcakes.com

Today is mom's birthday. Towards the end she was needing to eat more protein compared to the about zero she was used to eating. Dad would go to Mr.Burger every day and get her a cheeseburger and she truly enjoyed them. It was nice to see her have something she could enjoy when she was in pain and feeling down. She also was loving baked potatoes with cheese and sour cream and coffee ice cream. Coffee ice cream was her last meal the night before she passed away. I will always try to remember that she was still enjoying some parts of life as she slipped away from us. So today I picture her celebrating in paradise having a juicy cheeseburger, or may a cheeseburger cake? Who knows. What I do know is that I miss her terribly. 

Happy birthday mom!

IKEA is for Dreamers

I wanted to share this blog today because I love to see people's ingenuity in action. People are thinking up crazy ways to reuse/repurpose Ikea goods. Some of these are really creative and a good source for inspiration.

Check it out at http://www.ikeahackers.net/

The Blows Just Keep Coming

Warning, this is a bummer post.

I opened the file "Wedding List" to approximate how many invitations we would be sending and the first person on the list is, yup, you guessed it, Mom. No tears were shed, but it certainly reinforced the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach; like someone knocked the wind out of me; an elephant on my chest. Now I don't even feel like tallying up the number of invitations.

I can't bring myself to delete her from the list. Whelp, there's the tears. Great. Dad's cleaning the house and purging it of all her clothes and belongings, deactivated her cell phone, had Kim remove her Facebook. Isn't her loss enough, why do things have to radically change at the house? Why so fast? Hospice had their contracted company come within a few hours after she passed to take all the equipment. In less than half a day you couldn't even tell a sick person had been living there. In less than 2 weeks you can't tell a woman had lived at the condo for 8 years, the closets and drawers empty of her makeup, hair stuff, lotion, undergarments, sweaters, purses, jackets, shoes. Everything. All the craft stuff she was working on or kept around for when the grandkids visited, her sewing machine, tea, scarves. Next it will be all the little knickknacks women are known to collect and men are known to despise. I talked with her about how I was scared it wouldn't feel like home with her gone and now I feel like my fears are turning into reality. I guess it just won't be the home I am used to...

Even though it really makes me sad that he's getting rid of her stuff I stay quiet. She was his wife, it is his house, and he is there all the time. I suppose this is just how he is dealing with his grief, and so I pretend like it doesn't hurt when he fills another huge garbage bag to bring to Goodwill. For me, it feels like another loss every time he gets rid of something.

So tonight, I am not going to delete her from our wedding list. Tonight she still get's the number one spot.