Family time




So I have this house I bought in September. It needs a lot of fixing, so I'm fixing it before we move in. It is extremely frustrating. It turns out I can't do as much of it by myself as I thought I could. Frustrating. The stuff I can do by myself isn't very much fun by myself. Frustrating. Like my whole entire life now, everything is without Dan. I am trying to make a home without Dan. FRUSTRATING.

I am one of the lucky ones. I have an amazing support system of family and friends who want to help me. I know a lot of people don't have that.  I even have some that are quite skilled in house remodel. The problem is they all have lives. They have families. They have jobs. They have better things to do then fix my house even though they do want to help me. It's ok. I get it.

Dan was the type of person who didn't let his job go away after he got home. He had the type of job that couldn't go away when he got home. Dan was in charge of a facility for mentally ill adults. That means if something happened with a client, they called Dan, no matter what time it was. That means if they had a question, they'd text Dan. Dan was constantly answering emails for work and I would get so frustrated with him. "this is family time, put your phone away, your not at work."  

I remember the year baby girl started 2nd grade (also the year Dan died) Dan was usually able to leave for work after baby girl got on the bus. The three of us would get the morning going together. This was especially important the first Day of school. He wanted baby girl to know he was there for her. This particular year he had a work meeting early in the morning and he was going to miss the first day of school. I was furious "your the boss, can't you schedule the meeting for a different time. It's the first day of school, I need your help. Don't you wanna be there for the first day of school"  He did want to be there but he had to go to work instead. Work was cutting into our family time and I was mad.

To be clear Dan had a really good job with a fantastic company. They were really good to him and a huge support to us after Dan died. This is just me being selfish. 

But now Dan's gone. Family time isn't the same. Nothing is the same. I'm trying to make us a home without him. I wish so badly that he were here to help with this house, which is saying a lot because a handy man he was not. But I still want him here to help fix our house. I am frustrated that it's going so slow, I feel like it would be going faster if Dan were here, it probably wouldn't be but it wouldn't be as frustrating. 

My friends and family are helping me fix it and all the while they have wives back home saying "your work is cutting into our family time" and all the while I don't have anyone to say that to anymore. I know I need your help, I know I can't do it without you. Thank you for cutting into your family time for me, I wish you didn't have to. I wish I didn't have to ask you too. I wish none of this had ever happened, but you all know that, and you wish it too,

I wrote a book about my grief, you can read it here: Carry on Castle


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PTSD is not for sissys

Image
Do you know what PTSD is? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I bet you think you do.  You might say something like "ya its what people that go off to war have" true. You might say "It's when people see really terrible things" true. A few really smart people might say "ya my friend watched her beloved husband die and now she has it" very true. If you are a mental health professional you might say "ya a child who all of a sudden has a dad who dies will have it" also true.  I was telling a friend once about how life is now without Dan and she said "wow it's almost like you have PTSD or something." No not almost, we do. But what exactly is it? Well it's complicated. I can't describe it for baby girl because I am not in her mind (unfortunately) but I can try and describe it for me. I am hesitant to do so; it's not an easy thing to talk about, But if we are going on a the point of this blog is to be therapeutic for me and h
Read more

The Floor

Image
I pulled him off of our bed and onto the floor. The 911 dispatcher told me to. She said it would help him breathe. I grabbed his ankles and pulled hard on his legs. He fell to the floor with a loud thump. I gasped at the loudness of it, but he didn’t move on his own at all. He didn't shake his head and say, “Ow, what’d you pull me off the bed for?” He didn't do anything. He just laid there. She told me to lift his neck up to help him breathe. I tried, but it was hard to move him, and I didn't want to hurt him.  I put my head on his chest again and again, I couldn’t tell if he was breathing, I couldn’t tell if that was his heartbeat or mine that I heard as he laid on the floor.  “Daddy! Wrestle with me!” she would shout, as she jumped into him and they landed on the floor. It was their favorite game. She would pound him and he would exaggerate the impact, clutching his stomach and lifting his legs in the air.  “You got me good, baby girl!” he would tell her. She would grin i
Read more

Milestones in grief

Image
                                                                Dan and I around 2011 I wrote this for a writing contest about milestones. Writing about every grief milestone would take a book and I had a word limit so I couldn't do that. I tried to do the really big ones. I have not had a particularly eventful life. When I was eight, my parents moved, but they took me with them. At ten, I had a pretty bad accident, but I came out of it fine. My husband and I met at sixteen, and at nineteen, we went against all good advice and got married. I gave birth to our daughter when I was 27.   I loved our boring, normal life. We were living our happily ever after. I was a stay at home mom, Dan was finishing up grad school. Everyone says this kind of thing at funerals, but Dan really was the most amazing person I’ve ever met in my life. He wanted to save the world: the people, the animals, the ecosystem. He wanted to make the world better, and he was. I loved our little family and couldn
Read more