Things only a mommy would notice




Baby Girl is learning to write in cursive. Very much a lost art (many schools don't even teach it anymore), Baby Girl finds cursive enthralling. She wrote her name in cursive and showed me, "wow you did a really good job on your name. Your hand writing looks just like mommys." That was it, that was all it took a simple comment made by myself. It hit me, her handwriting is just like mine. This child is 90% her father and 10% me. She takes after her father in so many ways that when she does something like me it always surprises me. Dan always said she had my facial expressions, since I don't often see my face I never really knew if he was right. She definitely has my handwriting, So what, who cares? This is why I care. It's my handwriting, not Dan's. Now I have some pretty distinct handwriting (read sloppy). Dan had very distinct handwriting too. He would have made a good Dr. based on his handwriting. I guess without even knowing it I always assumed Baby Girl would have his handwriting because she is so much like him. I guess without even knowing it I always assumed that one day I would see a note she scribbled on a piece of paper and sigh because it looked just like her dads. In one comment it all came crashing down on me that I won't. That makes my heart hurt, I can't really explain why, it just does. I have lots and lots of letters and notes from Dan, we feel in love before texting, when people still wrote hand written notes to each other. I have his handwriting, some of it is even framed on my wall in poems he wrote me. But she doesn't write like him.

There are other things, things only I notice, things she does different since daddy died. Daddy was her hero and she always wanted to be like him, she would emulate him, not me. (I wonder if Dan would agree). Since he has died she stopped doing some of her "daddy" things and started doing "mommy" things. I don't know why. I don't know if she just naturally copies the parent shes around. I don't know if she stopped because she knew they were daddy things and it made her little heart hurt so she pushed it away. I guess thats my suspicion.

Toothpaste: Dan always hated mint with a passion, so he used children's fruity toothpaste. Baby girl had her own children's toothpaste but always wanted to use daddys toothpaste. So I started buying them the same kind (the one with sparkles). Now she only wants to use mommys toothpaste. She still has kids toothpaste with sparkles but she is always using mommys grown up mint toothpaste.

Teddy. She loves stuffed animals, possibly more then the average little girl that loves stuffed animals. When she was about two Dan gave her a teddy bear that was his when he was a little boy. Daddy told her how special he had been to him and teddy was extremely special to Baby Girl. This was the go to bear. The one we couldn't sleep without, the one that would also kiss her good night, the one that went to the dr and took the shots first to prove how brave he could be. This was the teddy.  Baby Girl has barely held this teddy since Dan died. For a long time I thought perhaps she was mad at the teddy for daddy dying. I asked her once if she was mad at teddy. she said no. I said o I just noticed you you never really play with him anymore. Then she got up and went and found teddy, kissed him and put him on the bed. But she didn't play with him.  Her go to bear now has always been one of her favorites, it just wasn't the favorite until after daddy died. It's one I got for her. It has a cute story attached that it is the first stuffed animal I ever bought her, I was still pregnant. It goes everywhere with her now. Not daddys animal, mommy's animal.

There are several tv shows she used to love to watch, that she won't watch anymore. Some of them I understand, one has a very good dad in it that reminds me of Dan, so it must remind her too. One was our favorite show to watch as a family together. Some of them though she just stopped watching and I can't figure out why, silly cartoons that used to drive Dan nuts. maybe thats why, maybe she remembers some comment he made about it once upon a time. I don't know because Baby Girl doesn't like to talk about daddy.

This is how she grieves, sometimes only I can notice.

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