Carry on Castle: Living with Grief

I went to therapy today. One of her usual questions is "How is baby girl doing?"  "Fantastic and completely screwed up" This is one of those times when my therapist flat out refuses to indulge me "Baby Girl is not screwed up...But why do you say that"  because she is, because shes both just like me. Doing fantastic, kicking ass and taking names, but shes completely screwed up. I proceeded to tell my therapist about how fantastic she is doing. We had school conferences and everything is great, she is doing great at school. She is playing with friends, she is talking to people. She is being a normal kid. Except that last Monday she didn't go to school at all because she had a giant anxiety attack about leaving mommy. Except last night when I walked out the back door to unplug our fountain. Before I even got to the plug approximately two feet away I heard screaming from in the living room where a moment before she was peacefully watching t.v. "MOMM

It's my birthday, happy birthday to me.  I turned 38. That makes me a 38 year old widow instead of a 34,35,36,or 37 year widow. I was all of those once too, the years just keep on going I guess. I was 34 when Dan died. Four months later I was turning 35. I didn't want to, I didn't want to have a birthday without Dan, after all he had been with me to do something special for my birthday ever since I turned 17. I also knew my family who loves me fiercely would realize this and try to overcompensate for my now lack of a husband and I didn't want them to. What I wanted to do was run away, distract myself. So I did. Baby Girl, my sister and myself went to Disneyland for my 35th birthday. It was a pretty good distraction although you can never really run away from grief. The next year I turned 36. I was in the same spot, I didn't want to acknowledge my birthday without Dan. In fact the only good thing about my birthday is that it brought me one year closer to seeing D

We had spring parent teacher conferences today. Dan was always really big on going to parent teacher conferences. He wanted to be involved, he wanted to know what she was doing in school. He would always ask the teacher questions about new teaching styles and new state testing, he wanted to be up on it all. I would just shake my head and think "Come on babe she has like a million parents to see today stop bugging the poor woman" But he was generally interested in that kind of stuff. I have been to more conferences without him then with him now. One more thing I thought I would never do. I remember one of the first conferences I had after Dan died. I don't remember if it was the first because ha, I didn't remember anything those first couple years. I remember this one because Baby Girls teacher was telling me about how great she was doing in school, but then she started talking about how better then having good grades was having good character and she started naming

Baby Girl and I went to see 'A wrinkle in time' with some friends tonight. They invited us and I thought oh ya I read that book in Jr High, it was pretty good this will be fun.  Uh ya apparently I don't remember what it was actually about, more likely I didn't pick up on the massive grief theme when I read it because hey I was in jr high and both my parents were alive and well. If I had remembered this I don't think I would have taken Baby Girl to see it. Or maybe we're over sensitive to that kind of stuff these days. Now I am going to spoil the movie so if you don't want to know what happens you may want to stop reading. The movie opens with a beautiful little girl who is about seven or eight playing with her daddy. You can see the light and the sparkle in her eyes, her daddy is everything to her. She helps him work and he teaches her that love is all around them. They spin around the room and they are both so happy. It even shows how in love the mom and