Congratulations your normal





I have a tween girl.  She is 11, she thinks shes 16. I think thats the definition of a tween; a kid who is between 9-12 and really really really wants to be a teenager. So far it has been a summer of 'everything mommy does is wrong'  I wear the wrong clothes, I pick the wrong way to go (cause you know the 11 year old is an expert driver) I get eye roll after eye roll everytime I open my mouth. She rarely wants to snuggle anymore and is embarrassed when I kiss her goodbye. We haven't had the official "talk" yet but I think shes done with Santa and the easter bunny. Yes this blog is about grief, hang on.

Baby Girl went to sleep away camp last week. I am picking her up today. Five days and four nights she has been away from me. I am sure that is the longest she has ever been away from mommy EVER. She went with her two best friends. Two years ago her best friend invited her and she refused to go. "I can't leave you mommy" she said and would start to panic. "I want to go have fun with my friends but I can't leave you mommy" I know, I get it. Without saying the exact words 'If I leave your side mommy you will die just like daddy' thats what she was saying. She was sleeping in my bed every night. I couldn't go to the bathroom without her coming with me. She was not ready for sleep away camp.

Last year she was again invited to go to camp. She thought hard about it, she really wanted to go. "But what if I need you mommy?" I was unsure too, what if she did need me. What if something triggered her and she had a massive panic attack, like she was prone to do. Who would comfort her as she raged, who would possibly understand what she was going through. Camp is a good two hours away, I wouldn't be able to get to her in time.  She wanted to go, she wanted to be normal so bad, she just wasn't there yet.

This year she was invited to go and she said "Of course I'm going, why wouldn't I go?" you know like she had gone every other year, like it was no big deal. She was so excited, she told everyone how she was going away to camp with her friends. I added "and not mommy, mommy's not going, she going all by herself" They gave me understanding looks. They have read this blog, they have known how hard it's been, they realized this was HUGE.

I drove her to camp, "k mom first thing we have to do is find my friends" o ok. So we did that, they helped her take her stuff to her cabin, I followed. "Ok bye mom" uh no we have to like actually check you in, I have to give the nurse your medicine. I got an eye roll but she came with me to check in. "Ok mom i'm going to go find my friends NOW" "wait wait wait, mommy is going to leave can you give me hugs and kisses?" I got a quick side hug and a peck on the cheek. "wait wait wait thats it? You understand mommy is leaving? I won't be back for four days, you won't be able to call me. That's the only kiss I get?" I got another eye roll and a slightly better kiss and hug, though still not up to par. Away she ran with her friends to do a scavenger hunt.

Uh now what do I do? Do I really just leave my kid here for five days? I went and found her friends mom, also my friend. I told her "Uh Baby Girl can not get rid of me fast enough" She started laughing at me. "Congratulations, you have officially made it to tweendom. The rest of us have been here for two years." Two years, your kids have been like this for two years already. Why are we so behind, I mean I guess it's good that we are cause I can't even tell you how much I don't want to go through this stage but why are we two years behind? O right! Thats why! Actually were not two years behind, we are three years and two days shy of six months behind.

I call her Baby Girl because thats what Dan always called her. When Dan died she was only 7, she was a baby. Fairies and pirates were real, death wasn't real. Then one day it was. That set us back, that froze us. The  trauma of Dan's death froze our emotional state by two years. We spent two incredibly long years just trying to deal with the trauma, the shock, the survival, his all consuming absence. We didn't have emotional space for anything else. She was missing her daddy she didn't have the emotional space to be a tween girl like her friends.

It seems like in this third year we are playing catch up. We are catching up to all that normal emotional stuff she should have been going through when she was busy worrying about things like mommy dying too or where we were going to live. She shouldn't have had to do that, she shouldn't have had to follow me into the bathroom just to make sure I would come back out like I said I would. But she did. Big heavy life got in the way of her being an american tween girl, who wants to be cool and have all the friends and go away to camp.

She's working hard on catching up. I pick her up tonight and I'm giving it a 50 50 shot that she will either give me the biggest hug ever or immediately roll her eyes at me.

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