Silly Me

I originally thought that if I got through the first year after Mazzy's death relatively intact I would know what I wanted to do with myself. I want to go back in time to that woman and smack her.

Now, I do admit that having that idea in my head immediately after Mazzy died was probably a good thing. I had something to look forward to while I was trying to muddle through each day. Here I am a year later and I have no idea what I want to do. I thought that, by now, I would want to rush out and get a job. I foolishly believed that I would want to contribute to society and stop cleaning stuff. I was wrong. As much as it might set the woman's movement back a hundred years, I like being a housewife. It is a lazy way of being my own boss. While some things happen every day, they never happen in the same order and I get to say how much, or how little, I put in to projects. Yes, I structure myself and I have goals and I reach them. I just don't have to deal with money or people or profit. I like to consider Adam a shareholder. His opinions matter, but they don't effect how the day-to-day operations run as long as the overall picture looks good.

So, I guess you could say that what I am going to do next is what I have already been doing. Which is lame.

I still have bad days. There are days when I want to say, "Dead baby trumps whatever lame ass gripe you have. Get over yourself. I did." No worries. I don't say that.

There are a lot of broad strokes that look the same. I still have the same friends and I still treat the family the same. However, there are things that changed that didn't even occur to me a year ago.

For instance, I can't just watch a movie anymore. Do you have any idea how many plots center around dead children? I didn't until I lost my daughter. Now I feel like movies should come with "Possibly triggering" labels. Adam and I have used television and movies as a form of escapism and, let me tell you, that is damn difficult to do if the one thing you are trying to escape keeps coming up. And no genre is safe! Seriously. We tried to watch a slasher film and it had the two main characters divorcing after the death of their son, only to be stalked and killed by crazies. (That is the plot of Vacancy, in case you were wondering.) We knew that they were in the process of divorcing, but nowhere did the plot mention that it was over their dead son. Meanwhile, they kept talking about it! It was like slasher group counselling. Geesh.

Yeah, it is little stuff, but it changes the way that we relax.

Also, we laugh at Santa blowing up a lot more than we used to. One of the best parts of Christmas this year was the amount of exploding/dead Santa gags on TV shows. Sweet. I fist bumped so much that I felt like I should be wearing Ed Hardy and shaving my chest.

Originally I feared what would happen to my marriage after Mazzy died. I worried that we would become a statistic pulled apart my blame and grief. I didn't anticipate that it would make us better communicators. We still fight and bicker, but we get over it a lot faster. Why waste anger?

There is so much about healing that I think is a choice. Every time that you are hit with that wave of sadness you are given the chance to handle it in whatever you feel is the best way. Sometimes it is so tempting to crawl back in to bed and just let the waves hit you until you drown in it. When that happens, I think about the Christian idea of seeing your loved one in the after life. If that is true and they are watching you, what would I want my daughter to see? I think that is a question that a lot of people should ask themselves when they experience loss. What do you want your loved one to see when they check in on you? Strength? Grace? Or do you want to hurt them with your grief?