Remember to be! Remember to grieve

When did I forget how to be myself?
I was reading on the car trip to LEX for T-day this blog post in which the author mentions it being her "Jesus Year" (http://happydeadmomday.blogspot.com/2013/08/happy-dead-mom-day-22-can-you-turn-into.html) and I guess that really resonated with me because I've been thinking about what that means ever since. I've been thinking about turning points this whole year without thinking of it as a Jesus year. I just started my new "save my sanity" job in River North after nine months of commuting to Glenview, and I am grateful for the space and the time and the sleep and the feeling of relief that rushed into my life and the tiny blips of happiness that appear every once in a while. Why am I not actually happy? Is it the dark Chicago winter? The coming of age dilemma? The fear of the aging of my one remaining parent and what that will do to my life just when I'm beginning to feel like a person again? The obsessing over stupid tiny thoughts like this? Recap: I am thirty-three, the year my mom was when she had me. I am ten years a motherless daughter, at least I will be this July 20. To me, thirty-three= pressure to have kids and make a GD decision about the path your life is taking and all that pressure is hanging over me like the sword of Damocles, or a cartoon piano/anvil. I want to do something cool, something big, something kind, and guess what, I can because TOMS shoe guy says so in his book (which I did NOT buy :) I don't know why these entrepreneurs are all so taken with sending me their books, Zappos sent me one too last time I complimented them on customer service). But I feel hemmed in by my inability to know what's brave and what's easy. That should be easy, right? It should be, if you trust your own brain. But is cutting and running the hard thing to do? Or is it the easy way out? How do I know which voice is the universe telling me what the right path is?

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So this above was the depths of the Chicago winter. If I'd known how snowy and arctic it was going to be, GAH! I'm glad I didn't. But it's March! Yay spring someday! Every now and then, there's a foggy day where you can smell that chlorophyll hint of spring in the air under all the gravelly cigarette-and-trash-ladden-exhaust-tinted crystal castles of snow and ice that line our proud big shouldery sidewalks. Since it's my birthday month, my so-called Jesus Year is almost over for this year, but not by a long shot for my so-called life. That's what we call 90's humor, y'all. But seriously, Kenyonite John Green wrote “What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?” What is the point? I mean, I don't think remarkable has to be big or even loud, but it should feel remarkable to us, on our level, right? I personally think it's remarkable that my husband knows which of my clothes to take out of the dryer (especially since I've shrunk 2 of his favorite shirts), so I'm easily held in thrall, but I do think you can have quietly remarkable moments, and sometimes it's those things instead of the loud things that reset your foundations in subtle and permanent ways. I'm still trying to figure out what that means to me.
 

All this snow, all this cold, speaking of shifting foundations, has actually moved our apartment. The husband is running around taking pictures of the newly-formed cracks, the doors that no longer shut properly. If winter can move something so rock solid as this 100-year-old brick house, then it's no surprise that it should be able to move me too, crocus-like and grouchy as I am. Winter is an opportunity, for those of us who live their lives in varying stages of grief cycles, to be stuck indoors and confront yourself in a way that doesn't permit running away. Sometimes I just need to lie in bed and cry and feel like an orphan for half-hours at a time, and without that downshift and battery recharge, I'm not good at being whole. Sometimes I forget that I need to lie in bed and cry and feel like an orphan, and then I get mad at The Husband for not being a husband and a dead mother too, which is not his job. 

It's been almost ten years. My 93-year-old great aunt said a year or so before she died that she was as old as she was and still missed her mother. Revelation! I don't know what I thought; that that pain would ever actually go away just because the shape of your body changed? How silly of me! I'll be missing my mom till my dying day, and probably I'll still need to do my orphan rain dance as an octogenarian. Grief never goes away. It just changes shape like we do. 

So, personal voyage, self-discovery: music, words, and organization! I realized that when you start forgetting who you are, you have to go back to the basics. This week, I pulled out my box of music that I've written since the year before she died. Some of it doesn't even have the guitar chords written down, but I still know them from heart. Revisiting the songs that took me through her loss and various heartaches and heart breaks along the way has been like seeing an old friend without any of the shyness or initial pretense. I love these songs; they're part of me, even the embarrassing ones, the clichéd ones, the not so good ones. They make me remember being that age and feeling those things. And it makes me want to beat myself on the head for not keeping a regular journal, because nothing is more useful or entertaining when you are trying to recreate the past in your mind. 

So I try to reconnect and to stay sane by filing all my little papers ways in those delightful legal-sized boxes from The Container Store, making my life more colorful and less clutterful because clutter in your house leads to clutter in your mind (at least in mine). Thanks, Mom, for not only giving me your guitar, but taking it to have it mended and leaving it for me to find, all whole and glorious and full of promise, giving me an outlet for music, but also a key to surviving your loss. Thank you, Husband, for believing in me and letting me be a little crazy sometimes and dead-mom it up when I need to.