All in Musings
Grieving is hard, rarely linear, and shows up in the most unexpected ways.
It was my dad’s birthday party. My brothers and I were all there. I did my best to cook some nice food and take care of the cleaning so my dad didn’t have to. My dad had his friends over but it felt a little hollow for me.
And I just… missed her. I just missed my mom.
When I broke up with my ex-husband, I swore I was never going to get married again. I was never going to twist and shape my life around another human being. And I was certainly never going to move to another country for another person again.
I ate my words.
Because I got married again.
It wasn’t that I was onto the next chapter of my life when the e-mail came through. It’s hard to describe where my head was at: I was in Canada holding my mom’s hand during her first round of chemo. I mentioned it to her in a passing comment and both of us had left it at that. The excitement of finally being free wasn’t there. The people I thought I would celebrate the transition into my new life didn’t want to come with me, and step by step, more parts of my old life were left behind.
I feel like I need to dedicate a blog post to this subject because it happened. It was a significant chapter in my life and it forever altered the direction of my life. Before, during, and after the relationship ended.
When I look at my goals from 2018, so many of them were not relevant to my life. I just didn’t know it at the time. I was still trying to hold onto my old life. My pre-divorced life. My life of youth and vitality. My life of potential and opportunity. The goals I had set in 2018 were an attempt to recapture a part of my life that I had lost and wasn’t ready to admit to it being changed and gone forever.
I thought I knew what homesickness was when I moved to the U.K. from Canada. But this is a new kind of homesickness I wasn’t prepared for: It’s a weird mix of missing my mom and missing my husband.
I’m questioning my former self because it feels like most of these goals don’t feel relavent anymore. But then, the whole world has changed, and I’ve adapted to it, and so I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.
Somehow Mama P just knew that the way she did things were good, useful, and healthy. To this day I only have vague rationalizations for her practices, which I have adopted. So this post is more to pay homage to Mama P’s instincts than something spectacularly backed up by research. But in an ironic twist, a lot of government advice sounds very similar to what Mama P had been doing all along.
The lockdown initiated by government due to COVID-19 has been a weird time for me, though I’m sure a lot of people around the world can relate.
I used to love travelling.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it. I just don’t love it right now.
