An End

Last night I dreamt our house was sinking. Every time I looked out the window I saw the earth around our house swallow up more and more of our home and everything in it.

Peter and I were scrambling trying to get our two kids and four animals out of the house before it was swallowed completely. It seemed impossible to get all of our family together and no one would leave without the others (which was kind of sweet but also infuriating and troubling).

I woke just before the house was swallowed completely.

Here is the completely unsurprising dream interpretation of a house is sinking into the earth:

To dream that you or something is sinking suggests that you are feeling overwhelmed. Someone or something is pulling your down. Alternatively, the dream means that some important and significant stage in your life may be coming to an end. 

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For those who have followed my journey, you know the story. For those who have not, my mother was a bright, funny, spirited, woman with so so many dreams. She achieved several of those dreams. And she did so while not getting support and help for her pretty significant mental illness.

However, she found a way to numb the pain and began self medicating with drugs and alcohol about 20 years ago. We have not seen each other in 8 years. She died at 65 of complications resulting from alcoholism.

These past 2 weeks I have felt flooded much of the time--so many thoughts and feelings that I can't tease them apart or think them through. Flitting in and out or sinking deep into my bones, these thoughts and feelings are pulling at me as if being tossed by a wave....wave after wave after wave...

And, the rest of life doesn't stop. There are still children and pets, with their own crises and needs and lives. And there is still a pandemic and we still are living in this altered state. There is much to wade through in the turbulent flood and I am chest high.

I am processing this significant stage of my life coming to an end and will be for as long as it takes. This week we are preparing for my mother's virtual memorial. Watching old videos and looking through her writings and pictures have been both painful and healing. I hope the memorial we are planning brings others who have loved her some catharsis. Creating it certainly has.

Slow death

I've recently been receiving emails about a friend whose wife's mother just passed away after battling a terminal illness. My heart goes out to this friend and his wife and family. After I received this email I thought, I do not envy them this situation (I mean, who would?), but there was, if I am totally honest, a part of me, that envies the clarity with which one can speak of such an event.

It is tragic and it is life's unavoidable sadness when a loved one dies. We mourn, we pay respects, we weep, we come together, we galvanize around the love shaped hole that this person left in our lives. It is terrible and sad and life upending, but it doesn't feel perverse.

In my life I go forward with straightforward sincerity and honesty, as much as a cynical and slightly jaded person can, yet with my mother all feelings are perverse and convoluted. With love comes hate, with worry comes rage, with sadness comes apathy...I feel dirty when I think of her and there is no one else in my world who makes me feel that way, thank god.

I'm ashamed to say that in more than a little way I envy the straightforward despair and longing. Now, to be fair, I don't really know this woman's family and for all I know there is a convoluted jumble of feelings there too, but this is how I perceive these events and how I have experienced death with other family members. Family members who are somberly and beautifully just...missed and loved.

I am currently working on not becoming a bitter person. Usually I can see the relativity of situations when people discuss family, but sometimes, like now, when things are raw and my mom is found wandering the streets of another state in a sheet, I have a hard time feeling anything but bitter rage at this f'd up hand I've been dealt.

I will not intervene for she doesn't want actual help. And now I'm trying not to even think of her because it only makes me anxious and depressed imagining what she is doing today, right now, as I type this. The only thing that my thinking of her accomplishes, as far as I can see it, is it makes me less available for myself, my husband and my children. The very thing I swore I would not do.

But as I have aged I have seen that the promises of youth are steeped in idealism that often blur with time. So, my kids occasionally see me distracted or stressed. It is less than ideal, sure. But they also see me recover and do so more and more quickly. Such is life. But I will not have my kids hold me while I cry about my mother like my mother did to me. That buck stops here.

On the one hand I have no issue with that as I am not mentally ill like my mother and feel no impulse to rely on my children emotionally (and for that I am so so grateful). On the other hand it is difficult to be the emotional shock absorber as it needs to go somewhere other than deeper into me. I do not want it and will not take it anymore.

I have some ideas for how to channel it and remain hopeful that they will be healthy outlets. For now, I'll end.