I'm happy to use this icon today
I decided to hurry and get my Mom Tasks done early this morning so that I could spend a couple of hours scrapbooking before I had to go to work. The little girls appeared to be content playing and watching cartoons so I sat down to work on Kim's scrapbook. I'm at the point where I need to tell the story of Abby's birth and death so I was typing out little snippets to go along with the pictures on each page. The little girls started acting out - fighting with each other, Charlotte climbing behind the computer and wanting to sit on my lap - I snapped at them.
When I revisit my grief like that, I feel it all again, so fresh and painful. I remember every detail and it feels like I'm there again. Having children fighting and climbing on me when it feels like my chest is being crushed from the weight of my grief......well, it just makes me crazy. I tried so hard to speak kindly and firmly, I really needed them to understand that now was not the time to upset me. I sobbed and laughed and cried at the same time, I truly felt a little crazy in my need to be left alone.
It makes me angry that I am not given the physical and emotional space I need to grieve sometimes. And especially today, when I'm trying to capture the events and emotions of those days so that my daughters will have their own record of Abby's birth and death. I'm sacrificing my own emotional comfort to do this for them and still they can't appreciate it - a double whammy. And of course, I know they're just being children and they aren't doing it to cause me pain, but it still makes me stabby.
So, I'll do the layouts for these pages and then go and actually put them together next month when I go to a scrapbook workshop. I will give myself the time and space to think of Abby, to grieve for her, to remember the feeling of her head on my arm, her foot in my hand, her face against my lips. I will tell her story and capture her memory for her sisters.
"He knew, too, that his grief was changing shape. Tears still came easily, and nights were often interminable. His pain was still real, sometimes very physical. But there was a future now that perhaps hadn't been there a year ago. Now he could see years ahead of him, and looking at them, imagining them, was not so painful as it had been. It would never go away, but it would get better, and keep on getting better, until it was something he had in just one part of himself, instead of all through him, a part he could put away when needed and access again just as easily. But not the greatest part of him, which was, he was suprised to learn, intact. He had her children, and he would have their children. And she would never not be with him, because they would be with him." (speaking of his wife's death, from "Things I Want My Daughters to Know" by Elizabeth Noble)
When I revisit my grief like that, I feel it all again, so fresh and painful. I remember every detail and it feels like I'm there again. Having children fighting and climbing on me when it feels like my chest is being crushed from the weight of my grief......well, it just makes me crazy. I tried so hard to speak kindly and firmly, I really needed them to understand that now was not the time to upset me. I sobbed and laughed and cried at the same time, I truly felt a little crazy in my need to be left alone.
It makes me angry that I am not given the physical and emotional space I need to grieve sometimes. And especially today, when I'm trying to capture the events and emotions of those days so that my daughters will have their own record of Abby's birth and death. I'm sacrificing my own emotional comfort to do this for them and still they can't appreciate it - a double whammy. And of course, I know they're just being children and they aren't doing it to cause me pain, but it still makes me stabby.
So, I'll do the layouts for these pages and then go and actually put them together next month when I go to a scrapbook workshop. I will give myself the time and space to think of Abby, to grieve for her, to remember the feeling of her head on my arm, her foot in my hand, her face against my lips. I will tell her story and capture her memory for her sisters.
"He knew, too, that his grief was changing shape. Tears still came easily, and nights were often interminable. His pain was still real, sometimes very physical. But there was a future now that perhaps hadn't been there a year ago. Now he could see years ahead of him, and looking at them, imagining them, was not so painful as it had been. It would never go away, but it would get better, and keep on getting better, until it was something he had in just one part of himself, instead of all through him, a part he could put away when needed and access again just as easily. But not the greatest part of him, which was, he was suprised to learn, intact. He had her children, and he would have their children. And she would never not be with him, because they would be with him." (speaking of his wife's death, from "Things I Want My Daughters to Know" by Elizabeth Noble)