One year...

A year ago at this point in time, I was facing the loss of one of the most important people in my life.  

My own mother...

And to most of us that would create a feeling of sadness and loss.  

Yet, her loss in my life also created for me a new sense of freedom.

Honestly to this day I love my mother.  I have striven to always honor and obey her.  Sadly my failures in being human and prone to making mistakes did not always create the best relationship with my own mother.  She was the type of person who liked everything in a very neat orderly manner...  and in my world it was just a little too neat and orderly.  I could never understand how moving the garbage can a millimeter was such a matter of life and death.  Yet, in my mother's world it was just that.  And since it was such a big deal to her, it also became a big deal in my life of mistakes that I was lectured about... punished over... and eventually started to just understand that I would never be perfect enough to be the daughter that my mother needed, and at times I would wonder if she was even happy with the very fact that I was born.

This desire to be perfect for my mother was not an idea that came to my mind in an instant, but one that would be created over years.  And it is only now that I have come to understand that it was not just an issue of how my mother communicated to me, but also an issue of how I understood what she was trying to communicate.  I spent years lost in trying to understand how to prove to my mother that I really loved her...

It was only in the last few years before I lost my mother that I began to understand that she had spent so many years trying to communicate to me that she did love me...  I just didn't hear the message.  All I ever seemed to hear was how much I fell short of the mark that I thought was set for me.... Perfection!  

In the days right before my mother died...  she said three little words that I still hear in my mind.  Years I longed to hear these words...  To know that I was the daughter that she wanted...  To know that I had shown her that I loved her...  And in the end... her last words to me meant more to me than all the fighting and miscommunication over the years...

Her last words to me were...  I love you!  

And right now... though I struggle with her loss.  I struggle with the changes of being an orphan...  at least I know that somewhere deep inside of my mother...  

She loved me despite my lack of understanding and perfection.  And maybe for now that is enough!

Storms...

I have spent a great deal of time as of late reading about leaving...  And the one thing I wish I could leave behind is the storms of emotions.  And yet, how do you leave behind something that has become such a part of your life.  If I hadn't spent so much of my life learning how to function with simply figuring out how to bury the emotions... leaving them might be easy.

Here is a simple case in my life of not dealing...  About a month ago, I wound up in the hospital.  And while to most people going to the hospital might be a simple act of having a spouse watch the children... in my life it is not that easy.  And I honestly wish that I could say that I wound up in the hospital just because I had an infection.  That wasn't the case.  

I wound up in the hospital because of the new medication the doctor tried wasn't covered by the insurance.  And in my attempts to deal with this... I went off of the medication.  Well, without the medication the hold I have on living life just began to slip away.  And in, what I can only call a God moment, I wound up in the driveway of my pastor and melted down.  Did I meltdown because I lacked faith... No.  But I did meltdown.

Thankfully in my life my pastor is one of the few people I completely trust.  And he understood what was happening to me, when I couldn't even open my mouth and talk to him.  When I lacked the words, he was granted the wisdom to know what needed to be done.  Which of course included needing to find someone to take care of my daughter... while I went to the hospital.

Once I was in the hospital... and the choice was made to keep me.  I began to be able to talk.  It is not easy to know that you are going to be sent to a locked ward, with the understanding that nothing is there that you can harm yourself with.  That once again the mental struggles that you face have demanded that you be in a space where you have the simple choice of life or death removed from your control.  And yet, once that choice is removed... it makes it easier to start to talk and figure out what to do next.

In my case that was simply to be put on a new medication.  One that the hospital fought to get covered by my insurance.  And my church helped me cover the cost for the week that it took to get it covered.  And yet that new medication has brought me to a new awakening.  It was like I was sleeping for so many years...  And it brought me a time of encouragement from the staff at the hospital.  In the past I would have given into the insane need to cut and attempt to stop the pain in my life in so many ways... this time...  I melted down and was able to get help before I walked too far along the path into the need to cut.

Well... Here is the reason for all this history.  The day I got out of the hospital I was given a lecture by a friend.  This friend meant well, but didn't use the best words for how I look at the world.  And that day... I just bite my tongue and didn't say a word to anyone...

Fast forward to this past week... And all the thing that my friend said turned into another meltdown.  The storm of emotions that I refused to face that day when she spoke... came flooding back to me like a class 5 tornado.  And in my attempt to deal with them... I left the trail of destruction like the tornado inside of me. Her disappointment in me and her insistence that our pastor was too nice to say things... now had me convinced that he believed that I was an unfit mother.  To add to the destruction, it also included his wife and the fact that they were telling people things about me behind my back.  And that list could go on, but I think you get the point.  

So, the fall out of this tornado should have been in my mind being thrown out of church... never allowed to talk to my pastor again... and a whole list of other punishments that my mind was quickly coming up with.  And when I found silence... That list grew.  And the tornado inside of me grew.  

Once I finally had allowed the tornado of emotions inside of me to do the destruction and they had begun to calm down...  A simple phone call from my pastor showed me that I needed to seek the truth... And the truth was that if he was thinking anything like I thought he was... He would have talked to me.  And the other lesson that I learned was to explain when asked that the emotions from a month ago had caught up to me.  And while to the rest of the world it was far from urgent... to me it was the most urgent thing in my world.

But as far as leaving behind the storms of emotions... I don't think that is possible.  I am beginning to understand that despite the cost to me currently that I need to walk thru these emotions...  I need to face them and feel them.  And at the same time I need to practice how to simply be in the presence of God.  To know that in time I will be able to sit in front of a candle and simply focus on God... knowing that the emotions exist, but that I can be calm and present with God.  A simple idea, but a challenge that I have to keep sitting down and working towards.  Because after so many years of living life numb... I can feel.  And if the price of feeling and being able to focus on God at some point is walking thru these storms...  The sign me up!  Anything has got to be better than hating myself and loving God... and always wanting to love others better than I love myself.