Birthday Blues

Well, I have been nudged to write. I haven’t been writing due to sadness. It’s all around me, children who are facing horrible diseases, people living in heartbreak and misery, wives facing the loss of their husbands…It is almost unbearable for me. I take peoples pain pretty hard. I really would give anything for everyone around me to be healthy, happy and content. I do this because I know that I will probably never be any of the three ever again. 
  Harper's approaching birthday has also struck sadness in my life. This time of year reminds me of the agony that I was in during my pregnancy with her, and the reality of her birth. The following is an excerpt from a blog I wrote two years ago: 1/22/12 “Of all the sad days that I could reflect on, Harper’s birthday is the ONE that gets me. Every year as hard as I try I am sad for her father who is missing another birthday. I do not remember much about the rest of my pregnancy with her after Steven died, only that I was under an enormous amount of pressure to get her here healthy (my own accord). I remember the day I was scheduled to have her. All of the family came to the hospital to see her. I, however, was not ready. I already knew from the ultrasound that she had his nose, and wondered what else she would have of his….I was just now getting used to him NOT walking through the door, sleeping beside me, and calling me every five minutes to tell me he loved me. I didn't want to have her without him, raise her without him. How in the world was I going to be able to look this child with her father’s face and be happy?!?!
At 1:23 p.m. on January 26^th 2009 Harper Eleece Wilhelm Richie was born. She didn’t cry, she simply entered this world silent and calm. Upon seeing her for the first time I had a panic attack on the surgical table and had to be administered oxygen to calm me down. She looked exactly like her father…same eyes, same nose, same widow peaked brown curly hair….I WAS IN SHOCK!!!! It was almost unbearable to look at my child. I loved her from the moment we heard her little heartbeat, but the circumstances preceding her birth made that day almost as hard as the day I buried her daddy….I’m not going to lie…I HATED THAT DAY!!! Three years later I wish I could say that I have overcome that feeling but I haven’t. It is approaching and I am growing anxious as I have for the past three birthdays.”
To elaborate on that would take longer than an hour, but I always try to find a positive in any situation. So here is my plan for this week, I have been looking back on memoirs and hope to reflect positively on my growth over the past five years. Bear with me, it shouldn’t be an easy task, but one that I feel is necessary.

And Then I Had Teenagers

I didn’t blog last night…three days and I have already broke my resolution…funny! I have had a lot going on the past two days, well, the last 14 years. MY TWINS!!! I remember when they were little, and I was so clueless as to the amount of work that was involved in caring for twins. They were my first children, so I really didn’t know any better. I changed one diaper, then another. Fed one baby, and then another….up until a couple of years ago I thought I was doing pretty well, considering I am the only one raising them. ENTER THE TEEN YEARS…All they do is fight, watch tv, sleep, fight, ask me to buy them everything under the sun, fight and sleep. Did I mention that they FIGHT!! ALL DAY, it argument after argument, snide remarks, yelling and sometimes even hitting (Big no no in my book, always has been.) Please, don’t get me wrong I love my twins, but I am having a hard time getting them to get along with each other and with their younger sibling.) I seriously cannot believe that my children act this way…it’s disappointing.

After googling everything under the sun, I now know that this behavior is normal in most teens. I also know that having two of them at the same time magnifies a parent’s anxiety during the teen years.

 I noticed a pattern in the responses toward sibling rivalry…ATTENTION! Everything points toward making sure that the children who are fighting get more attention from their “parents.” Here is the problem…there are three children and only one of me. Furthermore, two of these children are facing the same phases in life and are unable to get the correct amount of attention from their only parent. I have come to the realization that no amount of attention in this world from me is ever going to equal the amount of attention they would get from two parents. It’s impossible, I’m only one person and there are three of them… No way, no how!

The solution (for me) is going to have stricter rules, a firmer hand, and a lot less yelling. I have to be both the good and the bad cop….it shan’t be easy, but it’s the hand I have been dealt and I have to learn grow with it. And in a way this will help me with my authority skills, so it’s a win/win. Raising twins is a whole different process than raising singles. I’m still learning, and doubt that this lesson will ever conclude. Hopefully, this means that the baby will be a piece of cake when she is 14, that’s what keeps me going anyways.

“Spare the rod and spoil the child”

Silence is Golden!

   I so do not want these blogs to all seem like a nightly bitchfest, but here we have another evening of something that has bothered me for a while and has come to a head today. Luckily I didn’t show my anger about it (baby steps), but it has eaten me alive all day. I have come to the realization that silence REALLY is Golden.

I will be the first person to tell you that I am a talker. I wake up singing, I sing when I am working, I talk to almost everyone I encounter. I have always thought, that it was a good quality in a person. Time is telling my otherwise. I am currently 35, and have acquired enough family medical history to know that 35 is probably WAY past middle aged for me. I was thinking on this today, and stewing on various things, and realized that for half of my life I have talked and no one really listens to me.

 Recognition of this was first noticed when my mother would ask the same questions over and over again..I thought it was simply her aging mind and left it at that. I also noticed that my twins did it as well, I chalked it up to WELL, TWINS!!  However, I started getting griped at over not telling people something, or forgetting an  item from the store, or even being confronted with “You didn’t tell me that!” So I started paying close attention to the things I said to others, and started making list and reminders, and little notes assuring myself that I haven’t lost my mind. I started noticing stories that I had told were being told back to me with an “I don’t remember who told me this” at the beginning.  Questions about information that I had relayed earlier were raised daily, and in every aspect of my life. It took three months of monitoring my communication to reveille that absolutely no one around me listens to a word I say.

I’m in tears, tears over the impact of it all.  Why in the hell do I even speak to anyone. I try my best to keep 4  people informed, on schedule, and up-to-date with things that are going on in their own lives…Not even that of my own, and the reception of it is wasted, useless, unwanted, and whatever other words can describe the way I feel right now. For months, hell maybe ever years, I worried about my frame of mind, and after I finally get my shit together and actually look for the answer, I am slapped in the face with the FACT that my family, my friends, my church family and half the waitresses in Madison County don’t hear a third of what I say. “I said gravy on the side!” should be my pitiful motto. Sounds pretty farfetched….I KNOW, that’s why it hurts so much…

As of today I have made a decision in my life….I think I have talked enough in the first half of it to make the second half a little quieter. I am going to speak less, and see where the chips fall. Not to say that this will go unnoticed, it won’t, and I will make no response or excuse about it…I’m just resting voice and my mind.

Let’s hope tomorrow’s blog is a happier one. 

Incomplete

   I'm starting my blog a little early today. I have been heavyhearted all day over 2 words from a friend “Mom passed”

Damn! I hate to hear this…It ripped through my chest and hit my stomach like a ton of bricks!! The first thought in my head was “Fucking Grief!”  

All day today I have been thinking about heartache and grief. It happens every time I see a friend lose someone close to them. You see, I consider myself to be an expert in grief, an acquired expert at that. I have buried a husband and a father. These experiences have given me two very different types of grief, but they both hurt just the same.

I remember sitting on a couch on the top floor of the Wells Fargo building in Bryan, Texas. My past weeks have been spent on this couch talking to a therapist who heard about my misfortune and volunteered his services. At first I didn’t understand the importance of his offer, but weeks later the impact of grief would set in and I would long for his insight, his guidance, and his unbiased ear. After several sessions, and many tears, I remember screaming at him “I just want things to be back to normal again! Tell me how to get back to the way I was before all this shit happened to me?!?”

I will never forget his response, he leaned forward in a matter of fact composure and said “Oh Erin, Please don’t think that your life will ever be the same, EVER again.” I left that day feeling hopeless, powerless, and pissed off at the world…fucking grief!!!

Being the somewhat of a control freak that I am I went home and read everything I could get my hands on about the process of grief. “There are 6 phases of grief: shock, denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.” However these phases are not guaranteed in any order, and can and will overlap.   Also, 5 years later I can rightly say although the phases seem to dissipate, they will sneak up on your ass at any given moment…. Driving down the road and a song comes on, BAM! Tears!! I see someone post FML on Facebook, and I will go off on a rant about how fucking hard their life is because their BF walked out on them (Anger), Give me a break, Fuck you!!

Anyway, back to my research, it got me nowhere! Grief is a bitch of a process that has no pattern, no cure, no bounds and seemingly no end. For a few years my life was a roller-coaster, and I’m still on that ride. However, the twist and turns don’t bother me as much. See, I am a firm believer that time heals NO wounds, we simply learn to live with the pain. We also forget how much happier we were in life before the death of a loved one. We simply grow accustomed to the pain and move on with our lives.

And this is one of the many ways grief has changed me….I hear of a passing and my heart breaks for the pain of the loss. I know what they will go through. I know of the insanity of people hugging you, the amount of food that will never be consumed, the words spoken that will never be remembered and the one million offers of “If there is anything I can do, please let me know!” I know the helpless feelings, the regrets, the sleepless nights, and when you do sleep, you dream of them; only to wake up and have to realize that they are gone, AGAIN. Oh, how I wish I could take the pain of it all for them, but alas it’s a part of life, A HARD PART OF LIFE!

I guess it all comes down to the realty that there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do to make this better., and for me that is a big deal.. I’m a helper! I’m a fixer, I want no one to hurt likes I have, I long to make people happy in hopes of preventing such pain….but it’s hopeless! All must suffer in life and in the end the reality of it all is that it’s necessary to grow, BUT it’s the pain involved in the growth that hurts me….I simply can take it!!  I guess the only thing to do is pray, pray for the loss, pray for the pain, pray for “healing,” and pray for grace.

 I’m not really sure how to end this blog, so I will leave it like grief leaves all of us…up in the air and never complete.

"It requires more courage to suffer than to die." - Napoleon Bonaparte

Im a Bitch, Im a Lover!

As much as I would like to think of myself as a pretty versatile person there is one thing in life that I have always avoided. Today I found out that this one thing is unavoidable in any role I play…conflict.

I am sitting in pain, pain in my back, pain in my arms, and pain in my neck. I had to cut firewood today…seems like a normal chore, and It would be a normal chore if I was a little more in shape and actually built to do something as masculine as chopping firewood…but I am not! I assume that my anger at the time, that I attempted to release with every swing of the ax, didn’t help much, but the job got done and I shall heal soon enough. My anger was geared toward a man, a man who I had in fact paid to deliver firewood 3 weeks ago. A man who knows how important it is that there is wood for my mother’s warmth. A man who was about to see me in rare form…We were going to have a conflict!!!

I will spare this blog of the details of the confrontation, but will say that one usually does not know how to react to me when angered. You see, I am huge fan of kindness, I love to show it more than anything else in this world. I am not saying that kindness comes easy for me, no, kindness is something I have to muster up every day toward everyone I know.

I was raised by parents who never said a kind word to each other and one in particular was a VERY negative person. There was never any praise for anything we ever did, but if there was ANYTHING negative to say about any one of us it was going to be said, over, and over, and over again.

I grew up with that same trait and fortunately noticed it in my early adult years. I made a promise to myself to praise, complement, and lift up everyone around me. I was never going to have negative things to say toward anyone (I am still working on it, don’t judge).  So now I am known as a girl a woman , no a lady who is always happy and always has kind words to say, and for the most part that is true. However, I am also the person who allowed herself to be screwed over every chance there is a chance of conflict. Well, after today of physically hurting myself, possibly threatening the quality of care I give to my children and my mother, I'M DONE!!!

Once again my pain (physical this time) has caused a realization…If I am going to continue to try to embrace being single and head up two households conflict is going to happen, and happen often. From now on I need to let go of kindness toward every aspect of my life and take care of business. One can’t not take care of business without being authoritative, and with that comes having to be a bitch. In all honesty, I LIKE being a bitch; it’s bred into me!!!

With that being said my hour is up and I need to hunt down something better than a barstool to sit on in my nook. Leaving this on a positive note….I got a cord and a half of firewood delivered today and he took my chainsaw. He will be repairing it because of my pain and suffering!!!

“Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman's got to hold on to.” ~ Stephen King~ Dolores Claiborne