I have no idea where and how Forrest Gump's mother figured that life was like a box of chocolates, yes you are never sure what you might get (kind of like when you take the gamble at reading this blog) but the bottom line of that is that everything is sweet and good. Life is not all sweet and good.. it's served up all crazy with a side of chaos, and what seems more often than not a congealed, cold, sour mess. No I did not get up on the right side of the bed this morning, no I don't know why, no I don't plan on putting on proper (I have been reading books set in England and Australia and such, they even write differently than we do.. using words like proper and snog.. I am sorry I don't want to snog.. that sounds dirty, cheap, and something that would be done in a smelly alleyway but I will do a proper tea or proper clothes or bid you adieu just because I think it is funny hearing those words in my rather messed up dialect and accent of all the places I have lived) clothes until I have to go to work, (edit.. I have been informed that we are closed tonight, I don't have to put on proper anything!) and YES I plan on enjoying the fact that it is like no degrees outside and even the dogs don't want to go on a walk.
I think I am a bit prickly because they say that we probably won't have any snow accumulation. I am not exactly one that ENJOYS cold weather, I haven't skied since high school, ice skating really hurts my ankles, I don't breathe well when it is frigid, BUT I do enjoy a nice snow storm once a year. If just once a year it would snow it's butt off and give me about 3 good feet of the white stuff, close schools, have a nice pot of chili, and good coffee (for two days then it all needs to disappear and resume life as normal) I would be ONE HAPPY GIRL. I love watching snow fall, it is peaceful and calming. Something about the way the snow seems so silent, I can remember my mother saying that she could hear it when the snow started, not because of a noise it made, because it got so quiet, what she was hearing was a peace falling over the land, a blanket of peace being placed on the earth for just a little while, the white bliss covering all of the ugly.
My mom also loved to see her house with a freshly laid blanket of snow, she loved this so much that when it snowed we weren't allowed to play in the front yard, only the back where people going by wouldn't see messed up snow in our front yard. Keep in mind we lived on a dead end road with about 10 OLD people at the end that were not going anywhere in the world until all the snow disappeared. I don't know who she thought she was fooling by saying she didn't want "people" to see the messed up front yard.. the "people" was just A people.. her. The funny thing is 4 decades later I get it. It wasn't that she didn't want us to have the enjoyment of the coveted snow in the front yard (yes even back then I knew that snow was special snow, it was different from the back yard snow and I so badly wanted to go and land right in the middle of it and make a huge snow angel because that was BETTER SNOW), it really was that she didn't want to disturb the peacefulness of it, while her children were outside throwing snow balls, building forts and snowmen with bread bags on our feet inside of snow boots and a snow suit that you seriously couldn't run in if you tried, she could look in that front yard and forget for just a few minutes that the world was full of crazy, she could gaze across the beauty of the while falling flakes landing so quietly on a blanket of peace and for just a few minutes be transported to a place where all was right with the world. Then in would run two frozen children with snow everywhere blanketing her floor with fresh puddles of thawing remains of snowballs, demanding hot chocolate and soup.
I need a blanket of peace, if even for just a few days. Something that can just so purely cover the world and my heart with a quiet that can't be measured. I need my mind to slow down, for the whirling of the constant chatter to just stop for it just to be quiet and peaceful for a few minutes. Yes I realize over the past few weeks I have been better, I have been finding my footing and just taking step after step, but I had to face the harsh reality that in 6 days from now it will be Deanna's birthday. She would have been 21. A big one, a milestone. As much as it breaks my heart, all of her milestones have been replaced by that cold headstone. It isn't fair.. it isn't fair at all! It isn't fair that I can be driving over a bridge and for no reason at all on an otherwise normal Saturday morning have all the thoughts of that day, that accident come rushing back at me. I can hear my Daddy calling me Sugah.. that's how he says it Sugah.. it's going to be ok Sugah, stop crying now Sugah... I remember those words, but even now so many months later all I can think is IT'S NOT OK.. NONE OF THIS IS OK.. IT WILL NEVER EVER BE OK AGAIN. He hasn't called me Sugah since and I can't remember a time since I was a small child that he had. I sometimes wonder if he knew how much I still cried if he would get in his truck and drive here just to give me a hug and try to tell Sugah that it is going to be ok. I wonder if I would ever believe it.
As hard and as terrible as it is remembering thoughts from that day, even now pieces come back to me that I had just pushed in some deep part of my mind, it is the parts I don't know that are worse. The reconstruction in my mind of her last minutes, did she reach for the phone? Was her window down, the radio up and her hair blowing in the wind? What was her last thought? What song was she listening to? How did it happen? The worst the most painful of it all, is my brain trying to reconstruct each and every second of that accident, the truck flipping, did she brace, did she get knocked out, how did she get out side of the truck, were her eyes open, was she scared, did it hurt, did she know she was dying.. answers that I will never ever have, but this stupid messed up brain won't stop popping up the questions, like some bad riddle that has no answer no matter how many times you try to solve it.
This is my brain, this is my life. The never ending cycle of another milestone is on it's way to remind me of that gravestone, to remind me that she will never walk into a bar and proudly show her ID that she was now legal, she will never sign her name on her marriage license or the birth certificate of her child, that her name will not be proudly displayed on a college diploma, she will never decorate her first grown up home with hand me downs from family members proudly displaying things under her own roof, and you know what.. what makes it all that much harder.. the riddles and milestones are compounded by not one child's absence but by 2. The same thoughts whirl around about his life and death as hers do, combining themselves in the perfect storm of emotion that no parent anywhere should ever have to feel.
My heart hurts today for all the missed milestones... that those babies have angelversaries instead of birthdays, that they will forever be 15 and 19, that I will never see what their adult selves would be. That on each February 22nd and July 2nd it will mark another year that is not going to age them.. she will never be 21, he will never be 43, it is always she would have.. he would have.. and they SHOULD HAVE! This is just not the way life is supposed to happen. Do you know that when you google their names the first thing to pop up is their obituaries, not life events, not how much anyone loved them, not some picture from their kindergarten classes field trip that made the paper, their obituary. This is just not right. None of this is right.
So you see... I need a blanket of peace, I just need a quiet place to rest my mind, a few minutes that can be filled with lies of all being right with the world and there is no ugly, a freshly fallen blanket of snow over all the crashing thoughts in my brain.
Here's to hoping my meds kick in soon and that Jon Cash is wrong and we get snow here on the Outer Banks.
Love
Re
I think I am a bit prickly because they say that we probably won't have any snow accumulation. I am not exactly one that ENJOYS cold weather, I haven't skied since high school, ice skating really hurts my ankles, I don't breathe well when it is frigid, BUT I do enjoy a nice snow storm once a year. If just once a year it would snow it's butt off and give me about 3 good feet of the white stuff, close schools, have a nice pot of chili, and good coffee (for two days then it all needs to disappear and resume life as normal) I would be ONE HAPPY GIRL. I love watching snow fall, it is peaceful and calming. Something about the way the snow seems so silent, I can remember my mother saying that she could hear it when the snow started, not because of a noise it made, because it got so quiet, what she was hearing was a peace falling over the land, a blanket of peace being placed on the earth for just a little while, the white bliss covering all of the ugly.
My mom also loved to see her house with a freshly laid blanket of snow, she loved this so much that when it snowed we weren't allowed to play in the front yard, only the back where people going by wouldn't see messed up snow in our front yard. Keep in mind we lived on a dead end road with about 10 OLD people at the end that were not going anywhere in the world until all the snow disappeared. I don't know who she thought she was fooling by saying she didn't want "people" to see the messed up front yard.. the "people" was just A people.. her. The funny thing is 4 decades later I get it. It wasn't that she didn't want us to have the enjoyment of the coveted snow in the front yard (yes even back then I knew that snow was special snow, it was different from the back yard snow and I so badly wanted to go and land right in the middle of it and make a huge snow angel because that was BETTER SNOW), it really was that she didn't want to disturb the peacefulness of it, while her children were outside throwing snow balls, building forts and snowmen with bread bags on our feet inside of snow boots and a snow suit that you seriously couldn't run in if you tried, she could look in that front yard and forget for just a few minutes that the world was full of crazy, she could gaze across the beauty of the while falling flakes landing so quietly on a blanket of peace and for just a few minutes be transported to a place where all was right with the world. Then in would run two frozen children with snow everywhere blanketing her floor with fresh puddles of thawing remains of snowballs, demanding hot chocolate and soup.
I need a blanket of peace, if even for just a few days. Something that can just so purely cover the world and my heart with a quiet that can't be measured. I need my mind to slow down, for the whirling of the constant chatter to just stop for it just to be quiet and peaceful for a few minutes. Yes I realize over the past few weeks I have been better, I have been finding my footing and just taking step after step, but I had to face the harsh reality that in 6 days from now it will be Deanna's birthday. She would have been 21. A big one, a milestone. As much as it breaks my heart, all of her milestones have been replaced by that cold headstone. It isn't fair.. it isn't fair at all! It isn't fair that I can be driving over a bridge and for no reason at all on an otherwise normal Saturday morning have all the thoughts of that day, that accident come rushing back at me. I can hear my Daddy calling me Sugah.. that's how he says it Sugah.. it's going to be ok Sugah, stop crying now Sugah... I remember those words, but even now so many months later all I can think is IT'S NOT OK.. NONE OF THIS IS OK.. IT WILL NEVER EVER BE OK AGAIN. He hasn't called me Sugah since and I can't remember a time since I was a small child that he had. I sometimes wonder if he knew how much I still cried if he would get in his truck and drive here just to give me a hug and try to tell Sugah that it is going to be ok. I wonder if I would ever believe it.
As hard and as terrible as it is remembering thoughts from that day, even now pieces come back to me that I had just pushed in some deep part of my mind, it is the parts I don't know that are worse. The reconstruction in my mind of her last minutes, did she reach for the phone? Was her window down, the radio up and her hair blowing in the wind? What was her last thought? What song was she listening to? How did it happen? The worst the most painful of it all, is my brain trying to reconstruct each and every second of that accident, the truck flipping, did she brace, did she get knocked out, how did she get out side of the truck, were her eyes open, was she scared, did it hurt, did she know she was dying.. answers that I will never ever have, but this stupid messed up brain won't stop popping up the questions, like some bad riddle that has no answer no matter how many times you try to solve it.
This is my brain, this is my life. The never ending cycle of another milestone is on it's way to remind me of that gravestone, to remind me that she will never walk into a bar and proudly show her ID that she was now legal, she will never sign her name on her marriage license or the birth certificate of her child, that her name will not be proudly displayed on a college diploma, she will never decorate her first grown up home with hand me downs from family members proudly displaying things under her own roof, and you know what.. what makes it all that much harder.. the riddles and milestones are compounded by not one child's absence but by 2. The same thoughts whirl around about his life and death as hers do, combining themselves in the perfect storm of emotion that no parent anywhere should ever have to feel.
My heart hurts today for all the missed milestones... that those babies have angelversaries instead of birthdays, that they will forever be 15 and 19, that I will never see what their adult selves would be. That on each February 22nd and July 2nd it will mark another year that is not going to age them.. she will never be 21, he will never be 43, it is always she would have.. he would have.. and they SHOULD HAVE! This is just not the way life is supposed to happen. Do you know that when you google their names the first thing to pop up is their obituaries, not life events, not how much anyone loved them, not some picture from their kindergarten classes field trip that made the paper, their obituary. This is just not right. None of this is right.
So you see... I need a blanket of peace, I just need a quiet place to rest my mind, a few minutes that can be filled with lies of all being right with the world and there is no ugly, a freshly fallen blanket of snow over all the crashing thoughts in my brain.
Here's to hoping my meds kick in soon and that Jon Cash is wrong and we get snow here on the Outer Banks.
Love
Re
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