Checking in with myself

 My counsellor is on holiday this week and I'm away next week, so I'll be missing 3 sessions. She advised me to take some time to check in with myself and see how I am doing, as I usually would with her.  Because I find that if i just think it, the thoughts stay in my head, I'll write them down here.  That approach forces me to be honest with the people who care enough to read this, as if you ask me directly I am likely to say "I'm OK". 

It has been an up and down couple of weeks. Well, when isn't it? Life has been ticking along as it does, we are mostly into our groove now, Oliver and I.  It's the school holidays and we are enjoying spending time together.   Considering in the early weeks the weekends felt long and daunting, this is great news.  We have had a couple of events that hilighted Mark's absence. Our 15th wedding anniversary passed by quietly, because I made sure it did. I took Oliver out for the day and kept busy. I braced myself for a barrage of Facebook memories that didn't appear. I chose not to use the anniversary Mr and Mrs Townend tea set that was a wedding gift and that we had a cuppa in each year  on our anniversary.  Maybe I could have raised a tea toast to him with it.  I was afraid if I got it down I would throw it against the wall.  BSo on it's shelf it remains, gathering for the first time a second year of dust. 

The barrage of memories came over the following couple of days. Of course, photos never got uploaded until a day or two later. 14 years of them. Plus the wedding.  A reminder, looking back, at how much we both changed. From young and hopeful, to haunted by loss, to losing our sense of couplehood through fertility treatment......to joy at last as a family of three.   But. Not happily ever after apparently. Was I so wound up in my own joy at motherhood that I failed to notice his lack of it? He looks happy in the pictures. I don't know what happened to him.  How could I not have known? Oops. There's the guilt again.  I've said many times I refuse to take ownership of that. But still it lurks just beneath the surface. Waiting for its chance. The enemy taunting me. 

My dad's birthday is the day after our wedding anniversary, and this year was the big 70. It wasn't a huge affair as he's not a party man, but it was a family do.  Two empty seats around the table.

After that Oliver and and I visited with Marks family. 

We had a nice day, seeing my in laws and his cousins.  Then as we were walking back to our car Oliver says "some families are big, others are small. Ours is small. We've only got two. It is too small for me. I wish we were still 5". I asked what he meant by five and he said "me, you, daddy Bertie, and Pippa. Oh yeah we are three I suppose, we still have Pippa."  He feels it too.  He also looks at other families and notices that we are different. He also wishes things were as they should be and laments the loss of a brother he never knew and a dad he loved.  I think that is the moment I began to feel angry at God again. 

I haven't questioned God over Mark's death like I did Bertie's.  After all, he was an adult, made a series of bad choices and ultimately died of the mental illness he hid from his family and didn't seek help for.  But, as I tended to the graves of my son and my husband this week I looked at the church behind me and thought about the fact that as I walked up that aisle to meet my soon to be husband, God knew that 4 years later I would follow him up that same aisle carrying our baby's coffin.  And He knew that ten years after that I would carry his ashes down these same paths and put him in the ground too.  He knew that I'd be widowed at 39, that Oliver would grow up without a dad.  Yes, it was Mark's choice and intention to die. But God made him who he was. Every day of his life was written before one of them came to be.   I cried a river over both their graves that day. The hurt I've been keeping inside finally found its release as the dam broke. 

God is good. And He allows us to make choices. And life is hard. And He knew that these things would come in my life. And He also knew that Putin would invade Ukraine. So what makes me think I'm so special?

And today.  Today my ex colleague gave birth to her second baby.  Another complete family of four.  And I'm happy for her.  And I will never have another baby.  And it is salt in the wound. 

And two is too small. 

And I'm lonely. 

And I miss them.