A little bit of hope...

Yesterday I went to the library to return some books and pick up a book on Veganism that I had requested. (I'm not planning on becoming a Vegan, I'm just interested in learning more about alternatives to animal products.)

While I was at the library I looked randomly through some books on the shelf and picked out a book called "no death, no fear" by Thich Nhat Hanh. An hour later I found out that one of my best friends just lost her mom.

Saddened by this news and thinking of my kids I opened the book this morning and found this passage,

"Since before time you have been free. Birth and death are only doors through which we pass, sacred thresholds on our journey. Birth and death are a game of hide-and-seek. You have never been born and you can never die."

It gives me hope. I wanted to share it with you.

Can someone please turn off my brain?!

It's driving me crazy!!

Lately I've been a little obsessed with the accident. Obsessed in a really bad way. Obsessed in that I seriously can't stop thinking about it.

Most of the time it begins when I'm driving on a highway. I'm driving along, singing some Gaga and it hits me. I look at how fast I'm going, I look at the side of the road and I start imagining what the accident was like for Kate and Peter. And then I freak out.

I start crying and apologizing to them and praying to someone that they didn't suffer. I go over it and over it, and each time it seems worse. I think, "I NEED to know that they were ok - that it was quick and they didn't feel anything or that they were unaware of what was going on". Then I think, "THEY WEREN'T OK, OBVIOUSLY - THEY DIED, YOU STUPID MORON!!!!"

And then I lay in bed at night and it starts all over again. Or I wake up in the middle of the night. I don't know how to stop it and I know it's not helping anyone.

It's not like I can go back and fix it, though that's what I think my brain is trying to figure out a way to do. It's not like I'll ever figure it out either. So why can't I stop?

Ugh.

One good thing...

Before I begin this post I want to thank you all once again for hanging with me through all of the sadness. Your comments and encouragement mean so much. Hearing that this blog is helping people - instead of just being self-absorbed and negative, as it sometimes feels to me - is very important. As long as this blog is helping people (myself included), I will continue to write.

I promised to write as soon as I found something positive and, thankfully, I have. So here it is:

I'm back in school now (I took the fall off for my wedding) and this quarter is all about baking. I am quite surprised and very happy to tell you that I think I may love baking more than anything I have ever done in my entire life! For real. I mean, I love to cook and I have always enjoyed baking, but seriously, I'm enjoying this class more than I thought possible.

In the past I've tried to not spend too much time writing about food because I don't want Callapitter to turn into a food blog, but right now my life is kind of food-centric so I may have to go there for a little while. I also don't have a fancy camera and I don't know how to take the beautiful pictures you see in other blogs, but I would like to share a few of the things I've made so far.

I apologize in advance if you're on a low-carb diet, or any kind of diet for that matter.

French Bread



Spritz Cookies


Pecan Sticky Buns


Biscuits (They're heart-shaped because I was practicing at home and didn't have a round biscuit cutter. And it was almost Valentine's Day.)


My favorite so far: Croissants



There is a down-side to all of this baking which is the fact that I've been consuming all of these baked goods almost as fast as I bake them. I haven't stepped anywhere near a scale in the past few weeks, but so far my clothes still fit. I'm sure that soon I will have to take measures to counteract all of the butter and sugar ingestion that's been going on. For now I'm just enjoying the fact that for at least 10 hours a week I'm distracted from my pain and sadness and I'm doing something I enjoy.

My sincere apologies...

I just wanted to let everyone know that I am, in fact, still here and I haven't made any decisions to discontinue my blog. I'm sorry I haven't blogged in forever. I know everyone worries when I don't write and I feel very badly about that, but the truth is that I've been a mess lately and I didn't want to write anything that would make people worry more.

I keep thinking that the more time that passes, the easier it gets, right? Unfortunately that hasn't been my experience at all. I don't know why it keeps getting worse, but it does. I just really, really miss them and can't figure out the purpose of my life without them. I mean, I'm a mom without any kids. That kinda makes me, well, nothing - or at least that's how it feels.

I promise that as soon as I feel the slightest bit of positivity creep back into my existence I will blog again. Thank you all for you comments, messages and words of concern. Someday things will be better.

Is it just me...

or do you so something unusual in this picture too?


At our wedding, Ken and I gave single-use cameras to all of the kids who were there. There were a lot of kids in attendance, mostly Kate and Peter's friends whose parents are our friends, and we were hoping to see what our wedding day was like from their points of view.

They took many, many pictures (over 500) and did a nice job of capturing things we never would have seen otherwise.

Like this.

Just sayin.

Catharsis anyone?

I wanted to quickly update you all and let you know I've been feeling a little better. I'm not sure exactly what changed, but wearing my Mr. Yuk stickers, carrying my princess wand and forcing myself to get up and moving has helped.

I've also started "managing" my overwhelmingly negative feelings in a way taught to me by my good friend, Kearsty, a few years ago. Back in the day (circa 2007) we were having a conversation in which we were sharing our woes and feeling sorry for ourselves and each other (I have no idea what exactly we were lamenting, though it was most likely related to men) when she shared with me something her mother had taught her.

Kearsty said that when she was having a rough time and began wallowing in self-pity her mom would tell her to take 5 minutes to feel sad, be angry, cry, scream, kick, punch, stomp her feet - to do whatever she needed to do to get it out. She encouraged me, "For 5 minutes, just feel everything you need to feel and feel sorry for yourself if you must. But when those 5 minutes are over, it's time to get on with it. Get up, get moving, get out of that space."

Honestly... it works. Please know that I'm not trying to minimize the intensity of grief, because it's huge and certainly not something you can get over in 5 minutes. But, for me at least, wallowing just isn't helpful. The feelings begin to snowball and eventually get so big that I can't find my way out of them. Feeling them in 5 minute increments is manageable.

If you've read this blog for a while you know that music is very powerful in eliciting my emotions. A couple weeks ago I discovered a song that captures much of what I've been feeling, and makes me cry - no, sob - every time I hear it. So what I've been doing lately is letting myself have that time: I listen to the song, cry and swear and kick and scream, and then I let it pass. I pull myself together and move forward. For a little while, until I need to do it again. Some days I only need to listen to it once, other days I listen to it 10 times.

It's helped. For now I can get through each day. I know many of you who read my blog are grieving too, and this time of year is especially hard. So here's the song. I can't promise you'll have the same experience with it, but give it a try. Listen to it, feel all of your feelings and then do your best to pull yourself together and move forward. Even if it's only for a little while.

Mr. Yuk

I'm not very good at being a mess. There's this part of me that has decided to not hold it together anymore, the me who wants to shut down and no longer be a functional member of society, but to everyone else I still seem pretty normal. I just can't let myself be a mess. I don't have time, dammit! But I still want to...

This morning I woke up with my to do list in mind. I got as far as making breakfast when I decided that I don't want to do anything on my list - I just want to sit in my pajamas and play Bejeweled Blitz for the next six weeks. (I love that game because while I'm playing my mind is completely focused on the stupid little jewels. I can't think about or feel anything else. It's a HUGE waste of time, but the best escape I've found that doesn't involve any mind-altering substances.) At the moment, I would welcome another Snowpocalypse (did I say that out loud?!) so I'd have a good excuse for doing nothing for a very long time.

The way I feel this morning reminded me of an experience I had about a week before my kids died. I was in a bad mood, feeling sorry for myself (apparently this is a long-standing pattern in my life) because a guy I was dating was being a jerk (or maybe he just wasn't that into me - which, in my mind, makes him a jerk). I felt like I was gonna end up being single and unloved for the rest of my life so I decided to stay in bed and mope. This kills me now because my kids were alive then - they were there with me and I was being selfish. I was taking them for granted and now I would give ANYTHING to have that time with them back and to be focused on them and not on some dude.

Anyway, it was a Sunday...I got up and made breakfast for my kids and told them they could watch as much tv as they wanted because I was going back to bed. Every few minutes, one of them would come into my room and ask for something and I felt like saying, "can't you see I'm trying to be depressed in here?!" I don't think I did, but I really can't remember.

After about 45 minutes of my attempt to block out everything and disappear into my bed, Peter came in and said, "Look, Mama...I'm Mr. Yuk!" and he made this face:

He really did look like Mr. Yuk:

And that was it. The end of my moping and wanting to be a hot mess. I cracked up hysterically and got out of bed, thanks to my little man.

In the most difficult way possible - by losing my kids - I learned a lot from that experience. I know now that nothing is guaranteed. I would honestly do anything to go back and change so much about how I spent the time I had with my kids. I spent so much of that time focused on stupid, non-meaningful things because I took them for granted and just assumed they'd always be here. And they're not. And there's nothing I can do about it.

I can only change how I act from now on. I realize that sitting in my pajamas and playing Bejeweled Blitz for the rest of my life would be a dishonoring of my kids. In order to make their lives mean something I need to take what I've learned from them and use it to be a better person, no matter how much it hurts - because the pain is truly indescribable.

Even though I may not want to, I know I am capable of helping other people and so I must. I also need to be as present as possible and spend all the time I can with the people I love and who love me because, as I mentioned, there are no guarantees. And if possible, I don't want to have anymore regrets.

In a related story, at Kate and Peter's wake and funeral everyone - and I mean EVERYONE (even the priests, nuns and choir) - wore Mr. Yuk stickers in honor of Peter. We also handed out little princess magic wands for people to carry in honor of Kate. So I think for the foreseeable future, at least until I'm out of my current funk, I'm going to wear a Mr. Yuk sticker and carry around my magic wand to remind me that the present is all we have. We need to make the most of it.