Grieving again

I've been quite miserable recently.  Really miserable in fact.
Miserable enough to sit on the floor and cry with my goat. (He's wooden.  He rocks.  Literally, and figuratively.)





See.  He's a goat.  He rocks.

Anyway.  (Look at me avoiding talking about it all.  I'm so....... 'brave'?)

I've been feeling miserable.  It culminated on Wednesday when I sat on the floor of my bedroom and bawled my eyes out for a good hour. Part of it has come from reading someone else's blog, and recognising those feelings in myself, and thinking that I probably should have faced these a long time ago as opposed to now, 3 years later. (Or 3 years 7 months and 13 days later, but who is counting?)

I've been readings, as many people have, life as a widower which is the blog of a chap who lost his wife suddenly, leaving him with a small child.  He's directing his grief through writing this blog, and he records how he feels.  Recently, two posts have really struck a chord with me.

One is about his Old Life which talks about how the life he had before the death is so different to the life he has now.  How it's his old life, and he can't get it back.  I felt like that and sometimes still do, partly because of the second post that really kicked me in the stomach when I read it.  Grieving nothing is a post that talks about how he is grieving for someone who never existed - the second child they were going to have.

I know that feeling.  As my body clock ticks through 38, as it heads into what I think might turn out to be early menopause, I am thinking more and more about the babies that Rich and I lost, the babies that I will never hold and watch grow, the people they will never be.  I'm thinking more about how the AC will not have brothers and sisters to lean on the way that I have - that he faces our deaths alone.  I know that's the paranoid part of me - he will hopefully be married and have a brood of his own by then, but in terms of understanding his loss, he'll be alone.  J doesn't want any more children.  He loves T-Boy and he loves the AC, and I love the way that AC is prepared to lose it all again by loving someone again.

When I was younger, I wanted a few things - none of them impossible.  I wanted a firm marriage, a big family of 5 or 6 or so, and my Masters of Education.  The reality, 20 years later, is that I am divorced twice, and that my fiance died before we could get married.  I have one son, and an apparent inability to carry past about 8 weeks.  I've just thrown out all my first year M.Ed stuff, because I cannot afford to continue it, in either time or money.  If I look at the shiny side, and believe me, I am trying, then I know I have a fantastic relationship with J, a beautiful and hardworking son, and a Bachelor level education which means I can do a job that I love.

But I still have spent a week grieving for that which I do not have, because now I've realised that I never will.  I'll be lucky to make a 40yr anniversary, let alone the Golden wedding of my grandparents.  I'm too old to have more children now, and to give them the life that they should have.  I couldn't take 2 years out as I did with the AC.  The chances of me ever being able to afford my Masters or Doctorate are incredibly slim now.

I think that this is a natural process though.  I didn't just lose Rich, I lost all that went with him - the family we were trying for, the relationship years that we already had, the traditions that we had.

Never mind hey.  Itwillallbefine.  I know it.  And it is.  Absolutely most of the time it so is.  The rest is just the process that has to be gone through.