youngwidowofbrooklyn - Tumblr blog

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

The Breaking of My Rock and Roll Heart

The Breaking of My Rock and Roll Heart

I am not, historically, an overly sentimental person when it comes to things. I trace it back to memories of my maternal grandparents’ dilapidated hoard-filled home. They were disgusting housekeepers, and savers of anything they thought they could turn around and sell at their various flea market/junk store/peddling entrepreneurial ventures. They also had a vicious doberman pinscher named Freedom…

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

The Stranger Returns.

Hello again, friends.

I wish I could explain why it was so hard to write this past winter. The longer I go without writing, the harder it is to formulate my thoughts to write again. But I never stop thinking about writing. And my journey of navigating this grief is far from over.

My last brief entry was a plea for financial help, and it was incredibly embarrassing to find myself in a situation…

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

Asking For Help.

I can’t stop crying about how this year has beat me up. You can read about where I’m at right now at the link below.  I’ve run out of words for the moment. I’m just holding out for brighter days.

External Hard Drive Failure

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

It's the most (...) time of the year.

It’s the most (…) time of the year.

Yesterday, standing in line at Marshalls, amid the throng of holiday shoppers, with a cheap robot dog tucked under my arm (that I had the extreme fortune to spot after my wildly imaginative and unreserved son declared that Santa was going to bring him “a cute little robot dog that I can love and pet and teach tricks and who will sleep in my bed with me every night”), I spotted a smallish woman,…

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

Keep pushing. Don’t stop. Today I lugged a fucking queen sized mattress up a flight of stairs, through a narrow attic hallway and then I took this pic to memorialize the moment after.

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

How She Spent Her Summer Vacation

How She Spent Her Summer Vacation

Memories of the past three months scatter in no particular order. Snapshots from the past three, yawning, humid months. 

There she is: frozen in a smile, in the split second before the smile fell, ever so slowly, in the horrible realization that she had just reached out, however feebly, for the last time to a person with whom she had hoped she could share a romance. She sits on her couch, draped…

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

The Humility of Asking Forgiveness. The Divinity of Giving It.

The Humility of Asking Forgiveness. The Divinity of Giving It.

“Hey, can I talk to you about something?” I ask him, as we begin to make our way  the two and half blocks from his preschool to our house.

“Yeah. What is it?” he replies, squinting up at me against the late afternoon sun. He brings his scooter to rest next to me, drapes his elbows over the handles and waits for me to go on.

I’d been screwing up my courage all day for this. I told myself that I…

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

Transaction Denied

“Are you going to have another wedding?” he asked me, as he lay across my lap, naked from the waist down, so that I could apply the prescription lotion necessary to combat the itchy bumps on his backside.

“What? What do you mean?” I stammer, trying to keep a casual tone with him. I should be a pro at this by now; he’s been hammering me with these gut punch questions, seemingly out of the blue,…

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

Moving

Tumblr friends:

This blog is moving to Wordpress. I find that it’s easier for subscribers to follow me there, and the platform lends itself more easily to long-form blogging.

Please feel free to visit the site at www.youngwidowofbrooklyn.wordpress.com and subscribe there. 

And coming soon, you will find me at www.youngwidowofbrooklyn.com. Nice and easy.

Be well.

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

Anti-social

I’m in the process of disconnecting from Facebook, and I’m pretty fucking excited about it. Sure I’m going to miss the instant connection to friends I wouldn’t ordinarily be in touch with, but recently the draw of staying plugged in has been outweighed.

I can’t look at your smiling, happy photos, friends. I’m sorry. And I don’t want to pretend that my life is full of smiling, happy photos in…

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

Teeth Around My Organs

Teeth Around My Organs

Take me by the arm to the altar Take me by the collar to the cliff Take me by the waist to the water Take me by the hair to the ferris wheel Take me by the wrist to the river Take me by the braid down to my grave

Love is selfish Love goes tick-tock-tick Love knows jesus Apples and oranges.

-Lady Lamb The Bee Keeper “Hair To The Ferris Wheel”

I’m a ghost, and you all know it I’m singing songs, and…

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

A Guide To Parenting When You Don’t Want To Live

Listen. Before we dive in, I want to make it clear that I know that this is the inside of my head without a steady delivery of seratonin. I know that. Maybe it’s a surprise to some readers because this blog has, up to recently been written by a body that was chemically regulated by magical tablets.

But don’t worry about me. If I weren’t talking about it, then you should worry.

Death sounds delicious to me. God, I want to sink down into that big sleep where I don’t have to make anymore decisions for myself or anyone else, I don’t worry about how I’m going to pay the mortgage or these fucking other bills that keep piling up, I won’t have to scramble to figure out how we will afford health insurance when our COBRA insurance runs out in a few months, and I can rest without the feeling of a tiny, needy body kicking me in the ribs, I can sleep forever without hearing, “Mommy? Where are you? Are you coming right back?” every five minutes. I can sleep without waking up to another day of doing this alone.

I want that like a junkie wants a fix.

But that’s not my future. I’m fighting really hard to make sure it’s not. It can’t be my future because it sure as shit won’t be my kid’s future.

I worry about the impact that my grief and general depression (as it exists with and without the traumatic tragedy it commingles with) will have on my son.

I really want to tap out and minimize the damage I can do it him by yelling at him for things that are not his fault. I’d like to remove myself from his equation so that he’s got a better shot at stability.

Except that’s not how that would work and I know that.

One day, when he is old enough to ask, we will have hard conversations about why his childhood worked the way that it did/does. And unless I’m swallowed whole by a shark in a swimming pool, I’m going to be here to have that talk with him, and hope that he understands.

In the meantime, what can I do? When he asks if I’m sad because his dad is gone, I say yes. When I yell at him for asking me a million quiestions when I just want a minute of quiet, I try to remember to apologize to him. I touch him and I look him in the eyes and I tell him that it’s not his fault and ask him to be patient with me.

I drive us to a local farmers market and when he tells me that he is sad that his dad is not there, I choke on my tears and tell him that we have to work on a plan together. I hold his hand as I help him out of the car. As we walk to the market, I tell him, “When we are sad, we need to remind each other to be happy, because if your dad were here, that’s what he’d want.”

And then I let him have a strawberry cupcake and a lemon one when he can’t decide which one he wants.

My name is Jennifer, and I think I am doing this all wrong. But I’m going to keep doing it anyway. Maybe it will end up so wrong that it’s a little bit right.

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

Suicide & Whether It’s Painless: Talking Points

Warning: Depending on how hard a topic suicide is for you, this may not be a post for you. 

It’s not one thing, today. Rather, it’s an intersection of unrelated, or barely related things all at once.

It was one of those melancholy rainy days today. The kind that always gets me.

I’ve cried so much today I’ve given myself a sinus headache. I’m exhausted from the crying and the heartsickness.

I went looking - foolishly - through some saved videos on my computer. Many that I remember watching over the past few years. Videos of songs sung in a hospital, by an unshaven man with painful, swollen gums who I barely recognize. I didn’t watch the one of him near the end, with his patchy bald head and his disclaimer at the beginning, “I know I look a mess, but I feel alright.” That one is too hard to watch. I did, however, I weep when I found the song he wrote for me as his (final) Christmas gift to me in the winter of 2014. It was the one he wrote about how we met and fell in love playing pinball in a little hipster bar, and how, one day when he was better, he would teach our son to play, as well.

I then found a video I didn’t remember, although I can hardly believe I’ve never seen it before. The song didn’t sound even vaguely familiar, and maybe I’ve buried it, I wouldn’t be surprised - the list of things I don’t remember from the last few years is quite long. Regardless, it sounded new to my ears, and that made it seem like a gift from the beyond. The lyrics were so sweet and so personal and so hard to hear.

“Hold my hand, you are my everything, Keep holding on, we made that little thing. I gotta go, will you please hold my ring? But I’ll be back, you can bet on anything. I’m holding on, You’re holding, We’re holding on and on and on.”

And then there’s a whole part where he’s singing so quietly that it’s mostly indecipherable, but I think he’s singing about me, about us, and about how hard he’s fighting.

Or maybe that’s just what my heart wants to hear. I don’t know.

I woke up today to the news that Anthony Bourdain has killed himself. It seems that everyone - myself included - is moved to acknowledge it, him, and the sadness around what’s happened.

I’ll be honest, Anthony Bourdain always drove me a little nuts. I wasn’t really a fan. But, really, it was because I saw something like a reflection in him. Something about the way he spoke, the snark and the bravado that seemed like a front. Something about that felt too familiar and I didn’t like it.

I’m not going to pretend to know what he went through. I’m not going to try to overlay my life experience onto a stranger (albeit a famous one). I will only say that there was something in him that made me uncomfortable, always, because I recognized it as being kindred to something in me. 

A few days ago Kate Spade died. I can’t say I knew much about her, other than the very superficial stuff. I’m sad for her child. 

I’m sad for Bourdain’s child.

Two celebrities lost in the span of a week to suicide. Now it seems we all want to talk about suicide.

I feel angry about these suicides, yes. But maybe not in the same way as other people are.

I’m not angry at them for doing it. I’m angry because I can’t. I wish I could, but I can’t.

I don’t want to be at this party anymore. All the cool people have left and the ones who are left are coupled up and making out in front of me and I don’t feel like I belong here and I don’t know where to put my hands or where to look when I talk to people and I just really don’t fucking want to be here.

My ride left without me and I want to go and see if I can catch up with him.

I want to go and I can’t.

I don’t think that Kate Spade or Anthony Bourdain or your dad or your husband or your stepdaughter or your neighbor or your cousin are selfish people. I’m not angry with them for doing what they did. I’m sorry that they felt that they couldn’t stay. I wish they would have, all of them. 

I don’t want to stay, you guys. But I’m fucking staying. Awkward and uncomfortable in my skin and crying all the time and I’m fucking staying. Keep making out in front of me, I’m not going anywhere. I’m stationed by the snack table.

Tonight, as if on cue, my son asked if he could see his dad’s ashes again. Why the fuck not? I’m already a big open wound, so might as well.

Then I showed him some of the videos of his dad singing. He didn’t recognize him from the videos where his dad had a beard. I had to explain to him why he couldn’t shave in the hospital.

I watched light of the computer screen illuminate my child’s face, growing as he is to look like his father. I put my arm around him and I held him close. I pressed my closed mouth into the skin on his back. I’m holding on and on and on.

I’m not fucking going anywhere. You can bet on anything.

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

Eyes forward

So, I began writing this entry last week, as I was alone in a hotel, away working on a film, a little drunk on a mediocre margarita from a mediocre local Mexican restaurant.

It was - to the best of my memory -mostly trying to memorialize some of the more poignant moments from celebrating my late husband’s birthday a few weeks prior. 

It was shaping up to be a pretty good post, I think. And suddenly “an error occurred” and it was all gone. Fuck it. I could try to conjure it up again, but that’s just not my style. It’s gone. I’m letting go of it.

It’s an exercise that ripples through many other aspects of my life.

So, where am I now? Let’s see. 

Since my last post, of course, I celebrated my husband’s birthday with my son. I tried to find some poetry in that day, and I tried to share it here, but the cyber gods had other ideas, so, sorry. Here’s the Cliff Notes version:

I got a tattoo. There was a long story behind the what and the why. I had a lovely experience with a tattoo artist at a parlor that I chose for a (separate) sentimental reason. Now I have a tattoo that I got both to honor my husband and also as a petty dig at my husband. 

My son and I celebrated together. He got some toys because he reasoned his dad would want him to have a present in his stead. We baked a cake and ate it.

My son asked me what heaven is and if it is real. I cried. Sometimes his questions are timed so perfectly that they hardly seem coincidental.

I booked a film gig. As a single parent, I cannot overstate how difficult it is for me to continue to try to live an artist’s life. It’s nearly fucking impossible, and without help, it is absolutely impossible. I made arrangements for my son to be away for the week that I filmed, which also happened to be the week of my birthday.

As I was anticipating a week of downtime, I decided to throw myself a birthday party. 

I hate my birthday. I fucking hate it. When did that feeling emerge? I was thinking about this earlier today.

Was it when I was 3, when I was beaten for peeing in the front yard of our trailer in the hours before my Kermit the Frog themed party?

Was it when I was 7, when I had an emotionally confused Strawberry Shortcake birthday party hosted by my stepfather (who I both feared and disliked) while my mother hid in their bedroom all day?

Or later?

Was it when I celebrated my 32nd birthday, after having been fired from the very last desk job I ever had? That year that I was feeling completely untethered and afraid, not knowing what I was worth professionally or personally - we road tripped in silence on that rainy day, back to my hometown, me, frightened that my future was unwritten and uncertain, and him, nervous and preoccupied with the ring in his pocket and the proposal that he’d planned. (Incidentally, that particular birthday was a good one, even as the knife of the memory of it sticks in my heart now.)

Maybe it was my 38th birthday? When I went home to film a movie in my home state five months after giving birth, feeling awful about the new shape of my body, and my mom got angry at me for some minor thing and decided to give me the silent treatment for a week. On the day of, I came home from filming to an empty house, a birthday cake and a card for me, but no one around and no reconciliation.

Or maybe it’s the accumulation of every birthday that I have since he’s been gone?

My birthday. It’s as slippery a celebration as Valentine’s Day or New Year’s Eve. The expectation is so high. Then the inevitable letdown.

This year I steeled myself to take the reigns and throw myself a party.

And then an enormous, and absolutely avoidable, fight with my family changed everything at the eleventh hour.

So, plans for my son to go away were scrapped. No birthday week break for me. Just scrambling, and a week of traveling and spending money and stress. And a speeding ticket. And a lost iPad, that happened to be the last (Father’s Day) gift that I ever gave my husband. And shooting a movie. Yes, there was that.

I know that I sound very “glass is half empty,” it’s true. But listen - it’s hard to get excited about work (even if it is “glamorous” work) when it ultimately costs more than it pays.

I just really need a fucking break. Financially. Emotionally. 

Last week, Memorial Day weekend, my son asked me about cemeteries. Just to back up a bit - I had naively thought that when we finally built up to the moment where my son understood that his dad had, in fact, died, that we would have completed the sad journey of bringing him to awareness. I hadn’t thought of the questions that lie after.

For months, more than a year, maybe, on the odd occasion that he would ask about a graveyard that we passed, I would distract and redirect. It’s hard enough for me to wrap my brain around the bizarre ritual of saving bodies and collecting them together in beautifully landscaped parks, let alone explain it to a child.

But last week, he asked and I steeled myself before answering, “Sometimes when people die, the people who love them decide to bury them somewhere so that they can go and remember them.”

As soon as the words left me, I anticipated the follow up question, and I knew I’d waded deeper than I was ready to go, but what the fuck, here we go.

“Is Daddoo buried in a cemetery?”

“No, baby, he’s not.”

“Where is he?”

Fucking hell. Here it is.

“Well, baby. I waited until you were old enough to understand to explain this to you. Daddoo is with us. At our house.”

“He is? Where is he?”

“Sometimes, honey, when someone dies, you can, the people who love them, can decide - and this is something that your Daddoo said he wanted - you can put them in a very hot fire, and then when it’s all done, they give you the ashes of the person that you love. And you can keep them. So, we have Daddoo’s ashes.”

“Can I see them?”

“Yes, when we get home, I’ll show them to you.”

And I put it off as long as I could, after that, but, yes, eventually, I climbed on top of the wardrobe in the living room and got down the wooden box that my husband’s grandfather made, opened the box, removed the smaller box with my husband’s name printed on it and showed it to our son. And when he asked, I opened that box as well, and showed him the clear bag inside it. He held the bag and poked it and laughed. And weirdly I felt outside of my body, sitting on the couch, watching my son hold the bag that contained his father.

I’d like to pause here, again, to stress how much better the blog post I began last week - and that the internet ate - was than this one. This one feels angry and disjointed. I’m struggling to find the poetry in it.

Perhaps it’s gauche of me to be self-referential of my writing style, but you get what you get with me.

Lest this entry end on a low note, I will say this: I am about two weeks with no SSRIs in my system. I had some nasty withdrawal symptoms, including several days of vertigo, but that all seems to be on the wane now. As I was starting this process, I was really worried about how I would “be” without the drugs in my system. I was concerned that my reactions would be irrational and my emotional responses disproportionate to situations. I haven’t found that to be the case. I’ve raised my voice, yes. I’ve cried, yes. I’ve been upset and angry. But I’ve certainly had cause to be, and I’ve never felt out of control or regretted my actions (more, I suppose, than I normally regret my actions, that is). Here’s the lovely thing I hadn’t been prepared for: these moments of joy and peace that I’ve felt (not described in this particular post necessarily) are so much sweeter right now, knowing that they are coming from a heart and mind currently operating without a safety net.

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

A Psalm For Susan Smith.

I hate being a mother. I do. God help me for saying it, but it’s the truth. 

Please don’t misconstrue what I’m saying: I love my son with everything that I have. He’s the best person I know, but I would give anything not to have to be his parent. I don’t want this job. I don’t like this job. I wish I could run away from it and not look back. 

I am a good mother. I take care of my child, and I enjoy his company. We are gentle with each other and we understand each other. We hold each other up and we make each other laugh. We are two halves of one tiny, complete family.

And I fucking hate it. I do. It’s a nightmare I can’t get out of.

Please don’t give me any, “You don’t mean thats” or “You are so strongs” or whatever bullshit people say when they feel like they need to speak on something that they don’t know anything about.

I don’t want this. One day - or more likely across the span of many, many days - in the future I’m going to have very difficult conversations with my son about this. It’s not easy for me to admit, you know, that this was a mistake. I thought I wanted to be a parent, and I knew I could be good at it, but not like this. If I’d known it would be like this, that I’d do the whole thing alone - no, no thank you, I’d really prefer not to. One day, I hope that I’ll be able to explain to my child that both can be true at once: I can try my best, I can love him and give him everything I can, and also not want to have any part of this.

I hate this holiday. I’ve always hated Hallmark holidays, but I finally feel like the universe has given me permission to say it out loud. Good for you if you feel proud of being a mother, having a mother, impregnating a mother, knowing a mother, and you want to have brunch about it. Good for you. The only gift I want is to forget. I don’t want cards or gifts or encouragement. I want peace, I want respectful distance. I want disengagement.

This morning I woke up, and I put on my husband’s boxer briefs, and the black chemo cap that I knitted for him, a worn out t-shirt of his with the collar ripped at the seam, and his wallet and chain clipped to my pants. Half father, half mother, feeling like neither. 

Most of the day was tearful and quiet, which is the best I’ve got this month. It’s not the meds, I promise you - if that’s what you’re thinking, it’s this month, it’s this stretch of weeks from Mother’s Day to Father’s day and the birthdays and milestones that fall between them. I am angriest at the universe this time of year, for all the time we were robbed of, for all that could have been.

Do you remember Susan Smith, the woman who strapped her babies into her car and rolled it into a lake so that she could be with her lover who didn’t want a girlfriend with kids? I think about how the world called for her head on a pike after she did what she did. I couldn’t ever find it in myself to be angry with her, and I guess I couldn’t ever figure out why. I only ever felt so sad for a woman who felt bad enough with her life that the only way she saw out was to do a thing the world would never forgive her for. 

I am not going to hurt my child. I’m not going to leave my child, ever, willingly. But there is a part of my soul that has something like empathy for Susan Smith. I understand, my sister, a desperation to run away from a life that you feel trapped by, an irrational and ill-conceived grab at a fresh start, even when you know deep down that no one can ever really go back and start over. I understand, Sister Susan. You did the unforgivable, and there but for the grace of whoever the fuck go I.

My husband used to tell me, when we were young, long before we got married, that he didn’t see himself getting old. He always thought he’d never make it past 40. I would laugh, tell him he was full of shit and that everybody thinks that because we can’t conceive of a time when we are no longer the young version of ourselves. Maybe he knew something about himself that I didn’t understand, that even he didn’t understand. Because, clearly, he was right and I was wrong. He made it about three months passed his 40th birthday.

Sometimes, these dark days feel exactly right to me, they feel like the days I was meant to be living in. Since my childhood I’ve expected darkness and struggle. Whether it was the particular childhood trauma that I had, or the genetic predisposition for depression or whatever, I just knew, and a part of my heart seemed to be aching for the darkness to be realized. I assumed I’d grow old alone. I didn’t think love was meant for a person like me. Which made falling in love and getting married seem like the silliest and most delightful plot twist imaginable. I had been wrong, I thought. I was not fated to be the odd man out, after all.

Until I was. Until everything I dreaded and knew deep into my marrow was my future came true in a more awful way than I’d thought it could.

Is it possible that we all, all of us, have locked away inside our DNA some knowledge about our future selves? Is it self-fulfilling prophesy or clairvoyance or just an eerie series of coincidences that leads us down paths that we fear to be true but hope with all we have to avoid?

Today I found a bunch of old videos and photos that I didn't know were saved on my phone. I spent an hour or so going through videos, holding my breath as they loaded, watching clip after clip. Several of my son, barely walking, barely talking, toddling his way down hospital corridors of Mount Sinai to visit his sick father, shouting out in his baby voice for his dad. Clips of my son and husband marching the length of our tiny Brooklyn apartment, wearing hats and humming together. Clips of my son, me, alone, videotaping him, maybe to send to his sick father, many from the months after he died, months that I barely remember. I found a screenshot of my husband and I Facetiming....his bald head, gaunt face in a hospital room, me in a little corner box, lying in our bed, tired.  I cried and cried and cried today.

I hate this day and I wish it was over. I don’t want to celebrate being a mother. And there’s no one who is still living that I want to congratulate me on doing it. I just want to sleep and wake up to a new day.

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

The Great Work Continues.

Wanna hear about this hilarious dream I had last night? I dreamt that I realized that I was pregnant again. And at first I was nervous because I was not prepared to have a second child in my 40s and I’d just committed to losing the baby weight from the first pregnancy, but I knew that my son would be such a wonderful big brother that I decided to embrace the unexpected and dive headlong into the new adventure. I had an audition for something....a play, probably....and I was waiting with a bunch of other actors, trying to work on my scene and figuring out how I was going to deal with talking about my pregnancy  if I was cast. 

And my husband was there, too. He was auditioning as well. And he was helping me work on my audition. But I didn’t have the right sides. He was helping me search for them. And then...he was gone. I couldn’t find him anymore. My belly was swelling and I couldn’t hide the pregnancy and he was gone and I couldn’t audition and I couldn’t find him and then I was bleeding and I didn’t know if I was miscarrying or if I’d just thought I was pregnant because I was fat and maybe I was just having my period and I’d never been pregnant and he was gone and I was alone and fat and not acting.

It would be funny if it weren’t so on the nose. And it would be sad if it weren’t so funny. Incidentally, I’m not pregnant. I am having my period.

The last post from a few weeks ago was - obviously - a direct address to a shitty person who assumed that she can keep waltzing in and out of my life every few years, never apologizing for past pain inflicted and continue this awful friendship/estrangement dance we’ve been doing for three decades. I hesitated to write about her here because our relationship isn’t directly related to the topic this blog to addresses. But I’m grateful to the number of people who have reached out to me with their own stories of painful friendships and breaking the cycle of toxicity. I’ve thought over the past few weeks about other things I could write here about her, about that relationship, but nah....I think I’m done. For real, I don’t have the room in my head, my heart or my life to give that much more than I already have. Thanks for indulging me while I wrote that one off my chest. I feel much better now.

I’m still in the process of weaning down off of my medications. So far so good. It was all going very well, until a few weeks ago when I finally reached the point in which a step down meant that I was effectively halving the dosage. For the following two weeks I had some pretty uncomfortable physical symptoms - mainly this thing colloquially called “zaps.” If you’ve ever gone off of SSRIs, you know what I’m talking about, probably. It’s not necessarily painful, but it is a sensation not unlike a throb, that runs through your whole body. It makes concentrating difficult, as well as staying active, or even staying upright. It’s a little like the day before you realize you have the flu - before the barfing and shitting when everything feels awful but without any real descriptors.

Obviously, I didn’t try to step my dosage down during this period. I just hunkered down and rode it out. I slept a lot and ate a lot of fried food. It sucks and it’s ironic that this is part of the process for me to get to a place where I can focus on losing this stupid baby weight. But, you know, I’m pretty good at meeting myself where I’m at, staying gentle and staying aware of what I need in the moment. So that’s what that was. Two hellish physical weeks full of fitful sleep and delicious breakfasts of sleeves of Golden Oreos dunked in coffee. So, there were some upsides, I suppose.

The good news is that so far, my moods have been fairly stable. I’m not irrational or anxious or easily upset. In fact, I feel pretty calm and peaceful. I take this as a sign that the time is right to do this.

I’ve felt no physical symptoms for about a week now. I think I’m going to step down the dose again today and see how I feel. It seems like I’m about two step-downs away from being off the medication completely. I’m really looking forward to knowing myself in the life I live now without medication.

The sun is shining most days now. My garden is blooming, and the birds are hanging out in the bird feeders. I’m happiest when I’m barefoot in my garden, mowing with my little push mower, digging up weeds, pruning, shoveling, or else out on the bike I just bought for myself, using my strong legs to propel myself around the city, feeling the wind on my face, daring the universe to splatter me on the pavement.

Most days I feel really good, really strong and really right. Summer has always been my favorite season, and it’s coming soon. I can feel it.

Except first I have to get past. And mother’s day. And Tom’s birthday. And my birthday. And father’s day. I try not to look too far down the road. I just enjoy where my bare feet are planted right now.

About a week ago I got a break up text from a guy I’d gone on two very nice dates with. He’s a very cool guy. We had a lot of laughs and I think he’s smart and nice and all of that stuff. But also, dating is so complicated for me. i’m ferociously protective of my kid. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of another person co-parenting instead of my husband. But I need friendship and respect and eventually I know that I’m going to have to give myself permission to change the rules that I’ve set up for myself about who gets let in to my actual life....not this life....and not the life where I go out and drink and try to forget what’s back at my house. I don’t know when that will be. I keep testing the waters, then getting scared and retreating.

I hate dating, to be honest. I want sex and love and comfort and easy and uncomplicated and I also want to be alone. Or with my husband. I really do have impossible standards.

Anyway, this guy - this very nice guy I’ve gone on two dates with, and had been asked and agreed to see again - texted me to tell me that he’s decided to pursue a relationship with someone he’s met. His text was so nice, you guys. Very heartfelt and sincere. And I don’t begrudge him any happiness he wants to pursue. There was a time when my life had so few complications that I would have really felt the sting of not being chosen. Not anymore. In fact, it’s that old Groucho Marx line - I don’t want to be a member of any club that would have me. I wouldn’t date me - are you kidding? I’m all baggage. It’s totally cool. I get it. If only it weren’t so lonely.

Yesterday it rained. The warm rains are the hardest. They remind me of the day that my husband died. I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Yesterday was a bit melancholy for a stretch. Rainy days are the days that I can’t help looking for signs. Where is he? Did he make this Neil Young song come on the radio? He always loved Neil. I stood in my bedroom and saw his face in the clouds of the night sky. He was smiling at me and I reached my hands up to the skylight to touch him, and he kept smiling and I kept reaching, and I laughed and cried. The rainy days are a gift and a curse.

How do I ever explain my bizarre relationship to the rain and the clouds and the songs on the radio to someone new? How do I fall in love again when I’m still in love with a ghost I can see in the sky and hear in my car?

[youngwidowofbrooklyn]

And the rebuttal comes swiftly. Because of course it does.

There was a time when this would have hurt me. That time has long past. You don’t know me. You don’t know my son. And by your cruel and deflecting response, you’ve made my decision to say goodbye to you appear to be a very wise one.