Tag: grief

Humanity

Beef Stew

Lovelovemotherexpletive

I made a nice beef stew this week. What? Kate cooked while the kids were away, and it didn’t involve eggs?! Why yes, yes I did.

Can you tell I’ve been quiet for too long today? Yes, maybe. Third person referencing is a sure sign.

But I did make a nice stew, with tips from cheffy friends, (bakers’ chocolate? oh yes.) and I took it down to my father-in-law, who is in grief and is feeling isolated. I cooked the beef in a bone broth and the nourishment is off the charts. His children call and visit beautifully, but in-between, he is not having visitors regularly and the house is echoing. I can understand. Part of the reason for my visit is that the kids are gone, I have too much time, and I know his son is away for the weekend. (with the same kids I’m missing). The sheer isolation is enough to make life warp strangely.

God, it is hard to grieve. So damn hard. How to incorporate these prickles of loss, joy, -with appreciation, love, self-reflections on our own mortality, a life reflected upon, memories of earliest life, and latest, all the temperatures mix and all at one single minute and then you are left on a ravaged beach after a tsunami. not even ready to look at the remains.

just blank.

and it happens over and over again.

I needed a very strong hug after the visit. I made it happen.

I think I need another one today. Maybe I can finagle one from my flower farm boss. I think she’s not a fan of the hugging though. I’ll go hug the guy at the quickie mart, give him a story to tell.

Its how I roll.

Love love, hug your people out there. Hug them good.

-me

Humanity

So. (Sew. a needle pulling thread.)

Lovelovemotherexpletive

I can’t tell anymore if my moods are because of anxiety about money, or grief, or resentments about past activities. or even the foods I am eating…

How I am stitched together:

I have a therapist, I have fresh veggies in the fridge, I have steps to take concerning money which is more than i might have, my kids are relatively healthy, but boys don’t talk as much as girls and that is deafening sometimes, when they are going through stuff and you only get the spottiest of details and all you can do is cook food for them that you think will make them happy and then you look at your plumpy round belly and recognize where it has come from.

comfort.

How I am falling apart:

reasons for anxiety and mood swings and depression,

1.hormonal insanity.
  • bad food choices that are super comforting when they actually occur.
  • Hello macaroni and cheese, homemade of course, literally heavy with cheese.
  • i use a test kitchen recipe but I can’t link to it without you having to pay to join and that sucks so much I am going to boycott it. creamy stovetop mac and cheese, if you already pay to play.

3. And then there is candy. I’m partial to cinnamon bears and swedish fish, but also go down hard for chocolate riesen.

4. financial upheaval in the sense that I am still trying to move along with a refinance and trying to dream about a future that is sustainable for me, and might even truly sustain me. like, on the insides, with beauty, work, and joy.

5. i don’t have a lot of energy, which could relate to 1,2,3, or 4, really. And i’ve got a date to attend but I just don’t have any feelings about it and forcing myself to go do it is both good and bad and I’m not sure where I stand on it right now. gah, i don’t want to go, i just want to sit on the sofa and eat my candy goddamnit.

6. I’m heading off to the flower farm this morning, and the beauty will soothe the beast. But one thing I’ve realized now, in my third week of working at two farms, is that my body is not 27 anymore, and I need to be damn careful about how I stand, and how I position myself when I am hauling things, because damn, I need more hot baths than I have time for.

7. Goddamned fucking pandemic is making everyone so afraid still, and everything is tentative and weird and i keep wearing a mask but most people aren’t and I’m just confused as to if one of us is in the wrong or doing something useless. am i doing something useless? really? its exhausting. so goddamned exhausting. and still, nothing to do but feel the feels of the entire fucking world. swampy ground.

8. regular old depression. if you can pick that feeling out from all the others, and normalize it a little, that would feel good, i suppose, if depression feels good.

9. grief. feeling the loss of supports right now, even though new ones are popping up everywhere. grief. loss my shit yesterday at finding a recipe written in my lovely motherinlaws hand. its fine, its fine, i am holding it together.

fine. fine.

all you.

-lovelove.

and don’t worry about me, please, its just life.

Mess. Color. Beauty. Work. Fuschia and Nasturtium and Pansy

Humanity

what i’m doing.

Lovelovemotherexpletive
  • i’m crying a fair amount, but now my eyes hurt and i’m trying not to.
  • i’m meditating most days. a guided meditation, so i have even less opportunity to think. thinking is the enemy.
  • i’m working part time in a flower greenhouse, to learn, because i’m dreaming of having my own greenhouse lately and goddamnit, those things are not cheap and are a whole big deal. they arrive unassembled, goddamnit, and empty. (laughing.)
  • i’m gathering all my dreams into a big pile to see what I can make of them, try to make my life something more independent, more in line with the joy and the contentment I have and want more of. fuck ‘work in the schools’. swear to god, i hear that one more time and i will buy a gun.
  • i’m sinking into a deep melancholy that I feel in my chest, losing one of my best supports and loves is an unbalancing force, and I am aware, and so I am doing my best to reach out and gather new supports, and use the ones I have. hello sister. nods.
  • i’m fine. its january. things percolate. i have a working coffee maker, and vitamins. i’ll make it.

love love,

me.

structure with floral design and lights
Yeah, this is NOT how I’m feeling. Photo by Scott Webb on Pexels.com
Humanity

How much midnight do you carry?

Lovelovemotherexpletive

*i spent yesterday going through one old journal, making notes, writing down things that i thought were remarkable. Today’s post title got me right in the chest. i think everyone should write about it.

My heart is in the shape of a walnut again. In my older blogs I wrote about my walnut heart many times, in many ways, and all of my worries about it, what it might mean and all the things, all of them.

When I realized this week that I was feeling the pain of it, the hardness in the center of my self, the hurt I am carrying, I realized I had been years without it, and I’m not sure I remarked on that enough. Maybe I didn’t even know my lightness had returned? Is that possible?

My mother-in-love will die very soon, and is definitely in another phase of existence even now. My favorite mentor for decades, I am deep in grief these days and it has been almost unbearable to recognize the walnut as grief.

Was I really grieving the marriage all that time? All those jokes, that mistake of identifying myself as cold, or hard-hearted? Grief? Really? It makes me weep for the woman I have been.

I am deep in the midnight, and the dawn and all the places where there are cracks, I am in there.

love love,

kate

Humanity

Sinking feeling.

Lovelovemotherexpletive

i’ve forgotten my antidepressants for two days. (just as an fyi) Took a late dose today because I’ve started falling off the path into past losses. I even spent a minute resenting that married guy I liked so much who neglected to tell me that he was married. men can really be assholish. I know its gender fluid, that assholish-ery, but I stand by my sentence, as the body of my experience is with male assholes.

my former mother inlaw is in the hospital again, and i’ve been told now, for the third time, that she just has a little bit of time left.

She’s one of my oldest friends. I met her when I was fifteen and loved her even then, and never stopped. I will miss her terribly. I admire her so. I do not envy her children, because they really don’t know what is in store for them, despite all the assurances that they do. maybe they are in fact, different from the rest of us. time will tell i guess.

i don’t like writing bullshit like that there, but feel the need to leave it because i know how common that attitude is in me, full of resentment and past bullshittery…. just so you see me as I am.

Bullshit it is, because grief and how you feel it is yours, and yours alone and i have no right to fling my own ego on this situation.

its going to be a large loss, and we will all feel it.

I’m making cookies. Plain old chocolate chip. Enough to fill the cookie jar and more.

I’ll get through, changed, but through.

love you all.

-kate