Today it’s all a mess. My heart, my head, my house, my car. Today I feel like a depressed young mom who is holding a thousand different ends trying to find a way to make them all meet some way somehow. My heart feels heavy and broken up. The kind of broken where it’s hard to inhale a full breath and then the crying comes out easily and it almost is sad to me that I’m crying. I feel bad for me. Tomorrow is my mother’s birthday. She would have been 58 years old. Fifty. Eight. And today I can’t keep it together to save my life. I feel like the weight of the world is once again cemented on top of my shoulders and my body is underground. My head is just above the pavement and my neck is heavy with a pit of constant grief about to erupt into a fit of screaming cries. Some days I feel like I may actually have it together and then days like today come in like a goddamn freight train and I feel like I’m failing in every area of my life. Truth is, I really liked who I was before my mom died. I never wanted her to die. I never wanted this new set of issues and mental sadness and heart heaviness becoming a part of my every day reality. I feel like I haven’t been my greatest self in almost 9 months. I lost a baby in the last 12 months and then 3 short months later I lost my mom. I never had a chance to even come up for air before then my grandmother died and somehow, I still put two feet in front of the other most days, brush my teeth and go to work. Or be a mom. Or be a wife. Or how my role of sister and daughter was kind of starting to take a back seat as I came into my own as a mom and wife to my own new little family, suddenly reappeared and needed me, front and center, immediately. I always try to make people feel important or special. I’m always trying to make the best of a bad situation and almost always I can find my light at the end of any tunnel. And I know eventually I’ll be ok. And the only reason I’m sure of that is because I’m Rita’s daughter. The days I feel guilty for crying in front of Mav, I hurry upstairs and start to organize or clean in a mad dash to protect him from my sadness. I’m a firm believer in teaching that emotions are good ways to feel and express, but I’m kind of sick of explaining to him why I’m sad…. because he’s a BABY, and these are earth shattering tears that I’m crying when they come and I just don’t wanna put that on him. I don’t wanna put that on anyone. The aftershock of my mother being gone is exactly that. I feel it, I feel it like tremors under my feet and jolting up through my bones, into my heart like an arrow then slowly moving through my throat like hot suffocating tar, and finally up to my brain to somehow make sense of all these nasty unwelcome feelings. Which I never can. I still shake my head in disbelief every time I see a framed picture of her, or her funeral card on my visor in my car, or her urn on my front entry table. I feel it when I look in the mirror and there are sad circles under my eyes, and new gray hairs along my hairline, and a few lines in between my eyebrows I never noticed before. I feel it when my husband looks at me like I’m actually on the brink of being checked into 4 winds. I feel it sitting heavy in my heart at night when I say goodnight to a picture frame that holds my beloved mother’s picture in it. I feel it when I’m losing patience. I feel it when I wanna call my mom. I feel it when I say dead or die or death or gone or anything pertaining to the end of my mother’s existence. It doesn’t help I’m almost 7 months pregnant and my hormones make me acutely aware of how much I feel and somedays when I can’t explain how I feel I best explain it as feeling ….nothing. Or numb, I guess. And that’s concerning to me because it’s a scary way to feel. Some days it’s hard to make a decision. Sometimes it’s hard to explain that there’s a fire and a flood inside my brain. A messy jumbled up scary shitstorm of emotions that almost nobody understands. Almost nobody understands me. Some days it’s hard to describe what actual heartache feels like, but trust me, you can feel a broken heart just like a broken bone or a bad wound. It reminds you it’s there. Throbbing and hollow and hot and heavy. 

So today is the day before my mama’s birthday. And I’m hurting. And I just want to feel like I have a reason to be happy. And I know I do and how extraordinarily blessed I am for everything I do have. But I really did like who I used to be. And I hope somehow tomorrow is easier than today. Today is the build up of a day I see coming. My little sister and my dad are going to be up in the clouds flying to a place where they have wonderful memories with my mama. They’ll bring some of her her ashes and they’ll lay them to rest forever in one of her favorite places. As beautiful as that sounds I wish she was on that plane instead. It was this exact day last year they decided to cancel their trip to St. Kitt’s because she was ….off; and it was then, that we know now was the beginning of the end.
I’ll do many things tomorrow as I do every day to honor my mom. It feels weird to not be buying her a present every day for the last month to spoil her on her birthday. I wonder how I’ll feel tomorrow when I can’t even call my mom on her birthday. I’ll still sing to her and celebrate her and I’ll even make her favorite birthday dessert and eat every last bite of it. I’ll let Mav blow out her candles and he’ll sing with me. We’ll smile and maybe even laugh tomorrow but today it’s not that light. It’s not that easy. If you feel so inclined to help me celebrate my mom tomorrow, then say it to her, out loud. That you’re thinking of her and wishing her a happy birthday. If you can drink, have a captain and coke with your husband. Or your girlfriends. Buy a designer bag you’ve been loving and couldn’t find a reason (until now :))to splurge on yourself. Listen to one of her favorite songs. Go to the karaoke bar and sing for her. Eat the damn cake. And then eat another piece with extra whipped cream. Say her name. Light a candle for her. Put your slippers on and sit and laugh with your family. Watch law and order or honey boo boo, because that’s what she would be doing. Then at 10pm when your grown children are coming in for the night, go to the racino and spend every last dollar in your wallet on roulette and then text your family at 3am to tell them you just hit the jackpot. 

My mom, she lived. My God did that woman have a life and she lived the shit out of it. She lived it out loud, every day, until she took her last breath. Happy Birthday Eve in heaven my mama. I love you. I love you. I love you. And I fucking hate that you’re not here.