Lifestyle of a Grieving Mom
Lifestyle is the way in which a person lives and there are many influences in society that impact it. Creating a certain lifestyle can become a person’s purpose, be it climbing the career ladder, being a full-time parent, having a certain kind of brand, or road tripping around the country. Lifestyle isn’t WHO we are but the behaviors and choices we make shape who we are becoming.
Then death happens and changes everything.
Perspective is on its head and what mattered feels meaningless. Devastating grief impacts everything about your life, no rock is left unturned. You are no longer the same person, the goals and dreams you once had washed away in a stream of tears.
What kind of lifestyle is grieving mom? We live in a society of labels and stereotypes; there is the working mom, the stay at home mom, the soccer mom and the helicopter mom.
I am the sad mom and this is my lifestyle.
My purpose is now barely recognizable. I went from mothering my child to mothering her legacy. I keep busy hands, always moving, building, creating in my child’s honor. It’s never enough to fill the void.
One minute balancing busy schedules the next trying to find a balance between happy and sad. Instead of planning for big days like birthdays and holidays, I plan around them, making strategies to survive.
The veil of grief is always there.
Sometimes it strikes hard and fast like a bolt of lightning. In the first months, it is constant, and then it subsides slightly for a day, then two days. I think, I can do this then suddenly I’m blindsided with sadness so strong I can no longer stand.
Old traditions that are too painful to continue, so I make new ones to survive the absence. I crave SIGNS, seeking butterflies, birds, and feathers. Everywhere I go there are reminders, so I go into a subconscious protective mode to cope until I get to the car or home where I can let it out because it’s too hard to explain that the toy at the store broke me.
This new lifestyle requires finding a balance between love and hate, love of the honor, yet hate of the loss. Feeling blessed to have the memories, yet pissed there will not be more. Thankful to have held her little hand, yet slighted because she is gone.
Foggy days fade into grey as I learn to laugh through the tears. My eyes leak often because that is all they know anymore. I seek a path to hope and healing, praying it hasn’t been banished from my heart forever.
My emotions are like Iowa’s weather in the fall or spring.
Ice is anger, rain is sadness, fog is numbness and sunshine is happy. The weather is as uncontrollable as grief is. It’s not something that passes with time. I endure the blizzard, fight back the floodwaters, and hang on in the hurricane. I can’t change it or make it go away. All I can do is ride out the storm until the next one comes.
This lifestyle was not the life I dreamed of, that dream is gone. Eventually, there will be a new dream, but not the one with my little family of four; therefore I am the sad mom.
