Pressure Cooker

I find I have no emotional reserves anymore. The least little issue sends me into an emotional tailspin of epic proportions and leaves me feeling drained and useless. Cooking dinner is an obstacle to be overcome. If dinner needs to be cooked AND I need to run to the store for air filters in the same night, I'm overwhelmed. Throw in a daughters smashed car window and I'm nearly comatose in my inability to function.

Handling every day life is all I can do, and if there are other things going on I find myself completely avoiding Josh's suicide. Shutting him out the best I can. The longer I do that though, the more insistent the thoughts become. So I stuff them down even harder. I pack my mind like a canning jar... a memory of his smile here, the way he smelled there, then cram the mental image of the fine downy hairs on the nape of his neck in between the two and screw on the lid really really tightly. Then, just like a jar of pickles, stick it in the cooker and turn up the heat. Before you know it, I'm ready to explode without provocation or explanation.

It doesn't help that during a time when I could really stand to have some serenity in my life it feels as if I'm holding out my plate and saying "Higher and deeper please...."

Currently, my brother-in-law is living with us rent free, my daughter is pregnant and moving back in a couple of months, my 23 year old son is in Portland for the Summer and I won't see him for his birthday for the first time, my job is stressful, money is tighter than it's been in 10 years, my husbands business is floundering due to the economy and we're trying to do a re-finance on the house.

That's where I am right now. I need desperately to find time to honor and acknowledge my on-going pain. I need to have a good cry and allow myself my sorrow and my memories, but there never seems to be enough time in the day because I'm currently so inept at handling the smallest of details. I feel continuously as though I need to be doing other things.

Catch 22

The pressure's building and there is an explosion eminent.

Please.

I hurt inside my soul in a way I can't touch, see or explain. I am wounded. Broken. Shattered.

Like an injured dog, I struggle not to bite the hands and hearts trying to comfort and heal me, yet my pain is so great I lash out- with no alleviation of my own pain, but rather, deeper discomfort from the pain I cause.

Inside my head the simple word "please" repeats it'self over and over. Please don't let this be real. Please don't let this hurt so much. Please let me find my way through this. Please. Please. Please. PleasePLEASE let me have my child back.

I have learned "please" is not the magic word. There is no magic word. Yet I beg the universe to make it so. please.

Stop the ride.

8 Months.
34 1/2 weeks

Less time than I carried him inside of me. Yet it's an eternity. A vast endless chasm of frustration, agony, and despair. I scream at the top of my lungs driving down the street. I wail. I lash out at those around me. I physically double over in pain when I can't hold my grief at bay any longer. I simply can not wrap my head around the fact of this existence without him. Never hearing his voice. This is too hard. Too damn hard. Overwhelmingly hard.

For today this is how I feel. Tomorrow may be different. Grief is a process, but not a predictable one. There are no set rules, no definitive path to follow. Instead it is a roller-coaster, whipping me to and fro without the least regard to where I want to go. This ride has no foreseeable end, only moments of anticipation where it noticeably slows before taking me into another plunge.

Stop the ride, I want to get off now.

As long as I'm pissing and moaning, let me just say, if I hear the statement "God never gives you more than you can handle." one more time, someone's going to get hurt.

Seriously? Do people really still find a way to believe this rhetoric? Simple reasoning tells me that statement can't possibly be true. If it were, my son would be alive and handling his depression.

I'm angry today and I'm throwing the bullshit flag.