Wholehearted

"She never seemed shattered;
To me, she was a breathtaking
mosaic of the battles she had 
won."

My heart is not shattered anymore.  It is no doubt battered and bruised, but I am once again, wholehearted.  I’ve let go of angry and bitter.   I think sadness may always linger.  And that’s ok.  I no longer resent the fact that I gave so much of my time and heart and oozed love for someone who couldn’t do the same.  I’m sad that our family had to pay so dearly for that.  But I found a strength that I desperately needed to walk away from it, by digging deep to get my kids through it.  And I have found a peace of mind and heart in hearing my once broken hearted babies assure me that they understand why I gave up on my relationship and still know, unequivocally, that I will never give up on them.  

I’m not afraid of love.  I remember it so fondly.  It has quite literally barged into my life these last few years, when I most desperately needed to be remind that I was worthy of it, and when I most certainly could not reciprocate with my shattered, war weary heart, as wholeheartedly as I was genuinely built to do.  I’ve learned some crushing lessons the hard way.  One is how selfish it is to offer a genuinely passionate lover with the very best of intentions, who looks at you as though they see their home and future in your eyes, and feels lucky, genuinely lucky to have you, anything less than the very same in return.  And another, is that I can love a man with all my healing heart, and still know when to look him in the eye and say “you’re just not the one”, because I was not built to be that selfish.  We all deserve someone who is convinced we are the one. 

I’ve had some great loves.   Loves that have shaped my vision of love and made me feel worthy of my quest for genuinely happy ever after.  Loves that have taught me that I deserve respect and loyalty and honesty and friendship and love.  Loves that I will love forever, even if they taught me a few of those lessons the hard way.  Loves I have loved enough to let go.  And I’ve been reminded of and become very familiar with the kind of lover i am when i am fearless and wholehearted; selfless, nurturing, supportive, romantic and passionate as hell, and how lucky someone will be to have the whole hearted me again.  

And I have forgiven the man who once had this whole hearted and devoted love in the palm of his hands, nurturing him and his children with all her heart and soul, and shattered it because he couldn’t help but always wonder if he could do better.  I’ve healed enough to know that he probably did love me quite a bit, but wasn’t about to (or able to) make himself vulnerable enough to do so as selflessly and unabashedly as i thrive on.   I’ve grown enough to feel genuinely sad for him (for us) for that, and to know I can’t fix it.  

Love.  I am not short on love.  I have been swimming in love since the day I became a mother and I soak in that blissfulness.  But my healed, whole heart has reminded me that I am a lover; a fiercely passionate lover.   And it’s scars remind me that I’ve earned my high standards and great expectations and that it takes courage to love fearlessly and with an insatiable passion,.   And it’s peaceful resilience has convinced me to be patient and that I can trust it, wholeheartedly, to know when it finds and feels “the one”.   

A Decade Without Grandma

Just before my mother lost the ability to communicate, she told me that she was proud of the mother I am; that I am a good mother.  It was out of character for her to praise like that.  She was more of constructive criticizer by nature, with a very loving, well intentioned heart.  But I think she knew things were about to go very downhill, and she didn’t want to leave me without saying those words.  And those words, from her, were gold.  To this day, “You’re a good mother” is my most cherished compliment.  Her words ring in my head often and have pealed me off the floor in some of my darkest parenting moments. 

I have a horrific memory of one of my mother’s last days on her death bed.  We had reached that hopeless point where we were left with no hope and could only pray for the peace and comfort of death for her.   She was suffering but clinging to what little life she had left.  She was fighting so hard for her every breath and her body was writhing in discomfort.  I hugged her and cried and begged her to let go.  I whispered in her ear, telling her it was ok to go.   “Madeline is going to be ok.  I promise.”  Madeline was her beloved first grandchild/best friend/new found reason for living.  And suddenly, she seemed to stop fighting quite so hard.  She let her guard down and seemed to raise her white flag before dying in the wee hours of the next morning.   It occured to me, in that gut wrenching moment, how badly my mother did not want to leave her grandchildren.  I was pregnant with my third child when she died, and aside from how very much she cherished her grandbabies and deserved to soak up the utopia of grandparenthood for many, many years, and fought for that privelege, literally until her very last breath, I’m certain that a lot of that fight came from her concern for her poor daughter who was about to be in way over her head with three children.  

This spring will mark 10 years since my mother died.  I think I’ve cried at least a tear or two, every single day, since someone pointed that out to me a while back.  10 years without my safety net/lifeline, and all while taking the biggest leap and fighting the biggest battles of my life.  A decade of motherhood without our grandma.  I fantasize all the time, about having that other human on earth, who may have loved her grandchildren even more than I love them.  And I resent that she’s gone.  Her grandchildren brought her a pure joy that she had yearned for her entire life.  I so enjoyed seeing that twinkling joy in her eyes.  And I gave that to her.  I owed her grandchilren, at the very least, and I delivered.  I like to believe that I redeemed myself, just in the nick of time.  

So I cry because I resent that she’s gone and missing out on the blissful hell that is her grandchildren and the opportunity to pretend that they are all bliss and no hell, all while silently snickering about the well deserved hell we both know I’m enduring in motherhood.  

And I cry because I need help, from no one on this earth, more than my mother.  I need that one person who’s footsteps I’m following through familly  and motherhood;  That one person who taught me everything she didn’t know either but we both learned along the way.  That one person who knows my children are putting me through hell sometimes, and genuinely sympathizes, but kind of enjoys it and loves her grandchildren even more for it.  I need her.  Grandma is the only person on earth who will almost always move mountains to help in the deepest deaths of parenting hell.  And this last decade of stay at home motherhood/housewife turned divorced single mother of 4 has had me at rock bottom (God willing).  I need her.  I need that person that will support my every whole hearted (often failed) effort, and my every blind, irrational decision, all while pointing out every mistake I have made or could be making along the way (none of which I asked for and millions of which I would never even have thought of).  I need her.  My kids always accuse me of telling them how beautiful they are or that they are good at everything they attempt because I'm their mother and I HAVE TO.  I need that person.  

The other day, my dad called to tell me that I am a good mother.  He tells me two things often, “Your mother was a saint” and  “You’ve mastered the art of parenting.”  And on this day, I was a master of parenthood.  And I cried, because just the night before, I was lectruing my boys about how I have dedicated my life to,  and poured my heart into raising good, kind, positive children, and how much it hurts me when they absolutely cannot get along and respect each other despite all my efforts.  I shamelessly told them that it makes me feel like a failure and that I didn’t think I deserved that.  I could tell it tugged at their heart strings just a little bit, but not enough to actually conquer sibling rivalry.  But here was my hero dad, to save the very next day, by spontaneously calling me to echo my mother's golden words;  "You're a good mother".  And while we both know that I am more the "Jack-of-all trades, master of none" type of mother, and I’m still entirely winging it every step of the way, we also both find comfort knowing that I’m following my mother’s footsteps (and I can feel heartbeat in every step).  But I need her.  And I’m guessing I’ll need her for decades to come.   

A decade later, my mother’s precious Madeline is now 15.  She is precisely the age I was when I started being a nightmare child to my poor mother.  She is the product of every ounce of the blood sweat and tears that I have poured into motherhood, and she is a gem.   She is the lovely young daughter my mother always dreamed of, and I hope my mother knows how much of an angelic hand she has had in that.  

Divorce is Hard...I Hope You Never Have to go Through it.

A while back, I was watching someone I love dearly go through a divorce.  He was in pain and I blamed and judged his ex, who I also loved.  I tried very hard not to judge, for a very long time, but one day she asked for my opinion, and I judged, harshly.  I threw things at her that we both knew she already knew and probably regretted and had already beaten herself up about.   And she responded with something like “Divorce is very hard.  And I’ve tried really hard and done the best I could do through those darkest moments.  I hope you never have to go through it.”  I can’t even wrap my head around how much of an understatement that was.  And then I beat myself up a little for kicking her while she was down.  

Years later, I went through my own divorce and darkest moments.  And I let myself crumble a few times and made very painful mistakes, some that I will never forgive myself for.  I was numb for a year, and breathless and dizzy and lost and angry and sad and trying to charge through all of that like a warrior, with my children in tow, determined to get us all through it, not just fairly unscathed, but better off because of it.  It was an even bigger challenge than it sounds.

I apologized to her, and told her how often her words rang in my head every time I tried to talk myself into forgiving myself for my darkest times and weakest moments.  The ones that inevitably come from the devastating failure and heartbreak of shattering your perfect family and giving up on happily ever after.   I felt sincerely terrible for adding insult to her injuries.  She was graciously forgiving and grateful for my long overdue understanding.  And so sorry that I was going through it.  

“Divorce is very hard.”  And for a very long time, it gets harder and harder.  Giving up on my lover was hard as hell.  Shattering my family was gut wrenching and life changing and often, seemingly unforgivable.  It was by far, the greatest casualty of this war.  Memories of our happy family still haunt me every single day.  And in those dark moments of my post-divorce life, when our new family dynamic took my kids away from me for days at a time, and we missed each other terribly, I wallowed in failure and guilt and cold, heartless, bad decisions.  When I wasn’t devastated, I was numb.   

But I have some feeling coming back now.  I’ve seen smiles return on my kids faces.  I’ve heard most of them tell me that they understand now.   I’ve listened to my oldest son vow to find a great love and treat her right so that he never loses her.  I’ve watched in awe as my teenage daughter chose a first love who oozes genuinely good intentions for her and isn’t afraid to tell her.  I watched my children watch and admire genuinely good men and learn the true meaning of selflessness and “love it or lose it”.  And just like that, two years and many regrets later, it was not all in vain.  

I’ve been dreaming about healing for years now.  But I think I’m ready.  I think I can muster up enough faith in my family’s strength and resilience to forgive myself for ever asking them to take on this fight in the first place.  ( And I believe I can thank myself for that.)  I think I’ve finally convinced them that when I said “trust me, we are all going to be ok” over and over and over again (with tears in my eyes), I meant it, and I was right.  I know they know, that in my life, they are first and foremost.  

It is very healing.  It’s much easier to forgive myself knowing that there is a good chance my children will forgive me.  It’s much easier to imagine letting another man love me knowing that my children believe that I deserve that.  It’s much easier to imagine letting myself love, wholeheartedly again, knowing that my 4 little hearts are mending again.  

“Divorce is hard.  I hope you never have to go through it.”  

Butterflies...

We have our first real boyfriend.  My oldest daughter, at the very same age that I was and who has never been one to settle, has met the first boy to put that look in her eye and smile on her face, which I recognize all too well.  This is the real deal.  This is the one who must have that extra something that she has been patiently holding out for since she decided she wanted a boyfriend, but not just any boyfriend.  This is the one that could break her heart.  This is the one that she will learn many hard lessons from.  This is the one who I will be watching like a hawk, making sure he is worthy.  

We picked him up for our first date…I mean their first date. And as we got closer and closer to his house, we were both trying to talk each other out of our tummy aches (which, in the moment, my jaded heart hadn’t recognized as very special and exciting butterflies.).  He was a sweet boy, with a lovely family and their adorable family dog.   I couldn’t help thinking, when I met them all, how lucky they were to meet her. 

I’ve put everything I have into raising her with enough confidence and patience to hold out for extra special and to be worthy of it and appreciative of it when she finds it.  My girl has some sky high standards these days and I knew that boy must be extra special. (He better be. My girl is a gem.)  It wasn’t lost on me, the way he looked at her, like he couldn’t believe his eyes.  And the way he smiled and floated on air around her, just as I have been watching my giddy daughter float lately.  

So far, she tells me a lot about him and them (like when they had the “are we boyfriend/girlfriend?” talk and she reminded him that he hadn’t asked her yet, but that he was welcome to ask her next time they saw each other in person.  My Girl.)  It’s not the usual “Whatever, it’s not important, don’t worry about it” (aka “none of your business mom”).   It IS important.  And it’s exciting and new and a start of a magical/horrific dating lifetime filled with heavenly highs and gut wrenching lows.  It’s a new chapter for us.  And I want to know EVERYTHING.  I won’t know everything.  But I want to.  I want her to not be able to stop talking about him, and I want to hang on her every word.  And in very grateful return,  I will try not to gush and choke up everytime I see that twinkle in her eye (because I guess that’s lame), and I will try to keep my very wise opinions  to myself…as much as I possibly can.  Lines of communication can be very fragile at this age.

A few weeks after our first date… I mean their first date, they went to his Homecoming dance together.  He bought three different ties just to make sure he had the perfect color to match her dress, which I thought was really adorable (and smart, because in all honesty, perfection is pretty much what I’m looking for, for my girl).   We stood in his living room, with his family, and took pictures of our children, who were positivley glowing.  Everytime I look at that picture, I am so thankful for that huge, genuinely happy smile on her face, and so impressed that his smile may be even bigger.  

I've learned to embrace the butterflies I get evertime I see them together.  Now if I could just convince her to introduce him to her three precious little siblings. 

Chapter- Unhappily Never After

Chapter-unhappily never after

He hugged me.  We had barely spoken face to face in over two years, after our 14 year failed attempt at happily ever after, as I have tried desperatly to avoid eye contact with my unrequited love, and suddenly, he walked onto my porch and pulled me to him and hugged me. It was a surprisingly comfortable, familiar hug. It was a tight hug, with every fiber of his also battered heart, and his deep breath quivered a bit.  And our war weary hearts beat strongly against each other. 

I asked him what it was for. He let go and walked away without answering, in his truest style, and then stopped and looked back and said “just because”...with tears in his eyes.  And in that moment, I think we both saw two people who had given it everything we could, and neither of which was enough for the other in the earth shattering end. 

I was shaken...to my core. It felt like I was facing a demon I had long given up on. The one who would NEVER come around and realize how lucky he was to have me.  He is the only one in the world who has ever met that whole-hearted, unjaded, passionate woman. He is the only man who that woman ever gave her all. He broke that woman. And suddenly he was standing on my porch, hugging her. 

 It hurt.  It brought to the surface, all the sadness that my anger had buried.  And then It felt a bit healing. I cried off and on, for days, at the thought of it. The tears feel like a release of a tiny bit of that painful notion that he will never consider himself lucky to have been so loved by me, that he will never be sorry for taking me for granted or  ever appreciate all that I poured into him and our family.  Maybe there is hope that he will one day be very genuinely sorry for breaking me, or look back in awe of everything I gave.  

 That full moon was something last night, after all...

3rd anniversary of all the kids in school...

I just sent my crew off for their first day of school.  Oddly, it did not give me the same euphoric feeling it ALWAYS has.  I didn’t spend this summer on the verge of nervous breakdowns and yearning for the first day of school.   And the summer went by in a flash rather than it’s usual eternity.   Don’t get me wrong, it was rough.  It was it’s typical mix of ice cream and swimming and frolicking and playing and laughing and fighting and bickering and tattling and bickering and fighting and tattling and laughing and bickering and fighting, and whining and the endless, relentlessly exhausting task of putting smiles on my precious, ungrateful children's faces, who, quite frankly were just as sick of me and each other as I was of all of them.  But as usual, we made the best and most of it.  And we survived.  

It helps that they can all fend for themselves (far more than they would ever actually let on).  They can get their own snacks and pour their own drinks.  We can go anywhere now, without strollers.  Everyone can buckle themselves into their car seats.  We don’t need diaper bags and snacks and sippy cups.  

Maybe it helped that I was down one kid most of the time (though I missed her like hell) as my teenager found herself a summer home this year and had a two month “sleepover” at a friends house, in an effort to be anywhere else but a house filled with her siblings (can’t say that I blamed her).  Maybe it helps that my boys took every moment that I didn’t insist on entertaining them to entertain themselves with their video game obsession.  It did get a bit worrisome at times, but I just had to keep reminding myself of the summer I spent trying to save Princess Peach.  

I’m sure it helps that I’m forced to share custody of my kids with their dad half the time.  I never imagined  that would happen, but it did, and in the interest of full disclosure, I needed it, whether I knew it or not.  I remember one time, while I was really in the thick of stay at home motherhood, with toddlers and babies and diapers and he was working 9-5, telling someone “I just worry that he thinks he works harder than I do.”  And he did.  Deep down inside, we always both knew he did.  And I think, deep down, underneath other far more painful reasons that I had to leave him, we both knew that I was never going to get the help I desperately needed with parenthood if I stayed.  Shared custody was a necessary sacrifice.  It takes the edge off, and I still struggle to cope with it.  

My growing, capable children and new found moments of silence and a very quiet house on this first day of school morning, have reminded me how lucky I was to be able to stay home with ever one of my children (and there are a lot of them) before sending them off to school.  It was a genuine blessing and there was never ever a moment that I wanted to be doing something else with my life.  One of my favorite things to do every morning when I have my coffee is check my Facebook memories where I have obsessivley document my journey through motherhood.  And they never fail to remind me how much I have loved this job.  Motherhood is my passion and even in the midst of my occasional nervous breakdowns, I didn’t take a single second of it for granted, I swear.  Those years at home with my babies brought me an overwheling and exhausting joy, great enough to overshadow my unrequited love.  He worked hard enough to afford me an invaluable opportunity of a lifetime, and I worked my ass off trying to be worthy of it.  

It’s not lost on me.  And on this third anniversary of having all four kids in school, and surviving a survival of the fittest type challenge,  I can look back at those very long grueling days that I once believed would never ever end, and I would never survive, and pinch myself at the selective memories of that moment in time.  

If We Knew God’s Greater Plan...

Recently, a  friend presented me with a question; If we knew what God’s greater plan was, or why we are meant to endure such things, would that make it any easier? I have spent countless nights pleading to God, in an effort to change his plan for my mother, but I will never forget the moment my pleas changed from “please God, see my mother through this one more time” to “God, please take her and end this battle”.

 My mother spent years of her life striving for perfection always trying to please everyone. She fought many a losing battle and I remember my father often telling her to “stop trying to save the world”. Life is full of letdowns when you have such good intentions.

She was a dedicated wife who’s only mistake was choosing a mate who had no interest in pretending to be perfect. He tried to teach her to focus on the good rather than dwell on the bad. But she was not ready for this liberating approach and perhaps resented the fact that it came so easily to him.

She was a dedicated teacher in the school district that recognized her special ability to handle the worst kids they could throw at her, only to have them turn their backs on her and accuse her of being too harsh on those kids. I often run into former students who tell me, with a residual look of fear in their eyes, that she was tough. So tough that they wish their kid had a teacher just like her!

And she was a dedicated mother who raised a son who seem to master the art of at least appearing to be perfect, and a daughter who spent her teen years resenting the very idea of such unrealistic expectations and often found pleasure in throwing her rebellious imperfections and her poor mother’s face.

Being a mother now myself, I have learned a lot about just how perfectly imperfect my mother was. It wasn’t perfection she was demanding from others, it was simply her want to see her loved ones, and even those rotten students, be the best people they could be. And she was always harder on herself than she was on anyone else when those people fell short. I have no doubt, for instance, that the lessons in tough love that she was forced to teach her  idiot teenage daughter were far more hurtful for her than they were for that foolish young girl.

In the last leg of her time here on earth, she became a grandmother. Her never ending soul-searching journey to find herself seemed to stop dead in its tracks the moment she met her first grandchild. She was happy to simply be grandma and never seemed to struggle with that role as she did with all the others. Her need to please and appear perfect found the ideal outlet in her grandchildren. In my five-year-old daughter’s eyes, grandma could do no wrong. Madeline is all at once,  the lucky one for getting to know her grandma so well, and the poor little girl who spent the last year waiting patiently to resume weekly sleepovers and camp outs by candlelight in the living room at grandma’s house. And while my heart breaks for the newest grand kids who have been cheated out of knowing their perfect grandma, I am devastated by the thought of my daughter losing her first best friend. I can only imagine the pleas  my mother made to her God, begging him to let her watch her grandchildren grow up and to let her shine a bit longer in the starring role of her lifetime, just as I prayed that all of her grandchildren could get to know the capable woman I still conjure up in my dreams every night; the woman who’s world revolved around them, not her illness.

Just as her downward spiral began, she took a very uncharacteristic moment to sit me down and tell me that she is proud of the mother I am to her precious grandchildren. I believe she is thankful and respects me for breaking the cycle of demanding perfection. I mother with my heart and without regard to how it appears to others. She was grateful to me for giving her grandchildren the kind of peaceful, stress-free, fun filled childhood that every child should know and probably doesn’t give herself enough credit for giving her own children the same. And she was pleasantly surprised that despite my obvious flaws, my children, her grandchildren, are genuinely kind, caring, polite, headstrong, independent, and yes, perfectly imperfect.

It took a while, but my mother did learn to stop taking life so seriously. And perhaps a credit to her “pal Petey” and his odd sense of humor, she learned to laugh, even at herself. We all grew to appreciate my mother more as she grew to appreciate herself. We were thankful rather than burdened by Sunday dinners at mom’s house. We were amused rather than annoyed by her incessant curiosity. We even saught the  nagging, motherly advice that we once resented because it was forced upon us. And my father, her ex-husband, never wastes an opportunity to tell us what a wonderful woman our mother was.

 Her faith saw her through many hard times. And eventually she learned to stop judging her life through the critical eyes of others, and instead begin living and learning through the forgiving eyes and unconditional love of her God. We found great comfort in watching my mother’s faith remain so unwavering during this agonizing process. Who are we to question God while we watched in awe as her faith held up and she still insisted on going to church every week even though it involved the challenges of the wheelchair and the humbling inability to rise with the rest of the congregation to sing his praises and the need to be lifted in and out of the pews, and the special,  doting attention from her loving and dedicated church family, which she once would have found terribly uncomfortable.

 I respect the Lord’s path, and I genuinely trust him. I only ask that he respect us for learning the valuable lessons this type of tragedy is meant to teach us, and to take note that we did this a long time ago, even before we were forced to do so out of fear and that the cost of losing someone we love. And I pray that he shower her with all the praise and accolades her dedication to him surely warrants.

 God bless you Mom. I am certain he will.