In the interest of being healthy, I am having banana pudding for lunch. Just thought I’d let you all know.
And in the interest of not over-spending, I bought myself a new purse which I spent WA-HA-HA-HAY too much money on. I’m telling myself that it’s a No-Dependents-Yet gift from me to me. (In truth, this happened on Monday but I’m still waiting for it to deliver.) (Or I would show you a picture.)
I just don’t want to think about titling my entries this early in the morning. Or ever.
So it’s Tuesday morning. I’ve had a very bittersweet week so far. I am a single woman about to be 30 years old. I live by myself with my 3 cats. I have to be responsible for things like mowing my lawn (no one else is going to take care of it), and things like not over-eating or spending too much money. I have to look out for my best interest. You wouldn’t think that it would be such a difficult thing, but sometimes it is.
I had a good weekend, full of low-stress interactions with people who I like. Yesterday I came home from work and mowed the lawn, then straightened the house some. Changed my sheets, did a load of laundry. Had a sandwich and leftover mashed potatoes for dinner. Watched some TV. Read a little, cried when the mood struck me.
Why do I keep talking to Matt in the first person? Obviously he can’t hear me, and won’t ever hear me again. I know this…and sometimes I even talk to him inside my head – because that’s the only place that he’s still alive? I don’t know. How long will I feel the need to talk to him? How long should I keep his FB page up? You know, it’s been almost 5 months. They said that the initial shock lasts about 6 months generally, and then your life starts settling down again. Of course everyone’s grief is different. I don’t quite know what to expect. I just realized today that the 6 month mark is one day before Matt’s birthday.
I need to start working on being healthy. I know Matt would want that (…curse words…). I know it would make me happier and feel better. Hell, I feel better just after mowing the lawn yesterday, and it’s not like that was strenuous cardio or anything. I’ve been making an effort to eat better already but need to continue that. It’s harder when I’m just cooking for myself.
I have all these good intentions, but I am still so bad at following through sometimes. I don’t know how much of my lack of motivation is because of Matt, and how much is because of my general laziness. I feel like, as long as I’ve been single almost 5 months, that I should be able to organize and motivate myself to be better. And I guess I’m still making slow progress.
I so much want to become a better person because of all this bullshit. Do I act different? I know I feel different. I really, really want ANYthing positive that can come out of this. Yes, I have plenty of time to keep learning. Yes, I wish Matt was here too. I have to keep remembering how glad I am that he is not in such intense pain anymore. I wish there was a way he could see how much I miss him though, and feel loved.
Oh well.
Anyway, just needed to ramble a bit.
I forgot to mention – it’s Sarah’s birthday. She was born 6 years ago at 7pm – this time on that day I was trying to ignore the faint contractions and probably cleaning the house or watching TV.
Matt accused me of loving him as a replacement for Sarah. I finally convinced him that he was completely wrong last year. I know he could see how much I loved him… I think that he wasn’t really able to compute it, though.
The situation with Sarah has been a little comforting lately, because I know that time has healed that wound. It’s a completely different kind of wound of course, but it has a similar root – losing someone who you love.
Anyway. As long as I’m uploading pictures, here is one from 6 years ago.
And here’s one from this year, which I stole from Janet’s FB page….
It’s Monday morning. I’m back at work and figured I’d tell you guys about my weekend. It was a pretty good one, actually. I got up on Saturday morning and drove through Knoxville to Townsend and made my way to Cade’s Cove. I’d never been to the mountains by myself, and it was great. It rained the whole drive from Nashville to Knoxville, but stopped around Watt Road and stayed dry until I was driving through Townsend to get back to Knoxville.
The drive through the mountains was soothing somehow. It didn’t magically make me feel fine or not sad or anything, but it was so nice to be in the mountains surrounded by trees and moss and rhododendron and water and rocks.
(I took the picture below just because I thought it was funny that so many people had pulled over to pet the horses. Like they’ve never seen horses before or something. ??)
After I got back into Knoxville I decided to stop by the UT trial gardens. It WAS raining at this point, and I got pretty wet even though I was wearing a raincoat. But it was just gorgeous and I’m really glad I stopped.
Sunday I went to church with Mom and Dad, and I’m glad I did that too. It’s funny – I forget how much Grace feels like home. It makes sense that it does – I spent more time there than I did anywhere except our house when I lived in Knoxville.
Grandma’s birthday party was a good time too. 🙂 All the siblings were there (Dad’s I mean) including Aunt Luci who I probably hadn’t seen in 10 years or so. I felt comfortable and like I belonged, and it was really nice.
So now I’m back in Nashville, getting on with the day-to-day again. I wish Matt was here. I wished he was with me all weekend long – and I’m not even going to try to explain what an enormous understatement that is. But it is what it is, and time is a healing power, and I’m going to be patient even though I feel like I’m treading water a lot of the time. I know I’ll be OK. But how I wish that I didn’t have anything to recover from….
I missed blogging yesterday, but justified it by telling myself that I blogged Wednesday and that I would today as well. Yesterday was a pretty full day for me, considering. Stephen came over and watched 1776 with me, for which I was SO grateful. After he left, I devoted the next hour or so to cleaning out the garage which I had been putting off for several months. It looks WORLDS better now, and I feel very gratified. After getting the garage and house cleaned up, some old B&C coworkers came over and we grilled burgers, had jello shots, and sat around and talked/watched It’s Always Sunny (very patriotic…). Overall, it was as good of a July 4th as I had hoped for, so that was nice.
I will add that I was surprised at how much I missed Matt just because it was a holiday. It’s not like we ever celebrated the 4th of July other than watching 1776 (and sometimes Team America), but I guess the fact that it was a holiday just made Matt’s absence more noticeable to me. The books I’ve read all say that holidays are bad. I wasn’t expecting this one to be anything important though.
Oh well. I think I’m going to try to hibernate from October through March this winter, though.
Anyway, I’m going to Knoxville this weekend – Grandma’s turning 90 on Sunday. (On an unrelated note, Sarah is turning 6 on Monday.) I’m debating driving in early because I’ve just been feeling lost lately, and for some reason, spending time in an unfamiliar place seems like it might help. If I drive in tonight, I’ll probably go to the mountains tomorrow. If I drive in tomorrow morning, I don’t know what I would do with the rest of the day. I don’t have any friends in Knoxville really, except for family. Of course I never really did have all THAT many friends in Knoxville, which is maybe one reason it was so easy for me to move to Nashville. I don’t know, and it’s not important.
This week, I’ve felt like my footing has been unstable. Like I can’t see past the next turn in the road. I don’t know where I’m going anymore, and I don’t remember how to do all this alone very well. I know all the “right answers” to tell myself, but they only marginally help. Maybe I should stop trying so hard.
ALSO, I’ve decided that my blog is in no way meant to showcase fancy ideas and words, and that I don’t have to feel bad when I just spew mental gibberish here.
My thoughts have been very scattered these last few days. They’re going all over the place and I either haven’t been doing a good job of keeping them controlled, or I haven’t been trying.
Sometimes I get the urge to just start all over somewhere. I was driving to work this morning and remembered the time that Mom and Dad brought me to visit Lipscomb, and we stayed in Cathy Pool’s mom’s apartment (right?) which was off of Charlotte, near the pink elephant. I drive there every day now, and it almost feels like home. It used to feel more like home than it does now, though; Matt was my home. Wherever he was, I was home. We could have moved anywhere, and as long as he was there I would have been happy.
I still feel so disoriented and lost sometimes. Thank God I have people here tying me to Nashville – people who love me and enjoy my company (at least some of the time anyway). It’s so easy to focus on what I have lost rather than what I still have, though; what I lost feels so immense and overpowering though – when I dwell on it anyway.
It’s been over 4 months but it feels like FOREVER since February 20th, even though I still remember that evening well. Maybe I feel like – since 4 months seems like a year ago – I should be stabilizing. And I know I am. But there’s still so much instability, questioning, doubting, loneliness, insecurity, etc. I just want to fix it all. I wish I could take a test to rate how well I’m doing in recovering from all this. It’s not an easy thing for me to gauge. People tell me that they’re glad to see that I’m doing so well…but I don’t know what “doing well” means. I guess that “doing poorly” would mean staying in bed, never cleaning or being proactive, not seeing friends, etc. I’m keeping my house clean, I’m doing fine at work, I’m asking people to hang out with me. So I guess if that means that I’m doing fine, then I’m doing fine.
I just get overwhelmed still. I wonder if anyone will ever love me like Matt did. I’m getting used to living by myself but it’s still so unnatural and I feel Matt’s absence every day.
This is a long process, I know. I need to have realistic expectations for myself. And I need to be thankful for the people who have offered to help me along the way. I need to be patient. Four months is not all that long in the scheme of things, and it’s okay for me to still be struggling; in fact, if I wasn’t, it would probably mean that I was doing something wrong.
Oh, life.
I finally sat down and deleted Matt’s income out of my budget (and also deleted the scooter payments and Vandy payments, which was nice). Much to my surprise, I find that I am perfectly capable of living within my means – I just can’t go around re-decorating my house all the time, and I should stop buying completely unnecessary stuff.
Along those lines, I found out today that a company-wide 2% raise goes into effect today.
So many good things mixed in with the bad, and I’m glad I can appreciate both sides of the coin.
– This year is half-way over
– I’ve been single for over 4 months now
– One of my coworkers brought me flowers from her garden (gladiolas, black-eyed-susans) and they are so pretty
– I need to remember to bring home that meat in the fridge from yesterday…
– There will be no one waiting for me at home again today
– Matt will not be waiting for me at home today, or ever again
– I feel like a broken record a lot of the time lately
– I’m struggling with the Taoist idea that desires cause pain, and no desires bring peace
– I miss being loved by my late husband
– I’d like to bake some bread after work today (stocked up on sandwich fixings yesterday except bread)
– It’s hard for me to remember how much I enjoyed being single and independent before I met Matt, because I don’t enjoy it right now. Am I doing something wrong?
– Matt
– The struggle some days to do anything productive…sometimes I’m able to force myself to get up and do stuff (e.g. grocery shopping, cleaning the bathroom, sweeping the floor, washing dishes, cleaning litter boxes, contacting friends, mowing the lawn, going to a coffee shop – ANYTHING). Sometimes I am not successful in forcing myself to do stuff though. This is nothing new really – I had the same problem when Matt was around. But it seems worse now. I don’t have anyone sitting on the couch distracting me and justifying my laziness. And that makes it all the harder to do anything.
– July 4th is coming up. I used to spend my holidays being blissfully lazy with Matt, but being lazy alone is not blissful. Does anyone want to come over and lie in bed with me while we watch 1776? Sorry, the only VCR is in the bedroom. Maybe I can plan a cook-out. I hate that Matt won’t be there.
– Contentment
– This weekend – I have nothing planned and I probably should
– Work, which I ought to get back to
I’m struck with the thought – how on earth am I doing this?? Which is to say… I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that you can love someone so much, but that will never stop them from being irrevocably gone after they die. Gone. Forever. It’s so, so heartbreaking. If you don’t see me crying, it’s not because I don’t.
This is why people believe in an afterlife. I completely understand.
Edit: I have a tendency to post stuff sometimes and then come back 30 minutes later realizing that I have more to say. Oops. But the more that I have to say right now is this – while Matt being gone continues to break my heart like every day, I’m so thankful for the capacity to feel grateful when other people are kind to me. Sometimes it just amazes me. I had planned to nap during my lunch break but ended up thinking about Matt instead, and when I got back to work Leslie handed me half of her pizza because she couldn’t finish it. Stephen volunteered to stop and grab Chinese for dinner yesterday so that we wouldn’t have to rush to get to the movie. Just little things that probably mean nothing to whoever is doing it can make me feel appreciated, and it’s nice. I feel silly thanking people sometimes for things that they obviously don’t think warrant such thanks. If I explained every time that whenever anyone does anything for me that indicates they were thinking about me, it means SO much. It means that I’m not alone, and that I still have love in my life.
I’m feeling a little disenchanted of life right now. The fact that I am privileged enough to complain about this should probably keep me from complaining. But it doesn’t, and now I feel ungrateful too. Is it too early in the morning to be guilt-tripping myself?
I miss feeling like I belong with other people. I don’t have any claim on anyone, except my family I suppose. Maybe the Ralston’s, sort of, a little bit.
This weekend was fairly full. I spent some time with Stephen on Saturday, then Ryan came over yesterday; both days I worked on my feather quilt which has been on the back burner for about a year now. I have an empty week ahead of me, not including work of course, and that’s daunting. I don’t want to spend the week alone, but I get tired of asking people to hang out with me. You know, I get tired of a lot of this shit. I just want someone to hold me while I cry and cry, maybe rub my back or comb my hair or something.
No more – starting to cry at work. THAT’s never a good thing.
If anyone in Nashville reads this and wants to hang out with me this week, let me know. Otherwise I might just end up asking you….
No Promises This Time 