And a happy new year to you too!!

I’ve spent a good part of 2014 stating how I can’t wait to shake the dust off my feet once this year finally ends and with plenty of good reason I might add. But as hindsight is 20/20 and I am able to look back at 2014 with far more clarity than I had going into it.  For me 2014 was filled with new experiences.  On last New Year’s Eve I crashed a wedding with my best friend, enjoyed Haitian New Year’s traditions, and in general had a wonderful time with someone other than my immediate family.  It was the first year I spent away from my family.  I video chatted with my other half and sons and later I talked to my mother on the phone.  I actually missed her considering how tense our relationship had grown only a few weeks earlier.  Now I wonder if perhaps that New Year’s Eve was a blessing in disguise.  This will be my second New Year’s Eve without my mother.  In a way, not spending it with her again this year doesn’t seem to have affected me over much.  Or perhaps I’m speaking far too soon.  The night is young still. 

It’s nearly midnight where I am.  Well, at least an hour and a half more to go until midnight.  I missed my friend earlier and started thinking about my last New Year’s Eve.  It occurred to me then that as painful as 2014 was, it gave me a lot for which I’m grateful.  I am grateful that I am alive to see another year.  Three women I loved dearly did not make it to the end.  As difficult the losses were for me, I am still standing on my own two feet, barely at that.  

2014 showed me the depth of my strength.  I have taken hits after hits this year and now that the year is finally nearing the end, I am surprised to find myself still in ring, ready for the next round.  It has taught me to love the broken fractured version of me.  I have learned to tolerate my weakness and see in it strength that comes through endurance.  As I bit 2014 adieu, I am unafraid to look at the woman in the mirror.  In a way, I find that I even admire her.  There are no artifice about her.  She’s simply a woman who’s completely at ease in her own skin.  2014 made me realize that I am she and I am actually ok with that.  

As this year ends, I bid it farewell, like to an old friend or lover who is leaving my life for good.  As the poet said, “it is better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all.”  I have loved this year despite my best effort to hate it.  I must swallow the bitterness it has brought if I am to savor its many sweetness.  As I await the arrival of 2015, I find myself awaiting it with determination and resolve.  It is a new chapter still waiting to be written.  I am the author and the story this coming year will tell will be of my choosing.  

2014 was the year of pain, or agony.  It was the year of my birth, in a manner of speaking.  It was the year I lost my mother and discovered the woman in the grown up version of her daughter.  Maybe when she said she saw the change in me, she was finally seeing what I see now, who I have always been beneath the shadow of the girl I once knew.  I think maybe I finally grew up or as a Pastor once said, I became more myself.  

All I know is, 2015 is coming.  Not for nothing, I’m going to do it my way.  It’s time I stopped pretending that I ever did anything any way but mine.  An old dog doesn’t learn new tricks and you can tell yourself the same lie only so many times.  So it’s time to tell the truth.  I’m not changing.  I am me and this is the only version of myself I’m interest in being.  To quote the poet “love me or hate me, both are in my favor.  If you love me, I’ll always be in your heart.  If you hate me, I’ll always be on your mind.”  I can live with that.  

So thank you, 2014 for imparting a valuable lesson to me in self-love.  Just because I’m grateful for everything you’ve poured into my life, doesn’t mean I’m sorry to see you go.  From me to you, thanks for hanging in there with me this past year.  Here’s to hoping a prosperous and another happy New Year. 

The Scribe Must Go On

When I was 19, I had an idea or rather, I created a character.  She was a supporting character for the main character in a story.  It was my very first manuscript and I was obsessed.  I finished it in 3 months, the manuscript that is.  But being young and not exactly confident of my own writing, I tossed it in the proverbial drawer and forgot about it.  I started writing when I was 13 and something magical happened.  Seeing words flying out from fingertips onto paper gave me a sense of release.  But writing from the heart can often leave you exposed, naked, vulnerable.  Since I loved to read and read voraciously, it made sense for me to make up stories.

 

There was a period of ten years where I did not write anything.  I was busy living my life rather than living it through the characters in pages of books or in stories I made up.  I managed to finish two advance degrees, get married, and even have children.  I tried many times over that decade to find my way back to my writing.  Somehow, the voice rang false and the words that spewed forth gave the impression of being dishonest.  What is a writer if they can’t write?  I did attempt to blog about my experience when I first became a mother.  It was a life changing experience and I realized I had a lot to say.  Still, I hadn’t found my voice. 

I would, over the course of the next few years discover the writings of my youth.  I learned to marvel at that girl’s talent and perhaps I was a bit jealous.  She was good.  So why couldn’t I do what she had done.  Then I rediscovered Sabrina.  I have spent the last five years trying to tell her story.  It was a very powerful story.  But no matter how many times I wrote her story I always ended up throwing out my work and starting over.  I wasn’t yet ready to be honest.  I’ve been busy growing into myself.  What I did not do is stop and take an honest inventory of myself.  I was busy changing, but I never once stopped to savor the changes or appreciate the person I was becoming. 

Then on a Friday afternoon, my cousin told me that my mother had at best a month to live.  My world simply fell out from beneath my feet.  I mean, I was still standing on the floor of the hospital outside my mother’s room but my world was simply coming undone.  If you’ve followed this blog then you know what happened.  She eventually passed away on August 16, about 2 months and 3 days from the date when my cousin told me to brace myself for the inevitable.  But she did something for me before she left.  She ripped off the veil from my eyes until I stood in the blinding sun staring at the truth I had refused to see.  Sabrina lay before me and I finally accepted why I was unable to tell her story.  I hadn’t been honest.  I needed to be brutally honest.  So I took a deep breath, and started this Journey.

Why am I writing this?  I don’t know.  I just need to utter these words and be held accountable to myself.  I can’t stop writing.  This is my therapy.  This is my drug of choice.  This is where I cut my veins and pour out my pain.  My virtual pen is the instrument of my salvation.  I am obsessed.  I am possessed.  The only way to quiet the voices in my head is to simply write the words.  This is for me.  This is for my muse.  My mother.

I had asked myself if I had set my mother on a pedestal now that she was gone.  The honest truth is, my mother infuriated me, frustrated me, but undeniably, she loved me.  She was far from perfect and she could be thoughtlessly cruel like when she made me give away a pair of earrings that she never acknowledged I wanted.  But then I was no better because I simply stood there and gave it away like it didn’t matter.  Beneath my clown smile, my heart was shattering, but I did it for her anyway because it meant so much to her.  It didn’t stop me from giving her a piece of my mind.  No, I’m not someone who will simply take it lying down.  I will stand up and fight for myself.  But in the end, sitting in her hospital bed, the incident with the earrings which had fractured what was left of our fragile relationship didn’t matter.  She knew I didn’t hate her even if in that moment I swore I did.  I knew I shouldn’t have said those words to her but she let me take them back anyway.  

What I miss is her ability to forgive and love me anyway, flaws and all.  I was different from her.  I made her feel like I didn’t need her and she was irrelevant to me.  But I think in the end, she saw just how relevant she was to me.  She was ready to go for 2 months and 3 days but she waited until I was ready to leave me.  In her morphine induced haze on that last night of her life, she still found the strength to hear my words and give my hand a firm squeeze.  It was the touch of the mother who could simply make me feel better by her mere presence.  

After ten year of trying to figure it out, I finally understood what story I had to tell.  It is a tale of a daughter coming to grips with the loss of her mother.  The honest truth is painful but what is a tale without honesty?  I have lost the one thing in the world which made any sense in my world.  I have lost my rudder.  I have my family but I am fractured and lost inside.  I’m hoping that somehow, the words I write will help me find my way home. 

Four Months and Counting

I woke up this morning and for the first time since her death, I wasn’t filled with an overwhelming sense of loss.  The other night I had a dream that I was praying and she was all better.  Then I woke up and realized it was just a dream.  I had seen her in my dreams as if she was real but in the cold light of day, she was still dead.  Dead.  How final is that word.  This morning when I woke up, I felt a sense of hope.  I thought maybe this is where I start to finally heal, to move forward with my life. 

Now I sit before this blank screen, spewing words at it, in the hope that somehow I can make sense of my life.  

I spent the afternoon with my brother and my son.  I wanted to reach out to him.  I wanted to ask him how he was.  I wanted to have a real conversation with him.  In the end, I just settled for occupying the same space as him.  In the movie theater, I held my son in my arms during the scary bits and I realized the chasm between us (my brother and me) has grown deeper, wider, since my mother’s passing.  

I have felt in the not too distant past that my brother and father were somehow growing distant from me.  I didn’t travel halfway across the world to bury my mother.  I did feel excluded and abandoned.  Today I realized that we are so broken without her that being in each others company is painful.  It’s a reminder of what we shared and what we lost.  

A part of our soul was ripped away when she died.  Love was ripped from our hearts and buried thousands of miles across an ocean and two continents away.  I don’t know if we will ever find our way back to each other and be a family again.  Not like we used to be.  Inside me tonight is just numbness.  As this wretched year slowly draws to a close, I find myself staring into a hopeless abyss.  

Perhaps I’m being dramatic.  I have hope.  I have two little boys who love me and despite what I may often feel, still require my love.  They keep me alive and moving forward when I can barely find the will to move.  Every day that passes, I see the baby slowly pull my dad forward, a millimeter at a time.  Will healing ever come?

Being alone with each other hurts far too much.  I miss you so much mother.  I don’t know if I can stand this pain for whatever remains of my life.  I didn’t know pain like this existed.  I never knew that tears could flow so freely against my will.  I didn’t know I would ever live without you.  It’s been nearly six months since my cousin said you would die.  And you died.  Yet, I still find it hard to fathom how you can be gone.  

I am tempted to echo your grandson’s cry, “Mommy come back!”  God please make this pain stop.  Or yet, give me strength to withstand this storm that’s raging.  Even my words can’t comfort me now.