I miss you all the time
This story was originally published on HerStry blog on July 7, 2021.
My mother passed away when I was eight years old, and for some time after that, I picked up journaling to cope with the difficult feelings I was having. She wrote in her own beautiful notebooks while she was sick, and I suppose in some way, I was trying to find a connection. I often shared thoughts and feelings about a variety of topics, from what pony I was going to ride that week in my horseback riding lessons, to making up stories about my dolls’ lives, through to writing out seemingly random emotions that I was having. However, at the end of one particular journal, I put together a poem that ended up appearing in the local newspaper under my mother’s obituary. This was the start of a long writing journey, peppered with growth and self-doubt and loss, but also small successes.
I recall hiding under my blankets at night with one of my many diaries, a pen, and battery-powered book light, trying to carve out the words on paper that would reflect what I was feeling in my eight-year-old head. There were moments I turned to a variety of memories—feeding ducks at the local pond, wearing Mom’s gold eyeshadow, playing kitchen on the bedroom floor—but none of that seemed to really get to the depth of what I was feeling or experiencing. I didn’t think it had a name other than just being sad.
It was soon after she passed, and shortly after that poem came out in The Daily News, that writing became more prominent in my life. However, so did the sadness and anxiety that came with her passing. I began picking at my skin as a way to cope with the emotions I was experiencing on the inside, though I certainly wasn’t able to connect the two until much later in my life. I remember jotting thoughts down on the creamy white paper or writing my feelings in multi-colored gel pens while digging at hangnails, bleeding onto the diary sheets as I rushed to process my grief and remember my mother.
However, the biggest revelation in journaling came when I turned 29 and realized I had lived to be older than my mother was when she died. From the time I was young—maybe around when I started picking—I always had a worry in the back of my head that I wouldn’t get to be 29 because she hadn’t gotten there either, so when I finally had my birthday, I felt as if I had been given extra time to live in ways that she hadn’t gotten to experience. I called them bonus days because that’s what they felt to be after so many years of thinking that I wouldn’t get them at all.
For quite a long time afterward, I focused entirely on these bonus days, dropping the journaling and hoping to do things and experience life events that my mother hadn’t gotten to fully appreciate or have. It became a little like a game to me, doing the things she might have wanted to do while remembering her in tangible ways. I adopted a cat that looked similar to her cat. I wrote a fictional book about the sadness I was feeling and the way I picked at my skin to cope. I bought my first car and moved barely far enough away from my family that it could be considered away. But none of those things compared to how connected I felt when I wrote that poem and dug around in my head for something that only creative words could provide.
It took a little while, but I did eventually drop the concept of bonus days. I had a small epiphany on social media one day after seeing a post that eludes me now. They weren’t bonus days for her memory at all. They were beautiful days in my own life where I needed to experience the things I was interested in and wanted to understand. Not living for her didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to miss her, but rather it meant that I was going to live my own life to the fullest capacity, no matter how many years long it was destined to be.
Around that time in my life, I began seeking help for the way I was feeling because it was getting worse—not better. My worry had developed into something more than just worry and preoccupation with when I might pass on, or maybe it had been like that for longer than I was willing to admit. But with getting assistance and having someone listen to my struggles and history, I was able to begin writing again. I was able to find the happiness and peace I had been looking for inside of myself while still having the capacity to tell stories that others might want to hear.
In the end, I adopted more cats. I wrote more books. I moved back to my hometown. I picked up my notebooks again and started remembering more. Connecting more. But also, I started moving on. Slowly, one day passed that I wasn’t preoccupied with the concept of my days being a part of her. Then a week. Then a month. Two, three, six months. A year. I came to accept that even if I missed her all the time, it shouldn’t keep me from living.
Life is like a journal, in some ways. We write a page every day, some happy, some sad, some in the middle. We cry, we smile, we laugh, and sometimes even rip out the things we didn’t mean to say when we were angry. But in the end, that book of our life showcases us at our best and our worst, all our days, whether they’re bonus ones or not. Some books are short and some are long, but they are all different—and they are ours.
Stories grow best when shared.
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