Split

How do you parent children here on Earth, as well as children in heaven?  How do you divide your time, attention, and heart in such a way that everyone gets what they need and deserve?

To parent a child in heaven means you have to tend to your broken heart daily.  In tending to your broken heart, you run the risk of living, at least temporarily, in the darkness.  When living in the darkness, the lightness and life of your living children sometimes seem blindingly impossible to bear.

How does a person function as a whole being when they have been reduced to pieces of their former self?  It’s so hard to try to put into words, the existence of a parent walking this road of life without their child. 

It’s “unnatural”.  It’s “unbearable”.  It’s “the worst pain”.  It’s “unimaginable”.

But then, when you have the blessing of remaining living children, you have to, to a certain degree, bottle up that pain, that unbearable existence, in order to continue to be able to give them, the ones that lived, the love and attention and positive nurturing life they deserve. 

Also, selfishly, for my own sake, I want to be able to give in completely to those happy “my kids are alive and life is good moments,” and not be ripped from them at some point each time, with the remembrance that one of them is gone.

I am broken and I am sad.  But at the same time I am experiencing hope and happiness.

It is painful. It is complicated.

I want so badly to be a mom to all four of my children here on this planet.  I don’t want to have to divide my time and attention and heart. 

I don’t want to be broken.  I don’t want to be split. 

I want to be whole.

If I were whole, I would be a better mother to my sons and my daughter.  I wouldn’t have to, so often, drum up the energy to just stand up.  I wouldn’t necessarily have to concentrate so hard on the day to day requirements this life places on me.

It would be a nice break.  Because this life, the one I’m living right now, nearly two years out from the day our world stood still, this life….it’s a lot of work.

I want nothing more in this life than to be remembered as a good person.  Most importantly a good mother, and a good wife.  I know I am doing the best I can under seemingly impossible circumstances, but man it wears a gal out…