Smaller Now

It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't lost a child the way it feels to be sad every day...every single day...even in the presence of joy.  I know I'm doing markedly better than I was even two years ago, and four years ago?  Wow, the difference is staggering.

But...
being a parent who has a lost child is like an invisible illness.   The face I bring to work everyday or to the coffee shop to study or draw doesn't always tell the whole story.  If you look closely, you'll note the days I don't bother with makeup and the days my hair looks a little crazy.  But I am strong enough now to throw a smile on and keep it light, except with my closest of my friends.  What you don't see are the nights like tonight when my anxiety is climbing the walls.  The trigger was probably something as simple as seeing a picture of her pop up in my Facebook Memories...one I hadn't looked at in awhile, and one taken in a moment when she was happy and feeling  proud of herself.  Those pictures are treasures and when I show one to someone, we say sigh over it together and talk about how beautiful she was.  What I don't say is how those pictures sometimes just kill me because so many emotions are stirred...longing because all I want is to see her and talk to her...sadness that she missed out on so much...anger that she was cheated...guilt that I couldn't protect her...
and usually those feelings play on a loop for me.  Add in one stressor of a typical day and I'm up at four in the morning writing because I had a nightmare about the road and concentrating on something else is the only way I can stop seeing her lying there.

Weary is what it is to be a bereaved mother.  It is marching through everyday with all of those feelings strapped to your back like a soldier and his gear.  You do what you have to do, but boy, do you get tired.

And the joy part? Yeah, it's there.  But not the way you think.  People say, "But you have good days."  And if they have never lost a child, they probably think it is that way:  good days and bad days...separate.  I used to say that was all wrong, that there are bad days and there are worse days.  But in the interest of progress, I will say this.  There is nothing as clean cut as a good day and a bad day after losing your child.  There are certainly bad days, but surely a moment, if you look hard enough, that had something redeemable within it.  And by that same coin, sorry, my optimist friends, you know who you are, just know that every good day, despite its ease or distractions, is unspeakably difficult.  I am forever walking around thinking, "She's dead.  She's really dead.  I can't believe that happened.  Did that really happen?"

And when there are moments of pure joy?  There aren't any moments of  "pure" joy anymore.  Her absence bleeds into every small win.  It just does.  It's inevitable.

Jacob would kill me for sharing this, but I will.

The other night, we were watching a show together, and he said, "Mom, feel my face.  Right here."

Sure enough, there was a wild, twisty hair poking up from his previously smooth cheek.  "Oh wow!  What have you got going on there, Jake?"

I asked him if he was ready to take the plunge of starting to shave.  "It's up to you, sweetie.  Just know once you start, you have to keep doing it."

He cocked his head to the side and pondered this.

"If you're ready, I'll show you how."  I offered.  "We can do it right now."

"Okay, yeah," he said.  "Let's do it."

We jumped up and sat back down right away when I realized I'd have to do a little google research.  I have no experience shaving faces or man whiskers whatsoever.  Up?  Down?  With the grain?  Against?  Who knew?

So once I had a little male perspective from Google, we were off to the bathroom.  I hot steamed a washcloth and covered his face with it, and we giggled about opening all his introvert pores.  Next, he watched in the mirror, while we took turns lathering his face up.  I reminded him of the play shaving kit he had for the bathtub when he was four, and my heart broke just a sliver to compare the two Jacobs in my mind, both with faces covered in foam, one four years old in the bathtub and the other fifteen, standing there, taller than me.

Relying on all the times I'd sat and watched my Dad shave, I walked him through holding his skin taut with one hand, while making smooth downward strokes with the other.  I even mimed the bit where the man has to suck in his lower lip to make the plane of his chin an even surface to draw the blade across.

When we'd finished, he rinsed off and we started raiding the cupboards for some aftershave so he could get the complete manly experience.

This little ten minute project was one of the times the pain of living without her has been worth it.  I was glad to be alive.  It was a moment I'll never forget.  And hopefully one Jake won't either.  I asked him as we "slapped" the aftershave on, if when he was all grown up, with kids of his own, and I was gone, would he remember that I was the one who taught him to shave?  He smiled, dubious that he would ever be that old or in charge of other human lives, or perhaps that there would ever be a day that I would not be here.  "Yes, I'll remember."

"Are you sad it was me instead of Dad that showed you?"  I asked him.

"Mom, it's always you."

My heart, in that moment, was full to capacity...but my capacity for joy now is just a bit smaller.  See there is that part that is reserved for his sister...the good, the sad, the happy memories, the flashbacks.

What could have made teaching Jake to shave better?  If Cory was here to watch in the doorway, teasing him, and running her little hand over his freshly shaved cheek, or even just here to hear this story over the phone.

That's what.

Every joy is made a little bit smaller by her absence.  That is the law of child loss.

I have learned to live without her here, but I feel it every moment.