I guess I’m having one of those rocking out to Sarah McLauchlin kinda nights.
It has been kinda and up and down kinda emotional last week for me.
Saturday I participated in a 5K walk/run for the Cumberland Valley Breast Care Alliance. I don’t think that I was really prepared for the emotion that I felt that day.
I was proud of myself because I was doing something I didn’t think I would by actually do before, but there was so much more.
You kind of get caught up in the engery of something like that. People from all walks of life joined together to walk for a cause to raise money for a diease that rips away pieces of our society every day. Mother, sons daughters, fathers, men and women are affected everyday by cancer, if not directly, indirectly.
I know my mother has had some scares in her life which, even scares, have a lasting effect. Being there on that rainy Saturday was an expereince. To see the women who have survived, those strong women who beat the disease and who are still beating cancer. Every second, every day, every month they are living. It make you appriciate live even more.
It makes me want to hug every last one of them. It makes me want to hug my grandmother and mother even tighter.
Fitting it was they day before Mother’s Day.
Yet another emotionally charged day. I have come to the realization that I need to, I don’t want to say make things right, but reconnect with family. I think that I spent so much time pushy myself away I forgot why I started in the first place.
I think there is a big part of me that doesn’t feel I deserve it so I act in a way to support my self sabatoging behavior. I want to be taken care of but at the same time I want independance and my family has taken the full blow.
I taken them for granted way to often. For so long, I’ve wanted to change them. Make them fit my expectations.
That sounds so selfish.
This year in particular has been a weird year because I think I finally started seeing my parents through adult eyes. I know that I will always be their little boy, but I think the transition is finally taking place. I’m allowing it to happen, finally growing up.
My mother had a major surgery to resurface her knee, or what they like to say knee replacement. She ended up having complication, nothing major, just her stay and recovery have been a little longer that they expected.
The mental recovery has been far more complicated. My mother has been dealing with depression, quietly, for many years. Living on a cocktail of anti-depressants, quietly dealing with things afriad to reach out to anyone. I think she just learned to live with it adapt to it the best she could.
It all started when the job she had for 20 years closed and she had to find another job. I don’t think she was ever really happy since then. Now closing in on 60 she is facing a another crossroads. She is trying to get on disablity because of her knees. I’m pretty much her only support because my grandmother and father I don’t really know how to deal with the situation. They see it as being lazy and quitting, when it is 58 years of baggage and low self esteem paired with medical problems and going back to a job that she hates.
I had my mother tell that she has changed. She doesn’t want to be here anymore. Of course my mother’s lovely sense of timing, she tells me this after she randomly show up to my work for lunch. Drops the I want to die bomb and drops me off at work. But that is another story for another time. 
I wanted to make this mother’s day special for her because the last 6 months haven’t been the easiest. When it comes to mother’s day card and cards in general I kinda have ADHD. Short and sweet, that is what works for me. If the card is a book, the little monkey with the cymbols will start up.
I’ve been meaning to write both my mother and father letters. just verbalizing a lot of different things that go unsaid. So I took this moment to tell my mom what I hold back on saying. It was all good. Not you never let me play with barbies so I know I want to dress up like a southern belle kind of unsaid issues.
Actually she really didn’t say much when I did play with barbies. But that is a different issues all together.
It was a very heart felt card thanking her for being a awesome mom, because really she is, and a care of hope. Life comes at us fast. There are ups and downs and it is easy to get carried under. I wanted her to know that with every down swing the is an up swing and I am there for her.
I was surprised how emotion it was for me to write out the card. How emotional it was for me to release.
Why is it so hard to bring out the negative and so hard to say I love you and talk about the positive?
I tell my mom I love you all the time but there is that hurried nature to it. When I’m running out the door to go back to my place, or when I’m ending a phone conversation. It feels lessened even though it isn’t meaningless. So it was kinda nice to spend time with my mom this mother’s day because we actually took time to just, “be”, not just running through life as normal.
Next is my father…
This one is going to be fun. My mother and I have always been close. My father on the other hand… there has always been a wall, maybe a screen between us. We interact with one another but I don’t know if either one of us really know how to act around one another.
It’s been like that for years. Sometimes I feel like I need a secret decoder ring to make sense of it sometimes. There is a lot that is left unsaid. I know he loves me I just don’t think I’ve heard him say it… it sad I really can’t remember a time. It has just been an unspoken assumption.
I don’t even know what I would do if he did say it… wait I know given that when he said he was proud of me when I graduated college I literally broke down to the point that people were actually concerned about me. So I’m suspecting a similar response.
So I have choosen to follow suit and write my father “the letter” for Father’s Day. I’m ready to put everything in the past and start a new. He did his best and what he thought was the best for me. The older I’ve gotten the more I realized that I am a lot like him with a slice of crazy from my mom. 
They are so polar opposite. My mother is emotional and my father is not at least on the outside. I’ve seen him cry once, at a funeral, and get mad only a few times. Never at me. He is my silent protector. My mother said that when they dropped me off at college for the first time my father cried on the way home. I hope that with this letter I can start the healing between the two of us.
It would be nice.
Now that I’ve written a book and shed a tear or two. I think I should probably go to bed.
I apologize for no prom dress pic. I’m still waiting for one.
