Friday, March 7, 2025

Friday, March 7, 2025

Tonight's picture was taken in March of 2003. We took Mattie to Los Angeles to visit my parents, while I attended a conference nearby. Mattie was 11 months old and it was his first plane trip! Mattie took to flying like a duck to water and was awake for the entire flight. In this photo, I bent down to try to take a picture of Mattie and this was his reaction! His reaction was he wanted to grab the camera!

Quote of the day: Unlike simple stress, trauma changes your view of your life and yourself. It shatters your most basic assumptions about yourself and your world — “Life is good,” “I’m safe,” “People are kind,” “I can trust others,” “The future is likely to be good” — and replaces them with feelings like “The world is dangerous,” “I can’t win,” “I can’t trust other people,” or “There’s no hope.” ~ Mark Goulston

I have come to the conclusion that I am running a business. I do not produce, sell, or advertise anything. Instead, I am running a three ring circus, but unfortunately it isn't an entertaining as Barnum and Bailey. Keeping my household up and operational is a feat. This week, I tackled another issue I was uneasy about. What? As silly as this sounds, I had to call a company about getting our septic system pumped out. 

Remember for the most part I am a city girl! As a city girl, we are used to SEWERS! But out here in the suburbs of Washington, DC, most people have a septic system, because there are NO sewers. I know the county mandates that a home's septic system gets pumped out every five years. But given that we are home all the time, I consulted my plumber. He told me his rule.... you pump your septic system every election year! I LOVE IT! Something I can remember!

So I put my brave hat on and called a septic company, that I had researched a while back. A woman answered, and not just any woman, but a kind and helpful one. She walked me through the entire process, and even gave me the history of how often our septic system was pumped out by the previous owner! All fascinating. 

Any case, next week I am balancing:

1. having my stone walkways repaired (as many of the stones popped up over the winter due to the snow and ice), 
2. my landscaper is coming because all the scrubs in my front yard have snow burn (delightful) and I think they are dead, 
3. the septic people are coming to clean out our system,
4. the company that buries cabling will be digging trenches to lay permanent lines (as a recap, due to construction in my neighborhood, my cable was cut to our house. For over a month, we have been using a temporary cable that is running above ground. Literally the cable is going through my neighbor's front yard, driveway, and over to mine). 

If this was the only thing I was balancing, that would be fine. But it is on top of my already full plate. Today my mom and I went out to lunch with a friend of mine. Being social for me is hard. As tonight's quote aptly points out, what I am enduring has changed me. I was once a person who loved going out, meeting with friends, listening, sharing, and being engaged with the world. I no longer feel this way! I feel VERY different from most people and therefore it is safer to be alone. I now have multiple strikes against me that separate me from those I know. I lost my son to cancer, which is an issue that makes most people jumpy on a good day, but now I have also lost my husband. Not by choice, either. So this further divides me from my friends who are married and have children. 

While at lunch today, I reflected on the fact that my maternal grandmother (who lived with me while I was growing up), lost her husband to colon cancer when she was in her fifties. In addition, my grandmother's second child died from sudden infant death. I knew these things as her grand daughter, but I was a child at the time, and the true ramifications of these losses were lost on me. Until now. Now I understand these profound losses all too well. Unlike me, my grandmother wasn't the kind of person who dwelled and reflected on such deep emotions. It could have been her or this could be the result of her generation. I am not sure, but she faced so much loss, and yet if you interacted with her, you wouldn't know it. You would think she was the happiest person around! But what I do remember hearing while growing up was that my existence transformed my grandmother's life. We had a very close bond and perhaps this bond helped her have a new purpose in life and experience love in a different way. I mention this because I understand the importance of our connection in a much deeper light now.

What I do know about myself is that I have been left so emotionally fragile that I can't handle hearing about normal lives, reflecting on happy times, or investing in any one else's life. The scary part is, I can't see this feeling changing or life getting any better. I am very upset over what has happened to my marriage and if it is possible to drown from the inside out, then that is happening to me. 

At times this feeling of drowning is so overwhelming that I can feel a panic attack coming on. Panic attacks are not new to me. I got them after Mattie died. Back then I was devastated and couldn't function in the world. The only way to manage the panic attacks was walking and more walking. Some days I walked over ten miles and I struggled with these panic attacks alone. I had no one helping me and I did not seek counseling. Instead, I walked for months. Finally in my walking I was able to develop an internal dialogue that helped me understand that I was okay, that whatever feeling arose, wouldn't last forever, and I learned how to sit through a panic attack. In fact, if I am having an attack and you are with me, you most likely won't notice. 

I some how survived after Mattie died. I am not sure how, but it took time, I had my husband and we found our way through this tragedy together. Then of course Mattie Miracle was born, and that was my second baby, or my baby's legacy. Mattie Miracle has been my compass for many years and now that the Foundation started our Wishes and Therapy grants, I get to personally interface with families, which I love. But the reality is I wake up, go through my day, and then go to sleep with the same disillusionment, same confusion, and same heartache as I mourn the loss of my marriage, of the person I knew and loved for 35 years of my life, and for the future which is no longer possible.