Broken Days

I do my best to wake up every day, get out of bed, get ready for work, kiss only one of my children goodbye and make it through the day.  I do my best to go work with some children whose young lives have already been touched with more trauma and grief than most people see in an entire lifetime and help them shoulder the burdens placed on them far too early in life. I do my best to take advantage of every avenue of help available to us.  I’m trying.  But the truth of the matter is, some days there just isn’t enough therapy, medications, or self-help options out there to get me through a day.  Some days I’m just broken. And broken days are ugly.

A broken day starts with a night of bad sleep and an almost physical incapability of getting out of bed.  It’s a slow moving morning and a commute filled with tears.  It’s sitting in the parking lot trying to clean up my eyes and the mascara streaks off of my cheeks.  It’s calling Sean in the hopes he can set me right side up again and hearing the desperation in his voice when we both know he can’t.  It’s going into work and trying to find someone that I can tell I won’t be able to stay today.  It’s driving around until I know my house is empty because I just can’t bear to have my baby girl see her mommy like that again.  It’s uncontrollable sobs.  It’s letting my sister try to make me laugh or just cry with me over the phone.  It’s fielding concerned and loving texts from anyone that happened to see me or heard I was a mess that day. It’s spending the rest of the day positively wiped out from the outpouring of emotion that has taken place because I still just can’t comprehend that I have to go through life without my son.  I have to walk this earth without one of my children.  Some days I’m broken. 

This past Wednesday was a broken day.  And it was bad. It took me the rest of the week to come back from it, so I was incredibly grateful that my book club was that Saturday.  It consists of a group of ladies I love and we talk about life-the good parts and the bad, and laugh, and if we get around to it, we talk about the book too. I needed it.

 I also had convinced Sean that we could use a puppy in our lives.  We needed something to be excited about; a warm little body to hold and snuggle with.  When the foster mother pulled up and Kennedy realized what was happening she looked right at me and said, "Mommy now you don't have to miss baby Jack!" I almost died as I thought, if only it were that easy, my love.  Thankfully we were deemed a fit puppy family.  Yesterday, we adopted an adorable little girl with a beautiful Lab face and chubby, Bassett Hound legs and paws and named her Lennon, or Lenny; we are all in love (some of more than others....I'm lookin' at you Tucker).

In the coming weeks I expect to have many more broken days.  Jack Holden will be gone for an entire year and that is something my heart or my mind can wrap itself around.  So while my heart is broken, these two girls will help soothe it a bit and make broken hurt a little less.