Stuck...

It is so easy to get stuck.

Every now and then I feel the weight of my circumstances hanging over me. As milestones come and go and our life moves forward without Mark, I am reminded of what my kids have lost and what is missing from their lives. As Audrey grows wiser, she too is all the more aware of her circumstances.

As my life has changed over the last 3 years I have changed with it. At times, I cope better than others and it’s hard to say what nudges me forward and what sucks me back. I have an idea but nothing that will change the world that’s for sure.

As I stood in the hallway tonight stretching my “weekday-mummy-multi-tasking-self” between three tasks (switching laundry, folding laundry and washing Audrey’s hair) and two rooms, the phone rang.

As anyone could guess, the last few days around our household have been challenging and somber to say the least. The tasks of the day keep piling up high, my impatience building and my early morning rise (5am Noah!) catching up to me. The ringing phone seemed to add to the hysteria of the bath time chaos, but I knew the person on the other end was someone I had been anxiously waiting to hear from.

Our discussion was quick, due mostly to the noise level in the background at my end. We casually discussed the fact that she was on her way up to the hospital room where her mom is fighting for her life (another victim of blood cancer.) It seems almost surreal that we could be discussing such thing as we both tended to our other motherly duties while we chatted. The story turned to a friend of hers, a neighbour who lost her husband just this Sunday.

This friend of hers reminded her of me, so she told me her story. A mother of three, youngest babe only 7 months old, now widowed. Her husband, aged 36 had lost his battle with Leukemia after being diagnosed less than a year ago. The common threads in this story made my heart ache instantly for this stranger, this mother. My irritability and impatience with the day gone.


I was instantly brought back to the days of walking up the steps of the hospital making quick calls to friends to fill them in on the latest. Now I’m at the other end as she stands in the doorway of her Mom’s hospital speaking to me about this stranger. She is going to sit at her Mom’s bedside, another Mom is about to bury her husband who died tragically on Father’s Day and I stand at the door of my bathroom looking at my kids. I look at them, the laundry and the soapy hair and I realize, I don’t feel quite so stuck tonight.