Welcome Back!

If you're reading this post it means that I have decided to start blogging again! Before I post this I want to have a few blog entries ready to go so... it may go up today (May 6th) or it may be significantly later! I updated a few things in the side bar but this page needs a drastic overhaul. It's going to take some time to get things fully up and running so lets just say we are currently under construction.

My blogging hiatus had a lot to do with the current political climate in our country (the United States, just in case you don't know exactly who I am or where I'm from). Things are so volatile and people take things so personally. There has been so much "people talking without listening" to quote the song, The Sound of Silence. There's a level of vitriol and a lack of empathy that doesn't jive with my non-confrontational personality. It became frightening for me to speak my heart openly because I felt like any strong opinion one way or another could be offensive to someone I love on one side of the argument or another. While my fella likes to "poke the monkey" (as he likes to say)... I don't. I'm a lover, not a fighter. I like to bring folks together and that just wasn't happening.

My blog style has always been sort of a daily mind dump... whatever was on my mind that I could share (without telling stories that weren't mine to share), that's what would make up the meat of my blog. Then all of a sudden I couldn't just say what I wanted to say... and I was also dealing with a brand new set of emotions as my mom's illness was progressing. Everyone wanted to argue about politics and I was in such a raw, vulnerable place emotionally that politics seemed trivial and ridiculous to me. I didn't have the emotional energy to have political discussion in the midst of things like making life or death decisions about mom's health. It was too much so I just shut down.

Once mom passed and that battle had ended, I just felt so stunned and ... alone. I didn't have words to describe life in those days and weeks. Fortunately, I had started talking to my fella and we both were in the same weird place of "what now?"and we were able to sort of fill in the blanks for each other. He was someone I could talk to without having to talk about things unless I wanted to and vice versa. We grew really close really fast and he is still the person I talk to about everything every day.

Losing my mom made me feel like I lost the one person on the planet who loved me unconditionally, who was there for me no matter what. I lost my safety net. As a woman without a life partner, my mom was the one who held me together when I was falling apart. Nobody else has the emotional investment, the inclination or the time to deal with "real Heather". My dad handles the financial stuff but not the emotional stuff - and he just doesn't get the pain and suffering involved in my life. Austin is good at the physical stuff like carrying in the groceries or taking out the trash but he will never have the magic cleaning and sorting powers my mom did. My sisters-in-law touch base with me periodically about how I am emotionally and that helps but they're both busy raising children and being career women and supporting my brothers. My fella is awesome at filling the empty hours. He is good company, he is a naturally positive (and funny!) person who is tender enough to shed a tear with me occasionally but he is also grieving and working and... not my mom. What I am is saying is there is no one who could ever take her place and there is still a big ol' hole in my heart that I don't think could ever go away.

I say all of that to say this: I'm not the girl I was before. Sometimes I'm more of a bitter brew than I used to be. I'm a bit rougher around the edges. I joke that my dad lost his filter when my mom died... but the truth is that I lost mine too. Some of the things I might not have said before because I ran everything through the filter of "what will my mom think about this"... I might just say now. She got a rotten deal there at the end and watching her suffer was the hardest thing I've ever lived through and I'm forever changed by it. In some ways I'm more sensitive to others than I could have ever been before and in other ways... I'm like, get OVER yourself!

I'm going to work on a few posts now so that you have a little something to look forward to. Once I know they're ready to go, I'll publish this bit. I'm going to need A LOT of encouragement! Let me hear from you... share my blog with people who you think might enjoy it. Ultimately, it's not worth it to me to expend the emotional energy of blogging if nobody sees it or responds or give a flying flip.

So here we go again!