Waking up in the midst of a dream, sweaty and crying, chest and throat aching and feeling as though you just finished a triathalon, makes my heart hurt for a day or two. The heaviness and brutality of dreaming of something that I know can never be changed is the worst.
I remember what the dream was and the conflict it was trying to make sense of.
People around me have no idea that I carry a painful burden of knowing I have failed my kids and that as hard as I try to get close to them, they won't let me. I cannot do this all alone, do they know that?
Finding out on social media that one son is home on leave from the Marine Corps and has made no effort to see me - even after I reached out to him while he was home - I cannot shake the feeling of not being good enough for him.
Matthew will be graduating from college this Spring and I feel enormously proud of him for having stayed with it.
There is no easy way to think of Hunter without feeling somehow betrayed by him and hurting because it was he who abandoned me. Yeah, that's fucked up.
Absent parent. That is what I am to my kids.
What my kids - and people around me - don't know is that I am also absent in my life and going through the motions just biding my time until somehow, some way, I reach the other side.
Is it wrong to hope that the next round of medical tests reveals that I am (finally) on my way?
That's fucked up, too.
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