Posts Tagged "parenting through grief"

Tatiana, my eight-year-old daugh­ter, begins to cry. “Mom-my! I’m not talk­ing to you. You are mak­ing me so sad.” Her curly blonde hair flies every­where, as if being blown by a fan. She stomps into the bath­room, slams the door, and locks her­self in. All morn­ing, Tatiana has not been lis­ten­ing, and I’m fed up with hav­ing to repeat my words six times just to be heard. Deep breath, I tell myself. I call through the bath­room door, “Honey, come out here.” To my sur­prise, she twists the knob right away, but her sobs con­tinue ris­ing like a helicopter. “Come sit here.” Tatiana curls in my lap, mak­ing her lanky body com­pact. She blows her nose on her orange sun­flower dress. “I know we’ve all had colds and that...

Guilt. Mommy guilt. Daddy died guilt. Always the guilt. Each morn­ing, at 6 AM, Julian, 2, calls out, “Ma Ma. Ma Ma? Ma Ma,” and the race begins. Ugh! I shouldn’t have stayed up so late. Four kids, like newly hatched spi­ders, crawl up my skin. They nip at my arms, my shoul­ders, my feet, and I want to flick them off. I want five min­utes, just five freak­ing min­utes, to make my cof­fee, before I get them ready for school. “Clothes on, hair brushed, then come to the table for break­fast,” I com­mand, but they con­tinue to swarm, com­pletely ignor­ing my orders. “Ewwwwwww!” Tatiana, 8, screams, as she holds her Hello Kitty tooth­brush an inch from my swollen brown eyes. “Tati, WHAT are you doing?” “Mommy, Juju just put...

Tatiana clings to me, her legs wrapped beneath my 9-month preg­nant belly, while the other Marin Day School tod­dlers push balls, rakes, minia­ture vac­u­ums, and each other around in the out­door play area of the preschool. Pri­mary col­ored toys are scat­tered everywhere—many of which Erik had cleaned only two months before, when he donated his time to Tatiana’s school to make some “minor repairs.” Erik was sup­posed to fix a cou­ple of loose locks over a week­end, but the teach­ers returned to a new gar­den of pot­ted flow­ers, re-stained benches and sand­box, and a large rain­bow play-structure that had been flipped and scrubbed from bot­tom to top. When he walked through the metal gate to bring Tatiana there the next day, the...

Erik told me about his dad, Hay­den, when we first started dat­ing. We were both 20, both stu­dents at Florida State Uni­ver­sity. Erik majored in com­puter sci­ence while I stud­ied cre­ative writ­ing. Within days of know­ing one another, it was obvi­ous that Erik’s ratio­nal, orga­nized side would com­pli­ment the artist in me. Erik spoke slowly, with quiet inten­sity. “We were on vacation.” I sat cross-legged, on Erik’s bed­room floor, soak­ing in the mas­cu­line whis­per of his words. My atten­tion was focused entirely on him. He stretched out on his back and put his head in my lap, his eyes directed at the cir­cu­lat­ing ceil­ing fan. “We were on vaca­tion, at the beach … I was eleven. It was just me, my mom,...

I walked in slow-motion towards Erik’s closed, mahogany casket. The old stone chapel was filled with famil­iar faces. There were faces from Sky­walker Ranch and other Lucas par­ties, faces I had pho­tographed in my stu­dio, faces from my bridal shower, my wed­ding, and Tatiana’s birth. I kept my head down. As the preg­nant widow, all eyes were on me, but I did not want to be seen. Direct eye con­tact would break me open in a way that I would not be ready to be bro­ken open for years. Dressed in an ankle-length mater­nity skirt, long-sleeve black shirt, and the com­fort­able three-inch heels that had taken me hours to find just the day before, I sat in the front pew. My brother, Troy, and his wife, Jen, sat next to me. Only ten feet ...