Morning/Mourning

I am getting over a cold, and I am sleep deprived, and this mourning I feel seven years older than I did at this time last year. 

My littlest woke me up at 4:45 am ready to come downstairs, and I had to negotiate with him for 20 minutes to get another 27 minutes of sleep. 

My head feels foggy. I am so sleepy. My back is kind of hurting from picking up my baby and toys around the house and bringing many loads of laundry up the stairs and folding the laundry and unloading the dishwasher and getting down on my knees to clean cream cheese off the floor and find bottles under the couch. 

I have one child climbing in and out of my lap, and one child asking for juice, and another child who wants pancakes. I am typing these words between toasting bread and paying bills and figuring out what I can accomplish today and making sure my daughter has done her homework.

Many mournings seem manageable.
Many mournings seem almost impossible. 

Most mournings some part of me is saying "fuck you" to my husband. Part of my mourning is saying "fuck you" to my husband.

A few months ago I sat in my car, on the periphery of a parking lot, on the phone with my aunt. 

I had just gotten my annual job review at work. It was the day after the one year anniversary of my husband's suicide. My boss had written my job review, which told me my work performance had been way down that year, that I had been late several mournings, that my level of accuracy had been sub-par compared to previous years.

Ok.

But my husband just killed himself.

But I'm an only parent now.

It is just me.

I am figuring this out.

I need this job.

And then I was on the phone with my aunt, in my car, with my sneakers half-tied and my sports bra on, sobbing hysterically. 

I said I don't know how I am going to do this, it has been only one year and this is the rest of my life, and the world doesn't understand, and I don't want to have to keep telling the world to try to understand, and I am so very tired, so fucking tired, but my kids still need me, they need so much from me, and everyone needs me to try harder, and I don't know if I can try harder, and what if I try harder and I fail, and I am so fucking angry at my husband because he couldn't deal with life, which I tried so hard to make easier, so he ended his life but that fucker ended my life too.

He didn't actually end my life.

I am still here.

He just took away the easy.

He couldn't deal with what was hard, so my husband took his life away and made my life harder. 

This mourning has been somewhere between manageable and impossible. In between getting juice and toasting toast and hugging my little boy and listening to my son's dreams and watching a video my daughter wants me to see and drinking my third coffee to try and wake up, I say "fuck you" to my husband.