Time is so tricky. It feels so long … and then as though it slips through your fingers like grains of sand in an instant. It heals, but also, sometimes it freezes and is inescapable.

I was thinking about this yesterday. My mother died over four years ago. Which sounds like a long time — it *is* a long time. But it’s also as though time completely stopped when she died and began again in a completely different way. As though my life is divided into two distinct periods – one when my mother was here, and the other when she is not. And they cannot bleed into each other, they are not the same.

Sometimes the pain is as though it happened yesterday. Everything still lives so clearly in my mind – the hospital, the doctors, the nurses, the sounds – beeping and plastic furniture, clog shoes on linoleum floors. The pile of her clothing that she would never wear again, that we would carry home like a pile of hopelessness, a pile of things that no longer had any purpose. Confused as to what to do with it – where to put it. And then remembering that it happened so long ago, and that coat and those shoes are long gone. Cleaned out by Lenny in her fervor to check boxes, to keep order.

I am two people – the human that my mother molded and encouraged and taught. And the human who has had to forge herself – alone and cold in this world. No longer protected by her mother’s unconditional love.

I cling to small things that bring me joy – hot chai tea lattes and fresh cut flowers. Clean sheets and jars and jars of skincare. I vacillate between strength and weakness, confidence and insecurity. I wonder – often – who I am. What is real and what is concocted out of a basic need to survive.

February is here and the days are a little less gray and we are a little closer to our home being built. And I am a little less sad and a little more tired.

Xox, g