Author: sheriroaf

What is the Perfect Age Gap?

I love, LOVE, love this article.  I have struggled so much with the fact that my kids are each almost exactly 3-3.5 years apart.  With Benny missing in the middle, there are 6.5 years between Fletcher and Darcy.

His absence sometimes feels greater because of the age gap.  Because Darcy is such a little mother to him.  She’ll often times ask me how old she’ll be when he starts kindegarten and it makes me so sad.

Will they ever play together?  Will they have that sibling love/hate relationship?  I have a sister that’s 11 years older than me and just like in this article, we are the best of friends, I couldn’t imagine my life any different.  But we didn’t grow up together, or in the same house even.  Maybe that’s why we get along so well, we had very different childhoods.

My other concern is that if we had more children, would that further the distance between Fletcher and Darcy?  My sister that is 3 years older than me was the one that I fought with, that grew up with me.  As I’m writing this, I’m just realizing I could be describing my own childhood!

I’m a planner so this whole thing just makes me nuts.  I can’t stand feeling out of control (such an ugly non-existant word that goes into the category with deserve).

I don’t have answers.  Just more questions.  More confused as the days creep by.

A few weeks ago a friend told me that they deserved something because they work hard.  This got me thinking very hard about that word.  Deserve.

So, if you work hard in life, do you deserve success and wealth?  Is it automatically assumed that you should have this in your life?  I’m pretty sure that’s how I felt before the accident that took my son’s life.  It made sense to me.

Now, take the same same word and apply it to my life.  Did I deserve to lose my child?  Did I do something so terrible in my life that I’m being punished?  Based on my original statement, it would seem yes.  Does everyone who has garnered a hardship deserved it?

Deserve is just another word for entitlement to me now.  Life does not owe you anything, because clearly if it did, I would be in line waiting with open palms.  The means don’t justify an end.  There is no guarantee that if you do things a certain way that you will achieve the desired results.

The lense through which I view the world has changed.  So much frustration I can now look at candidly.  I have also learned that even the best laid plans fall apart and it’s good to be flexible.

It’s amazing what perspective you can learn about life through grief.  This is the first time, probably ever, that I have been able to spend so much time with myself really looking at my life.  It’s terrifying and amazing all at once.  There are so many changes I want to make.

Maybe once I’m able to fully let go of the entitlement notion and see things for the randomness that they truly can be, it will be even clearer.  I’ll just keep muddling through this path that I’m.

I’m linking two additional Huff Post blogs.  I’ll continue to blog here, taxes are done now (yay!) and I can breathe a little.  It’s been a hectic winter!!

My Surviving Child: How My Daughter Dealt With Her Brother’s Death

What It’s Like Having a Baby After Losing One

http://m.huffpost.com/us/author/sheri-roaf

I’m happy today.  Something I’ve always wanted to do actually happened.  I’ve been published.

I suppose it’s not quite how I pictured it.  I always wanted to write a book.  Growing up I would write down stories and fill up notebooks with my imagination and dreams.

As I grew older I suspected I would write something funny or snarky even.  I’m very rarely serious and I’m quick to scoff.  I’m pretty sure that Darcy knew what sarcasm meant before she was 3.

Instead I find myself writing about the death of my son.  Still sounds surreal to write some 2+years later and it’s been the topic of my blog!

Having not really worked since the accident, I’ve forgotten what a good feeling it is to meet a tangible goal.  But this was a life goal!  Not at all how I pictured it.

I never set out to share any of this.  I’ve found that by opening up here though, I get to let a little of the crazy out.  I have the ability to get it out of my head.

There are days now when I look at someone and wonder ‘did they read what I posted last night?’ in a panic.  It’s hard for me to share so much, but I feel so much better after I do.  Sometimes I feel as if I’ve opened my diary for the world to see and it’s overwhelming.  I just try to remember that this is part of my grief process.  This is my way to deal.  I might not tell you I’m having a bad day, but I will post about it here.

It’s a weird thing to be excited about being published, considering what I write about.  It comes with guilt, but that’s ok.  I wouldn’t have chosen this topic for anything.  I wish I could write about anything but, or maybe nothing at all.

I’m happy to feel some true happiness again.  To let it wash over me like warm sunshine.  I’m happy that it was something that I did, a direct result of me.  My kiddos make me happy everyday, but this was about me.  It’s a great feeling to accomplish one’s dreams.

I wasn’t expecting it to come back.  I figured we had moved past this.  It’s like an unwelcome visitor that shows up unannounced, unpacks their bags and settles in.  I want it to go.

My insomnia is back.  You would think that having a 7 month old that doesn’t sleep would be able to cure my sleepless nights.  I cannot remember a night where I was asleep before 12 or where I got more than a 2-3 hour stretch.

I thought I was over this already!  I thought that I had moved on, but I suppose that with grief or PTSD you never really ‘move on.’  It’s just more of the same.

Someone was holding my second son and telling him all about his firsts.  How he would walk and talk and how 2016 was going to be amazing for him.  This was all said with so much love and hope.  All I could think was, will he?  Is his future any more guaranteed than mine?  Than his brothers was?

Dark, right?  Awful, terrible thoughts.  I had thought that 2013 was going to be amazing once upon a time.  I had expected that my first son would learn new words, might hop on a tricycle or sing his ABC’s.  That never happened.

As I watch this little man grow, I hate that these thoughts even enter my mind.  I have hope for the future, I do.  I want to think that things will be amazing and that I will grow old alongside my husband and children.  These thoughts are like my insomnia, unwelcome and unconstructive, but won’t go away.

Someone once said, ‘plant potatoes, get potatoes.’  This is definitely true for the likeness of our boys.

During the first year or so of grief you’re numb.  You’re not really thinking about anyone else, just trying to survive day to day.  Time passes slowly and fast at the same time.

You are so involved in your grief, you forget about everything else.  You stop caring what other people think, especially as it concerns yourself.  People still had opinions about what Parker and I did, I just really didn’t care as much.  I miss this.

This didn’t give me a license to run my mouth, I’m already good at that anyway.  I didn’t see it as an opportunity to burn others because I just didn’t care.  I just didn’t let their thoughts and opinions influence my life or make me feel bad about myself.  For the first time I realized that they had never stood where we were, therefore their negativity was irrelevant.  It meant nothing.

I’ve never felt so free, although I didn’t realize it at the time.  I mean, did it really matter what anyone had to say to us in comparison to us losing Benny?  All of the petty drama and bullshit became nonexistant in my head.  That nagging voice that always made me overthink my every waking move disappeared completely.  I was free from my own insecurities, most of which were petty and ridiculous anyway.  I’m pretty sure my own guilt overtook most of that anyway.

I would never have been able to blog like this before the accident.  Put into words all of my crazy thoughts and share them with the world.  I grew up in a house where emotions were not welcome.  I’m trying so hard not to make that same mistake, though it’s hard.

There are days when I miss the fog.  I miss not caring what other people think.  I make myself crazy sometimes (ask Parker as he’d surely agree).  If I could hold onto one part of the first year it would be my ability to shut it off.  Tune out the crap.  Remember to be grateful for what I have and not to let others influence how I feel about me.

That statement in and of itself makes my skin crawl, because I know how bad that first year was.  I’m shocked that I would want any part of it back, but I do.

I guess this is part of it.  Moving past the grief enough that other things outside of losing my son hurt.  I didn’t expect it to happen, no one warned me I would feel this way again.

I’m pretty I don’t like it for two reasons:  the insecurity and the fact that it feels like moving on.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be stuck in grief forever, but even thinking about moving on is sad to me.  It’s been 2 years and 2 months.  Longer than his 17 months.  How did that happen already?

I remember one of my first thoughts moments after the accident occurred was that this couldn’t be happening again.  I wasn’t supposed to lose someone close to me again.  I had already survived what I considered to be my life’s tragedy when I lost my mom.  It felt impossibly wrong.  I just kept saying, why is this happening AGAIN?!?!?!

My mom died 20 years ago this May.  Tonight we just found out that my dad’s wife has a very rare form of stage IV bone cancer.  How is this happening again to him?  How is any of this fair?  My life has taken on this surreal feeling again, where I’m unsure what is real and what isn’t.

Besides losing Benny, the darkest hours of my life were when my mom was sick and after she passed.  Even though my parents had a complicated relationship, my dad was incredible for my mom when she was sick.  He was unwavering in his strength and willingness to do anything and everything for her.  I guess that I’m lucky because in those moments I got to witness what real, unadulterated love looks like.  For all of his faults, that man was truly amazing for my mom when she was sick.

But he was sick too.  My dad is an alcoholic, plain and simple.  I had spent 14 years of my mom sparing me from most of that though and my dad and I had a pretty good relationship.  I’m one of those lucky people that really had an amazing childhood complete with what I consider to be great family memories, undiluted by my father’s illness.  As a child I really didn’t know any different, ignorance is bliss.

When my mom passed, obviously everything changed.  I was alone in my house with my father, alone being the key word.  He disappeared.  Fell apart.  Broke down.  My life became a series of days – going to school, coming home, taking whatever money was left on the counter to buy dinner and going to bed, waking up at whatever time in the morning to hear my father stumble in the door, clearly drunk.  I would spend a lot of time at friends homes because no one was ever home at mine.  I coped the best that I could by hiding behind a smile and moving forward.  Trying to keep it together, thinking it could always be worse.  Wondering why it was my mom that had passed.  Looking back, it was a dark time, but I was too young to even comprehend what I was going through and know how completely wrong it was.

It’s probably  why after Benny died, it was so important to me that Parker and I didn’t shut down on Darcy or each other.  It’s why I don’t accept people disappearing from our lives as ok, or have any ability to deal with their weaknesses.  I’m still not great at expressing emotion because quite honestly, if I let myself feel 100% of what I should, I would probably be in a padded room somewhere.  But that’s ok, because I know my limitations and I’m trying my damndest to work through them to be as healthy as I can for my family.  I’m not strong, I’m just doing what I need to do to survive.

It’s taken a very long time, but we finally have a good relationship again, probably not the healthiest, but it works for us.  I’m terrified about what all of this means for my father and my own family.  I don’t know if he’s strong enough to go through this again.  I’m angry as all hell that he should even have to.  Has he not suffered enough?  I just don’t get it.  We’re given one life to live, how many times can you just roll through the punches before enough is enough?   My stepmother actually apologized to him for getting sick, because she doesn’t want him to have to go through this again.  My heart is breaking for both of them. How many tragedies should one have to endure in their lifetime?  This is my question.

This topic has been a long time coming.  As I sit here rocking Fletch at 3:30 AM, it feels weird to write about such things.  This is part of the new paradigm that exists in my life of joy/sadness.  Hard to except that they now exist mutually exclusively.

After the accident, it was if my driveway didn’t exist.  It was like a game I used to play when I was little, it was ‘hot lava’ and I couldn’t go near it or I’d be burned.  It was my achilles heel, still is.

I used to park on a side street and go through my backyard.  The problem was the school hours parking ban and climbing up brick steps and then balancing along my stone retaining wall to even get to my yard.  Not a great option in New England winters.

I knew once Fletch was here things would have to change.  At first my solution was to park at the base of the driveway and still only use the bottom portion.  This then required climbing a hill of ground covering up to the house.  The only way to any door in my house was up.  Carrying the carseat this way didn’t make any sense.

Eventually I just gave up and started parking in the driveway again.  It was the only ‘safe’ way to get Fletch into the house.  Parker had always backed in since the accident, the theory being that we wouldn’t get caught in any open doors should the car roll.

I can’t begin to tell you the number of times I check to see if the car is in park.  It’s become an OCD habit.  I refuse to pull keys from the ignition unless I’m in the car.  I triple check the parking break as extra assurance, although I’m not entirely sure how helpful it really is.

We live on a busy enough street, on a curve in a hill.  Backing into this driveway sucks.  People aren’t always very patient with me and make me panic when they come flying down the hill at me.  To say I have anxiety over backing into my driveway is an understatement.

The week before the 2 year anniversary of the accident, I found I had to pull in one rainy day because someone had parked at the bottom.  Well, Parker came home and this unnerved him which in turn stressed me out further.  You really can’t see well out of the back of the suburban.  I had already backed into the fence and the Volvo, further adding to my discomfort.

The Friday anniversary of the accident found me running late to get home to get Darcy off the bus.  Friday always seems tougher than the actual anniversary date for me.  As I came down Chester Street, Darcy’s bus was headed uphill. I could see Darcy up on our lawn and breathed a sigh of relief.  I started to back into the driveway and Darcy was on my right up on the grass.  The driveway is steep, so I usually have to gun it a bit to get the Suburban up it.  At the last second I stopped because Darcy was gone from my sight.  This was strange as she knows to stay away from moving vehicles.  I started looking around in panic, and there she was, peering at me on my left, in my drivers side window.  I wanted to scream at her and cry, yet hold her and never let her go in that same instant.

She had walked behind the truck as I was backing up the driveway.  It was just about 3:30 on Friday afternoon.  A little after tragedy had struck in that exact same spot two years prior.  It took everything in me to get out of that truck not completely lose it.  How could something so similar almost have happened again, in the same spot, at almost the same time?!?!?  What.  The.  Fuck.

Thank goodness I stopped and looked for her.  I couldn’t see her from where I was because the lawn is higher than the driveway, something made me pause and duck down to see if she was where she should be.

So much for feeling like backing in was now the safest way to be in our driveway.  I guess that nothing would ever really make me feel comfortable again anyway.  It’s all just a false sense of security.

If only this driveway wasn’t a part of this house.  If only I could pick up my house and move it away to somewhere new.  It’s time to admit this doesn’t work.  We tried, but perhaps it’s time to move on.  This also fills me with joy/sadness because being free of this driveway excites me, but this is my home.  This is where I brought my babies home from the hospital, yet where my son died.  It’s hard to balance these two emotions sometimes when they’re everywhere in your life.  Why can’t it just be one or the the other?  Why does it have to be both at once?

WordPress just let me know that I started my blogging journey two years ago.  I am dumbfounded as it seems like 2 minutes ago some days.  Time is funny like that.

Two years, a lot can change in two years, this I know.

I’m writing this as my husband is at the emergency vet with our nearly 17 year old cat saying good-bye.  He began getting sick on Christmas Eve and we’d been nursing him for the last few days hoping to turn things around, but it wasn’t meant to be.  We had 4 pets before the kiddos, and the last 2 had held on until recently.  We had to put my dog Bailey down at the end of September and now this.  My heart is broken again.

As I’m on the phone crying with my husband, I don’t even know what to say to Darcy.  Just another death in this house.  At 7 she’s lost her brother and 4 pets.  Too much death.  Too much sadness.  Just too much.

So happy anniversary to me.  At least I have this when nothing else in this world is making sense.  Godspeed Toby, go find the rest of the pack.