A Bit of Clarity

Early August, posting it now.

This afternoon, I heard a radio interview that turned on a light bulb for me...I have been in mourning since April.

I was listening to a program about emotions, and a caller shared a story about her difficulty with processing grief while going through a certain period of stress on her job.  And the psychologist on the panel suggested that her emotional issues on the job were somehow related to the lingering, unresolved grief she had experienced.  And then it hit me like a ton of bricks that my current situation is very similar.

I wrote about my mother in law on the other blog, and I wrote a little bit about the oddness of it all here a few weeks later, but I finally accepted the fact this morning that I have been in a fog of unacknowledged grief for weeks.  I realized it yesterday while in New York because her absence at my niece's shower was obvious.  I've thought of her in small ways when the husband mentions her, but it has been very strange.

But I really felt a shift today while listening to this program.  I realized that in the lead-up to her passing, I bottled everything up because the husband did not want to talk about the inevitable.  Then I went on total BBW auto-pilot to get everyone through the funeral.  We returned to DC and I tried to go on with life as normal, only to be confronted with the reality of my mother's situation.  And I wrapped myself in trying to find solutions to that, and continued to do my BBW stuff and just generally wore myself down to where I was this past Friday.

This past Friday, I missed a college fair because I misread the logistics and did not plan appropriately.  I could blame the circumstances of the night before, when I spent the entire say watching my Baby Niece, but I will not go there.  Then I missed the event that I was planning to attend on Saturday, which would have been my cover story for being in New York.  I have a few other undone tasks on my to do list and in general, I am distracted and unfocused.  I did not go out with my friend at all during her month off from work, and I skipped hanging out with my sorors because I was feeling sorry for myself.

This level of lethargy is so not me, and when I heard a semi-plausible explanation on the radio today, I claimed it because I know it is at least partially true.  I have been on auto-pilot for months, and it is not working.  I need to deal with my grief, but I do not have an outlet for it.  I have been angry a lot and I know it has a lot to do with keeping a lot of my emotions bottled inside. 

The truth is, I cannot talk to the husband because she was his mother and he would rather not talk about it.  That is how the men in his family *deal* with things (which is to avoid them), and while that is totally unfair to me, that works for him.  And a lot of the resentments about a lot of things I have kept to myself over the years are starting to percolate.

I am not good at sharing with others because I don't feel that I can really talk to anyone about anything.  I spend a lot of time by myself, so that means I generally have no one to talk to except through the blogs.  How sad is that?  And most of the time, no one is reading...