Finding a Purpose

Today would have been my Mom's 60th birthday.  Initially tempted to spend the day wishing she was still around for us to tease about getting old (and being proved decidedly wrong), I have found a far, far better use of this special day.

I spent a significant chunk of my adolescence and young adulthood working on educating people about the importance of empathy and the dangers of dissociating individuals from the overwhelming statistics that make up their circumstances.  As such, I have spent more than the usual amount of time questioning: "What would I do, if this was happening today?"  Obviously, we all like to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and assume that we would stand up and do the right thing...but no one ever knows for sure until they are actually in the unfathomable reality of crisis. For so many Americans, Europeans, and relatively safe peoples around the world, it is all too easy to sit back in complacency and feel too removed to be effected...including myself.  

Ever since the current "refugee crisis" first made itself known, I have felt a deep, nagging, urgent sense that I absolutely HAD to do something tangible to help.  To practice what I have so often preached, and taken the risk of daring to reach out to people caught up in the overwhelming displacement.  But...what could I do?  I'm a full time, homeschooling mom, a freelance performer, a stuttered blogger, an amateur photographer...and I'm no where near the epicenter of what's going on and no one was going to come to me for help, and without a buttload of cash, there is nothing I can do to help the poor souls washing up on foreign shores, so far away, anyhow.  So I sat back and relegated that nagging need to do something to the bin of misguided dreams, and hid it under a thin veil of justification.

But that didn't last.  I am a mom, and that's a visceral reality that I can never truly turn off.  Seeing images of these families with young children arriving, soaked, scared, exhausted; watching videos of volunteers wrap tiny children in emergency blankets, and thinking about the long, dangerous journey most of them still have ahead of them, one of my frequent thoughts among the obvious heartbreak is:  how are they going to get those kids to continue to travel so far?  On limited food and next to no resources, carrying a baby or a toddler on such long travails - often over treacherous terrain - becomes a seriously perilous undertaking.  Any rocky slope would necessitate using your hands for stability or to catch yourself...which is next to impossible with an infant in tow.  I never used a stroller, for any of my three children, and am therefore very familiar with the comfort, sense of security (for both parent and child), warmth, and safety a baby carrier can provide - not to mention the ease of mobility and having your hands free!  I found myself thinking; "If only they had carriers, this would still be hard but it would be so much more doable."  But, still, nothing clicked, and I noted that my need to help was growing a healthy layer of guilt around it, but I left it in that discard bin, the veil of justification stubbornly insisting that I have no power.

Until yesterday.  Yesterday, I came across a news article about a mom in California, who - just as I had - saw the need for carriers for these families, but unlike me, she didn't let herself rest within that uncomfortable complacency.  She grabbed the bull by the horns and said "ok, let's do this."  And she asked people to donate carriers, then packed them up, flew to Greece, and personally strapped these babies in safely by fitting each one onto a struggling caretaker.  I was in AWE.  I cried.  In that moment, my hands shaking and my whole being rattled; that need to help threw off that veil, burst out of the discard bin, and manifested in a full, unshakeable form:  I had to join her.  I have to do this, and not just donate carriers and spread the word...All the work I've done over the years, all the effort I have put in to rallying people, it was all culminating in this moment.  This was something I could viscerally relate to, something that I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, will help these families in a simple, tangible, and potentially even life saving way, and with the skills I have honed in my years of production and management, it is something actually within my means to do. I absolutely must go there and do this.

So, I am.  I have joined her organization, Carry the Future, as a volunteer.  Over the coming weeks I will be collecting new or gently used baby carriers* and plan to fly to the Greek Isles (or wherever we are needed) and assist with the direct distribution of these carriers to the families that need them. Not an easy undertaking, I know, but I felt called to do this, and committing to it brought on an enormous wave of relief. I can't be true to myself - or to anything that I aspire to - if I don't get out there and get my hands dirty in an effort to do just a spot of good. And in the end, I will be coming home to a warm, safe, happy home filled with family, support, food, and security...who am I to deny even the tiniest relief to these families who deserve no less, and yet have been caught up in circumstances beyond their control, leaving them with virtually none of it. Regardless of politics, I am sure we can all agree that the children do not deserve any of this.  So please, help me to help them.

If you would like to donate a carrier, please let me know.  I am working to establish easily accessible drop off points around the area (and have partnered with many other wonderful volunteers to coordinate efforts across the DC metro region, spanning north to Baltimore and south to Richmond), and will be collecting donated carriers at my home and at local meet ups.  I may even be able to do some local pickups.    

Alternatively, anyone can ship new carriers directly to the organization’s headquarters in California. 

I will be doing this in honor of these families, as well as my mom, and of course of my dear friend Zoë, who I know would be right there beside me on this one if she were still around.  We lost her last year and never did get to go with her to her family home in Lesbos as she so often said she wanted.  I may well see those shores soon, Zoë, and I wish you could be there with me.

For further information about Carry the Future and what we do, please see our website: http://www.carrythefuture.org/

Your help in spreading the word would be greatly appreciated! 

Carry The Future founder Cristal Munoz-Logothetis with one of the many recipients of her efforts. Photo used with permission.

Love and peace, all.

*soft structured baby and child carriers only. No car seats, no metal frames, no strollers, no wraps, no slings. Soft Structured Carriers (SSCs) are basically any carrier that has clasps or harnesses, and Mei Teis (square cloth with four ties). A few examples are Baby Bjorn, Kolcraft, MobyGo and Ergo.

The paralysis of being 2 years out

Because words don't seem to be today's thing:

Mama,

I love you. I miss you. My heart feels clogged and stuffy when I allow myself to notice that you are no longer here.

I feel your presence in the very core of my being; you are in everything, you are here and present even as time marches farther from your physical manifestation.

And so I feel supported and loved as though nothing has changed, until I stop for a half a second.

Until I think of something perfect I just know you'd love to hear.

Until I find news that may help you somehow.

And I can't reach out to share.

I can't call, or text, or talk your ear off as I always did.

I can't hug, or tease, or comfort you and I can't subject you to my latest culinary experimentation...

In those moments, in those moments my heart breaks.

Part of me doesn't want to thrive anymore. Part of me wants to just stop and go find mom. Part of me thinks it's unfair for you to miss the best parts of my life, so I shouldn't strive for more than the wonderful things I have now.

But I also know that the part of you that refused to die because "Kate won't be Ok" would be hurt beyond belief if I gave up. That the part of you that gave up so much in the name of motherhood and giving your kids the best life had to offer would be offended, that your determination to do everything well would feel betrayed, were the child you raised to stop striving for her own goals and dreams, didn't jump at opportunity...

And really, I don't want to stop, I don't want to settle or lose my connection to my own children, even if they are harnessed to the breakneck speed of life and there is no looking back. 

But I miss you something fierce, mama, and I wish I could still have you here with me, and we could get to see the kooky old lady you were always supposed to become.

Mom & Hazel

Once Upon A Death

Mom left this for me to find after she was gone.

Last night, my mama visited me in my dream.

I don't mean I got some divine message from her or anything, but last night my dream was of an old wooden house, filled to the brim with activity - kids, family, chaos, lost socks...The place seemed new, and perhaps unfamiliar, but we were settling into it with the intention of letting it become a safe place for us.  And mom was there, too - it was a dream beautiful in its banality, we were just spending time together, like a family trip home for vacation.  With one notable exception: we all fully acknowledged that mom was dead, but that just added to how wonderful this brief time we had together was.  I think we knew it was just a day or so, and it seemed implicit that this would happen every so often, these visits... It was so surprisingly nice to get to talk to her about how hard this year has been, and how much we miss her...the same old comfort from mother's counsel that I could always count on.  No drama, just an acknowledgment of "Man this sucks.  It's really hard.  I'm so glad I have you to talk to about all of this." Plus jokes and laughter, and...it was just such a nice visit.

Up until today, I have been able to explain away my forgetfulness, my wistfulness, my loneliness, my tears. "My mom just died." But now there are only a few hours left wherein her abscence is "novel." Moments in the turning of the seasons that I have not previously experienced without her. Starting in mere hours, the time will begin to overlap. I will have experienced this moment in the cycle of time without her once already... Just last night, the darkness fell without her on an October 26th for the very first time. But tonight, the darkness will fall on an October 27th for the second time.

And somehow I find this one even harder to fathom.

The first year was somehow built into the event of death; you lose someone, part of your heart goes with them, and you spend a year mourning in an emotional darkness. 

But what do we do now, at the advent of the second year? 

Another trip around the sun without mother? This is no longer the fresh wound, understandably bleeding. This is now the old injury that doesn't fully heal, aching under gray skies, no longer obvious to passers by. A silent, private pain, devastating, but to the outside eye, invisible.

Mom's amazing laugh

I am used to invisible pain, though. All through my teenage years, I struggled with a chronic pain disorder called Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.  While it is (thankfully) mostly in remission now, I learned a lot from my experiences with it. One of the hardest things I learned was that sometimes, the things that hurt the most are the very things you need to do in order to continue on as a whole being.  Giving in to the pain can lead to atrophy and eventually the loss of the limb...or worse, it can spread and consume your entire body.

And so I find inspiration here.  I know that hiding from this pain won't help me find a path through it, and I know that the world at large isn't going to hold my hand while I try to find my feet, and so I dive into it on my own in the dark, quiet nights when my family is safely sleeping.  I write, I sing, I imagine, I explore, I cry...

Earlier this year, I performed an aerial silks piece that I created in honor of my mother, about the experience of losing her.  I haven't shared it because it was underrehearsed and not at all up to my own standards, but last night's dream really drove home that she would be saddened by my decision not to share it, and if I really want to honor her as I meant to, I should put it out there anyway.

So this is for you, Mom:

This song hit me square in the gut last fall as we prepared for your departure. Everything about it spoke directly to how I felt.  And though I knew we were heading towards goodbye, I knew that I would never stop wanting you back.  That there will always be a huge place for you in my heart. It spoke to the little kid in me that will always be looking for you out the window, waiting for you to come home.  It was very clearly written about a lost lover, but that didn't matter, the sense of loss and longing at the point of departure, the calm acceptance that this was happening even if we didn't want it to, the sense of strength in the face of huge change, and the preservation of the love...it all hit so close to home.  The chorus became my wish for you to have an easy, peaceful death, and no more promises became my way of releasing you from feeling like you were letting us down by leaving too soon.  And never loving again was simply never getting over this loss.  The song became the anthem of that time for me, and helped me, hugely, to grieve.

"The sky looks pissed

the wind talks back

my bones are shifting in my skin

and you my love are gone.

my room feels wrong

the bed won't fit

I cannot seem to operate

and you, my love, are gone

So glide away on soapy heels

and promise not to promise anymore

and if you come around again

then I will take, 

then I will take the chain from off the door.

I'll never say

I'll never love

but I don't say a lot of things

and you my love are gone.

So glide away on soapy heels

and promise not to promise anymore

and if you come around again 

then I will take the chain from off the door.

Then I will take

then I will take

then I will take

the chain

from off

the door."

I took that song and used it to create this piece.  I was going for a disjointed feel, where things seem backwards and upside down, at odd angles, and things that should be beautiful seem somehow awkward...all while looking skyward in search of something that is missing.

Unfortunately the video didn't come out very well.  It's dark, and all of the shape work I did in the fabric at the start is totally lost, and because it is in closeup a lot of the vertical dimensions I was playing with don't translate, so I consider this a poor documentation of it on top of feeling like it wasn't the homage you deserved...So it is only with the understanding that this is just a first step, and I will be holding you in my heart in everything that I do that I am putting this out into the world now. It may be flawed, but it is for you, mama, with so much love.

Once Upon A Death from Kat Stroot on Vimeo.

Maybe the chain is on the door to that old wooden house in my dream.  Maybe, every so often, you can come around again, and I will take - I will always take - that chain from off the door.

Love always,
Kate

A first UnMothered mothers' day.

NOTE:  I originally wrote this piece on Mother's Day, 2014.  I ended up not publishing it, because I felt it was more appropriate as a commemoration of this day, the first anniversary... so I have scheduled this to publish without my deliberate intervention on October 27, 2014, as I have no idea where I will be, emotionally or physically, six months from this writing.

*   *   *

The best term I have yet found to describe what today feels like came, unexpectedly, from my elementary school violin teacher, thanks to the wonders of Facebook.  She shared an article in which the author described feeling "UnMothered" following the passing of her own mom, as opposed to being "motherless"-and I could very much relate to the emotional journey she described as I thought about my dance with grief over these past weeks. Months. The yet unexplored years...

I feel that October 27, the day my mama let go, will become in my heart "unmothering day"...the day we-my sister and I-said goodbye and moved into a realm where we exist without her physical presence. Not motherless, we still have the love and experience we gained from her, and always will-but we don't now. So while we were fortunate enough to have a wonderful, loving mother, we don't still have her in the present, making us, indeed, UnMothered. We don't have her there to wipe our faces (as Mike Rowe's mom reportedly still tries to do, in his lovely tribute to her this morning) or to call up to straighten out a bit of family lore or ask for advice on how best to complete some task, but we still-and will forever-still have all the lessons she taught us about being good people, and caring for ourselves and our loved ones fully, and how to occasionally embarrass ourselves in the name of living life. We will never be motherless. She will always be our mom. 

But today, for the first time on this day set aside for honoring moms, we are UnMothered.

I breathe in the absence, and then let it go, and breathe in the abundance I have, and try to balance my grief with my gratefulness. 

She gave me so much, and what's more, she taught me how to appreciate it.

Not Asking

Last night, for whatever reason, I couldn't sleep, and I decided to try doing some work recording voice overs...I couldn't focus on that, either, and ended up recording an improvised song in the middle of the night.  I more or less intentionally left it ambiguous, but in my gut it feels very much about grief, and I post it here, flaws, hokey garage band processing (because my adobe audition wouldn't cooperate) and all, in memory of my mother.  She wouldn't care much about the weak spots, and would probably leave some comment about how I used to sing improvised operas non stop as a kid, and try to remember the lyrics to the "where's my purse" song she inspired me to sing as a four year old.

Miss you, Mama.

A humble Mother's Day

It's the little things that make life great.

It's my kids insisting that I need to sleep in on mother's day, but being so excited that they wake me up at dawn, covering the bed in cards and love and, oddly, sandals.

It's going out to breakfast and beating the crowd, thanks to their early morning exuberance.

It's coming home and having a quiet moment to sit and miss and love my missing mom.

It's blowing bubbles on a sunny Sunday, and seeing my babies' eyes light up at the big green ball I toss them, an unexpected gift.

It's in the way I feel lighter when my gift to them becomes a gift to me, as they invent a game that fools me into moving my body through space, running after balls and kids and splashing through streams; the very actions that heal the soul but feel too heavy to fathom out of context.

It's in the way I should take a nap, but the littlest commandeered her father's energy and now they snooze together on the couch, topped with a lazy loving cat.

This Mother's Day wouldn't be a celebration of motherhood without the little moments, like scooping a dead spider from the bath water and finding the missing hippo towel. These moments seem mundane; the compromises sometimes cruel, but there is depth to these moments that I can feel so fully now that my own mom is gone. They won't remember each caterpillar we rescue, or every sacrifice I make; but these moments sculpt their futures and help them to identify with hard work and joy, and I can ask for no more than to prepare my children for fulfilling lives of their own.

And perhaps, when I am gone, they will feel that, while they don't quite know why, the tiny moments of joy in the day to day remind them of home, and they will be encouraged to recognize those moments, and live there even when times are rough. And maybe, if I'm lucky, a moment or two of nothing in particular will remind them of their long gone mother, who loved them so very much.

two months

Hummel figurine talking hello.
missing.
missing.
missing.

Kelly Update

I want to offer a huge, heartfelt thank you to everyone who has reached out to me and my family over the past couple of days.  The scope of suggestions and offers and the way everyone rallied to try to make sure Kelly was safe and cared for was wonderfully stunning.

The important thing:  Kelly is coming home.  Her specific journey and choices are hers to share or not as she pleases, so I won't go into detail here, but we owe it to all of you who stepped up to let you know that she will be home with Dad very soon.

Thank you all SOOO much for your support and assistance. 

Much love!!!

What We Need

I am not ok.

I am writing this here because I have been trying to write for days now about how we are doing and what we need and it just hasn't been working because I have been trying to hard to be safe and polite.

Tonight I have lost the ability, or the will, to care about being polite.  We are not ok.  Not at all.

I feel trapped.  So, so damn trapped in this isolated place, this no man's land where the only memories are of my mother's death.  We have a sympathetic neighbor or two that we see now and again, and we have a couple friends in the general vicinity, and I don't mean to discount their presence…but I only see them maybe once a month or so?  It isn't enough.

My glorious godmother fedexed us an entire cooler full of frozen, home cooked meals all the way from Portland OR, and one of our NY friends had a delivery set up from a local restaurant one night.  Many people have sent us boxes of pears and chocolate. Other people have sent money so we can get food, and a cousin shopped for us-these are all wonderful, wonderful gestures, but it somehow lacks the comfort of the midwestern church ladies drowning the mourning family in casseroles that last weeks on end…that is somehow what I am used to, and it isn't here. I can't even remember who to thank when I never see faces, and I stress over where we can safely order from, and is that gifted food allergy safe?  And where are all the faces…I don't even have my sister or my dad here…the people who knew my mother existed and was wonderful and loved and loving…here I see strangers, who know nothing of her, who have no idea that she lived and died within these walls just weeks ago.

And it isn't just that.  It's the difficulty of daily life here, the fact that James spends 3 whole hours commuting EVERY DAY, which means he is out of the house for 12 hours every day and I am on my own with the kids, and I do my best but I am only one person and I am struggling with this loss and so are they and they need more than just me, and I feel so alone…and I worry about him, biking five miles to catch the train, and then five miles home after dark, riding in bad weather, cold temperatures, on the road…It isn't safe and I worry, I worry, I worry…

The chaos I feel in my spirit seems to be reflected in the situation here…this building, the first place we have ever lived where my children scream that they hate it here and want to move, the chronic fire alarms, the lack of insulation and shaky floors that lead to angry neighbors…the fact that four days after we moved in they bulldozed ALL the trees we could see from our home, and now BOTH sides of our corner unit look out over noisy, dusty, ugly construction sites.  The bulldozer under my kitchen window competing with the dump truck clanging outside the bedroom gets to be just too much, and we keep the windows closed to drown the noise, but then my allergies go haywire from the carpeting and no amount of vacuuming and air purifying seem to make a dent in it…

But worst of all is the smell.

Cancer fucking stinks.  If you haven't had a personal encounter with it you may not be aware, but cancer has a distinctive, horrible odor, that gets worse as the disease progresses.  It is a sickening stench, and strong…her whole room still smells of it, and I can't get rid of it.  No amount of cleaning, airing it out, scenting the air, anything…I can't get rid of this horrible smell of my mother dying.  And lately I can smell it in the rest of the house, too.

I cannot imagine spending Christmas here, with my children's joy stewing in that smell.

I need and want out, so, so badly.  What I need is for someone to find us a suitable home, and help us get out of here…someplace where James can actually be a realistic presence in our lives, where there is no dynamite outside the window or neighbors complaining about my vacuuming habits, where we don't have to get packages during business hours and the fire alarm doesn't go off 8 times in two months. Maybe have some outdoor space - a yard.  A fireplace, maybe, so the smell of the woodsmoke could cleanse my heart of that horrid, horrid scent that haunts every breath I take - every breath my babies take - tainting our lives with death.

Here, I can't cry.  I don't have time to mourn. This is the first I've written in days, and it is 4 am and I have not slept.  Instead, by body is physicalizing the stress.  My eczema has hit harder than it ever has before, my whole body is afflicted…my arms, neck, and chest  are more or less open wounds at this point, my skin sloughs off so easily…my eyelids have taken turns swelling painfully, and once that subsided I developed an eye twitch that kept me up the other night because my eye kept opening on its own when I tried to sleep.

I have also, horrifyingly, awoken an old, sleeping foe; the nerve disease I battled as a teenager and had finally put into remission has reared it's ugly head once again.  It isn't surprising, seeing as this thing is infamous for responding to emotional stimuli and this has been a whopper of a year…known as RSD (reflex sympathetic dystrophy) when I was first diagnosed, it is now more popularly called CRPS (chronic regional pain syndrome) and as that name might suggest, this bugger freakin' hurts.  Today I even had to break out my old TENS unit to cope with the pain, something  which I never thought I would do again, and weirdly offset the energy in my entire body.

My foot has been turning all shades of blue and purple, swelling, generally being an oversensitive nuisance complete with aching, burning, shooting, intense muscle locking pain, all familiar afflictions that I have no fond nostalgia for.

So there I am - trying to mourn my mother, alone, in intense pain, skin flaking off, eye twitching, with three young kids under my charge, in this uncomfortable place (described best by my friend Liz: "It's agoraphobia coupled with claustrophobia!") that is surrounded by noise pollution and the stench of death to boot.

But here's the kicker, and the real reason I am writing this negativity-ridden post:  I have it better than Kelly right now.

Read that all again, and let that sink in for you: I have it better.

I had my mother for 28 years.  Not long enough, but long enough that I was able to find my way to some semblance of adulthood with her around, and had her as a guide through the early years of my marriage and the birth of all three of my babies.  Now, I have my husband and my children to care for and focus on, to give me strength and support and inspiration in everything I do…

Kelly, though, only celebrated her 20th birthday weeks before we lost mom.  Her established life is that of a dorm, which she lost when mom's health turned because she had to withdraw from school in order to be with her.  She is just on that edge of adulthood that is so treacherous and scary for everyone who passes through it, regardless of specific life circumstance.  She wasn't done being mom's baby, and loosing her has hit Kelly the way the loss would hit a child, despite her maturity.  We are both extremely lucky in that we still have our father, who is very devoted and loving, but he will, of course, never replace our mother.

As if losing your mother before you've fully grasped adulthood wasn't enough, poor Kelly caught a kick while she was down when, the day before mom died, she discovered that her long time boyfriend wasn't just returning to his overseas studies when he left her side, but that he was, in fact, returning to another woman.

Catch that?

Yeah.  it hurt every bit as much as you can imagine it did. And probably then some.

Listen, he gets credit where credit is due-he came when we got him a ticket to be with her, he was helpful to us as a whole while he was here, helping to feed and entertain the kids…I don't mean to make him seem like a horrible demon, because he has many wonderful qualities that made her fall in love with him…my point here is to explain her pain, not slander him, but:

When she confronted him, and they were trying to work it out, he had the audacity to tell her that he couldn't stop seeing the other woman because she "was sad" - her boyfriend left her and she needed comfort.  As Kelly dealt with the fact that she just watched her mother die.

She is suffering so much.  So much loss.  So much halted potential.  And she can't go back to school until next semester. And only a few of her friends (albeit awesome ones) still live near her home base with dad.  And that house itself is fraught with memories, since mom lived there for 12 years, and she wants nothing to do with this place, either, which means building a new,  safe space here with me isn't a viable option.  She feels so lost right now.

Anyway, my point is she loves this boy so much, losing him right now is a huge blow…just when she needs support the most, the support she did have totally imploded.  It's so so hard and so so scary to admit that two of the most important relationships in your life are just suddenly gone without warning…mom took away much of her past, and she felt like this boy was taking the future she had relied on to get her through that pain.

She didn't like the way things were playing out, breaking up via Skype and Facebook, and she honestly believed that the best thing for her was to utilize the tickets she already had to fly to Iceland and see/deal with him face to face.  So she went.  She knew that we would worry, and as such has been making a concerted effort to check in with us/respond to our messages just to let us know that she is ok.

But she is not. Not at all.  The main thing keeping her going through all of this has been her friends, but her phone doesn't work overseas, and she doesn't have the proper power adapter for her computer and thus doesn't even have good internet access. She has been using his computer consistently, but it doesn't allow her to rely on her extended network of friends at all.

I was going to say that what she needs is a travel companion.  I was going to ask all of my well traveled friends if anyone would happen to be passing through Reykjavik, or would be headed to Europe and might be willing to have a companion for your travels, because what Kelly needed was a friend, someone to travel with, have new, fulfilling experiences with, to get out but not be alone.

But then I got a call from Dad.  Evidently Kelly is in a really bad way-a bad enough state that her now ex boyfriend is scared and called his mom because he didn't know what to do, he is afraid to leave her alone.  His mom contacted dad, and now Dad is trying to figure out how to get to her, to bring her home safely.

So now she is in Iceland, a cold, wet, dark place where they only have 4 hrs of sunlight a day, almost completely cut off from most of her friends, trapped with her now ex boyfriend and the woman he left her for, and is in way over her head.

We have both been trying to get in touch with her by any means possible, calls, texts, email, Facebook…we haven't had meaningful responses from her since friday, and now this distress call…I got really worked up last night after trying to reach out to a bunch of her friends - wonderful friends, she is lucky to have so many people around her - but young, an inexperienced.  They honestly believe they are watching out for her when they tell us we need to just give her space and not try to reach her or intervene, that her ex is just being dramatic and overreacting and this is his problem not hers, but frankly, I've seen too many people that I care about go through this, I've seen people lose this battle, and I am not willing to take chances.  I know now from experience how distorted reality can get from the inside, and how easy it is to think you have your own best interest in mind, when you don't.  Often, what you want is totally different from what you need, and things can turn south quickly. In those moments, no phone or computer can reach out and stay your hand.

Again, as Liz said: "No one regrets intervening. Everyone regrets not doing so if the end is tragic."

I didn't post this last night because it was written in an emotionally elevated state and I know this is going to be a huge thing to put out there in the world, and part of me knows it is a dangerous thing to do - And if absolutely nothing else, Kelly would be mad at me for doing it... But I know that the more people are aware of the problem, the better the chances we have of her getting the help and support she needs, both now and down the road.  And truthfully, I was also hoping beyond hope that her friends were right and that this morning I would wake up to a pissed off message from Kelly, being annoyed at our fretting and telling us to chill out, she's fine.  But there are no such messages today.  When she has been so consistently checking in to let us know she is well, this radio silence screams "I am not ok, please help me" just as loud as anything can right now.

And I will have no regrets.

Kelly, we love you beyond words.

Happy Birthday

Today should have been my mother's 58th birthday.

Only 58. But she won't ever be 58. Or 64. Or 80...I won't get to see what she looks like as an old lady, or ...or anything.  I tried to complete that sentence but there were too many possiblitiies, and it just came down to that: anything. 

Love you mom. I found this in the living room today:

These girls, they love you so much, too. We baked you some cupcakes-they are sorry things and I over baked the first batch. I'm sorry you weren't here to laugh about it with me. I hope next year I will be able to connect with you more deeply, but today I just felt the lack of your physical presence a bit too sharply.

Happy birthday.