PEACE, SPRINKLED WITH A LITTLE GRIEF

I miss my mother and I think I’ve missed her the most this year, this is excluding the year she died. I think it’s because so many big things have happened to me and our family during the last 3 years since her death and there is just something about the number three that brings things together or bringing everything into completion and maybe that’s why I miss her so much this year. More so now that the year is coming to an end. It’s like I’ve experienced a trinity of grief and joy and success and exhaustion to the point where I just want my mother’s embrace but I can’t have it. I can’t go to my mother and release my tension. I can’t have her stroke my head or lay on her lap or hear her voice. These are all things I’ve desperately needed over the last few years and I’ve been deprived and it hurts. It will probably always ache as I continue to grow and evolve as a person.

In the last three years I got married, started a business with my husband, got promoted, performed on two big stages, acted in a short movie, did an interview on radio, performed a poem on live television, cut my hair, gained weight, moved homes three times, started a podcast, joined ministries at church, discussed one of my poems with a group of strangers, opened up about sexual abuse, cried, laughed, screamed, hurt, felt incredible joy and debilitating exhaustion…so much has happened and yet it feels not enough has happened…and all I’ve mostly wanted during all of this was my mother and to be a child again.

We don’t always realise that we still live with the grief long after we have experienced the loss. It hits us at the most inopportune times and its not something that ever disappears. No one person’s grief experience is the same and its unfair to compare it. The only thing to do is to remember we are all hurting, we are all mourning a loss; whether its a person or an opportunity or a missed conversation. We are all in mourning.
I have experienced a labyrinth of emotions. I can’t even describe it as a rollercoaster of emotions because a rollercoaster has a beginning and an end; it has a pattern, despite the highs and lows, you know it will come to a head but what I’ve experienced or what I am experiencing is an endless sea…a never ending melting pot of everything. Don’t get me wrong; I am at peace. It’s just sprinkled with a little grief.

Whether its PTSD, burn out or emotional exhaustion, its been a lot to say the least. I have had to learn how to swim, to keep peddling and pushing against the current and the one thing that has become abundantly clear to me, the whole point of this post, is that I survived. I look back and I see all I achieved through the grace of God and I am grateful. Sometimes we tend to be so hard on ourselves; we put so much pressure on what we must achieve and what we need to do to be successful and we forget to count the small things and as the saying goes; the small things are usually the big things.

I looked back on the last three years and I can genuinely smile, knowing I’ve achieved and done things that I didn’t think I could.
It’s been turbulent and chaotic and frustrating and agonizing.
It’s been confusing and at times I’ve been left with more questions than answers.
I’ve been down on my knees in prayer, I’ve felt the spirit of God in my most vulnerable state and I’ve cried with the rain and it has all shown me that I’ve lived and that I continue to live

I hope you are able to look back on this year or the last few years of your life and be filled with gratitude and the knowledge that you too have lived.