… I didn’t realize that this was so true.

Tonight, I said goodbye to one job for good and am moving onto two other part-time ones. This past week I’ve combined shifts at the old job and training shifts at both new jobs and have been an emotional wreck because of it. I cry when I get home, I cry when I have to leave, oh and I really cried when my mother-in-law told me that she was proud of me. Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?!

I think it’s a combination of being in a new level of grieving, the deep well of need for something stable in my life and the rending of my heart to be away from my nest of husband and children at all – much less this much – because of that aforementioned need. That and I haven’t had family say something good to me in a long time. Such a simple thing and it blew me over like a leaf in the wind. It really struck me as foreign, to be honest. As if I am now living – for good – under the assumption that family will treat me like crap, that I should expect it and deserve it.

Excuse me, I know that I have given no background at all on this. You are sitting there thinking – what has her family done? Essentially, they’ve ripped my heart from my chest. I didn’t know that I would ever be capable of completely losing all emotion for my family. I am a tabula rasa when it comes to them and my future. The loss feels worse than I ever imagined, for it’s not simply them as people which is gone but the history, the traditions, the solid foundation of people you know will love you and support you through anything. I thought I had that kind of family. But when the proverbial “anything” happened, my entire life turned out to be a lie.

It’s little wonder I’m still in the grief process. I keep reading books on survivors like me – loss of a mother, loss of a loved one to suicide – and the people in them are deeply scarred from the simple loss. And believe me, I’m not putting that down. I am right there with them.

But I can’t help but keep asking myself as I read, has someone written a book about me? How am I ever to cope, dealing with the double whammy of loss and then judgment and betrayal and guilt heaped on me by those who should have consoled me? Am I ever going to be Ok?

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