Longer and Longer

It's been 4 & 1/2 months since my last post. As I said back in February, I struggle with coming here. My days continue on without my mom. It's been 20 months. I recently survived my 2nd birthday and Mother's Day without my mom and what would have been her 75th birthday just passed earlier this month. Mother's Day is still very hard and I anticipate it will be for some time. It's almost surreal to watch people looking for Mother's Day cards and knowing I have no mother to buy one for anymore.

Outside of the above dates, there have been several moments this year that have been momentous for me. I bought a house in March. Boy did I work hard to get to this place. I know mom would be so happy for me. Olly and I were married in April. And I am approaching graduation. I recently received feedback on my rough draft of my senior project. This is the culmination of the last two years of hard work for me. The work that began six weeks before mom died. The feedback began, "Kelli, this is one of the best papers I have read in a very long time..." As I read through the rest of my advisor's feedback, I found myself in tears. I have wanted to talk to my mom over the past 20 months at various times, but as I was reading that feedback it was the first time I so desperately wanted to pick up the phone and call my mom. I needed to talk to her. I KNOW she would be so incredibly proud of me. The kind of proud only a mother has for her children. How I wanted to hear that. I am very proud of myself, but how I wanted to share this incredible accomplishment with my mom. I did talk to dad and he expressed to me how proud he is and how he knows how proud my mom would be and I appreciated all of that and it meant so much to me. But I was surprised at how much I needed my mom at that moment and how much it hurt that she wasn't there.

And I'm surprised that I still get surprised. There are days when I feel like I've adjusted so well and then there are still moments where I completely crumble. And even though I am open to those moments and I let them come in...I admit, they still surprise me. Why I'm still surprised, I don't know. Probably because they just hit out of nowhere...out of the blue. Something small and silly usually cues a reaction in me and I find myself in tears.

As I approach the end of my Bachelor's Degree, it is such an amazing accomplishment at 42 years old, but there is a little part of me that wonders if I haven't thrown my grief into school. I have been in classes for 87 of the last 95 weeks. I have one more week in this term and then 8 weeks of my last term and I'm done with this step of my education. I have a 3.97 GPA. I only have one B+ and that was in the term right after mom died. Everything else has been an A. School has been a place to direct my brain. I have to admit that I worry about school ending and my brain having to deal with reality. But I start my Masters program in January and then likely my Doctorate 2 years after that. Is school my grief therapy? I don't know. Maybe I'm not ready to find out.

What I know is that I am very ready to start my new career. I feel I have renewed my passion for the postpartum period with my senior project and have recently learned that my passion for grief therapy is very powerful for me as well. I know without a doubt I am heading in the right direction. I have 2 Doula clients left. I will no longer be a full-time Doula by mid-August. It's odd. And a life transition...which makes it scary. But I truly know I'm following the right path.

And I feel like I have a light shining on that path for me. I feel that I have guidance that I would likely not have had without my mom's death. Is it my mom or is it the lessons I've learned in losing her? Maybe it's both. But I certainly feel that without all the experiences of the past two years, I would not be where I am today. And I know that it is exactly where I am supposed to be.