A Difficult Month

I'm reading "Chinese Cinderella and the Secret Dragon Society" with my students. The main character, Ye Xian, looses her mother when she is a girl and her father soon finds himself a woman who becomes a dreaded stepmother - hence the Cinderella connection. Good readers we use strategies to understand the text better: we make connections with the world outside, with our own experiences and other books. In today's chapter, Ye Xian emotionally falls apart in front of her future society brothers and tells them about her misery and pain related to her mother's death. 

I was not a little girl when I lost my mother and I didn't have a stepmother but I understand the excruciating pain a child feels loosing a parent. I told my students that I understand Ye Xian's tears because five years ago I lost my own mother. 

Although a lot of time has passed, I remember everything about her.  I remember her smell. I remember her voice, I can hear it in my head. I remember how she walked. I remember the shape of her fingernails and the texture of her hair. I remember her body shape. I remember her laughs and her tears. 

Oh, how I miss her!

October is a difficult month: each year around this tie I feel her absence even more. When it's really hard I ask her if she is somewhere around and sees me and I hear the voice that tells me that she has never left anywhere. 

I miss her. 

I have flashbacks and see scenes from our life: I see her dancing: there was a time when my house was full of laughter and joy. My parents loved having people around and every weekend there was somebody around: families, friends. I see her laughing and dancing with my father. Then I see her sitting in a chair with her cigarette drinking coffee in the morning on a terrace. Many times I would join her. 

How things can go wrong!

Guilt! I have a lot of guilt inside as well. I will not write more about it here but it's there and often I need to face these difficult emotions so that they it doesn't eat me up. I have hole in my heart.

I'm trying to leave my life as well as I can. I have my up and down, and I'm surely far from being very pleased with myself. But I'm trying. I'd like to look back one day and feel that it is possible to have a 'normal life' even after such a horrible tragedy as a suicide in the family but I'm failing so often...

And then I miss her even more... She would always tell me: if not you, then who? She believed that I have a potential to become successful but...

October is a difficult month. 

I was not a little girl when I lost my mother and I didn't have an evil stepmother but I understand the excruciating pain a child feels loosing a parent.