Goodbye

Goodbye Dad,

Thank you for giving me life and teaching me a valuable lesson on how dangerous it is to play around with addictions.

I'm sure that you are in a better place and that your suffering her, and you did suffer a lot, cam to an end. 

I wish I could have helped you but you didn't want to be helped on other than your terms and your terms we could not accept. 

It's so sad to think that I will never see you again. My thoughts travel home which now is empty but I still feel your presence. I still feel like you are there. 

But you are not and only a building has left.  Our home. A guardian of the story and many secrets. 

I am still here, though.

I am still alive and I promise myself today that I will learn as much as I can from you death, that  I will do my homework and live. I want to live. I want to live and be happy no matter what.

I want to fly.

You know that I loved you. I loved you so, so much. And I only wanted one thing from you - that you stopped drinking and that you chose us. 

But you chose otherwise and I still loved you. I understand you didn't know how to live.... only you know the truth. Only you know the pain you carried, the disappointments you experienced and hopes that died in you. Only you know... You chose not to tell me or my brothers. You chose to drown in alcohol.

I choose to live. 

I chose to live a long time and ago and that's why I had to run away from you. I suffer consequences of my choices every day of be being so far away from my family. I suffer but I also know deeply inside my heart that it was my only option to run away in order to survive and live.

Live, live, live!

I wish it was different but since it's not I will play with the cards that life is dealing me. They are not the easiest cards but the game goes on and I will not give up and play the best I can though the rules of the game change without my consent. I will play nevertheless because if I stop I will die.

I want to live.

I had to pause now and have a look at my own life. The time of some changes has come, changes that will improve the quality of my existence and my work. It hasn't been the best six months of my life but the time has come to stop making a victim of myself and start working on solutions.Thank you, Dad, for making me pause. Too bad you couldn't help me figure out things otherwise.

I have no parents any more.

Goodbye Dad.

I'm sure you are in a better place.

 

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.

Where Are You, Mom?

Now that I'm expecting my own child I am often traveling down memory lane thinking about my own Mother. I often think that everything would be different for me if she still was here, if she lived. I would be able to do it with her, raise my child with her, love it with here and receive help from her. She was so good with children and she loved each and every little one she met on her way. She was a real MOM. She would scold you and comfort you, she would feed you with the most delicious food and she would listen to your worries. But she is no more.

I remember how she was waiting for me to get pregnant. My both brothers have long been married with children and it was me, the only girl in the family, she was waiting for. It was her joke I truly disliked that I should never worry if I ever got pregnant without a partner because she would help me; just like she helped my sisters-in law and brothers. It sounded scandalous to me whet she was saying. I knew better and I was waiting for my beloved one to have children with. I never had thought of doing it by myself. So oftentimes she would get annoyed "Moooom" after her joke. And here I am: pregnant, without a partner but also without a Mom to take me though it.

When I sometime pass by her picture in my flat I'm asking: where are you, Mom? Where are you when I need you so much? And depending on the level of pain that surfaces, I'm asking her this quietly with no remorse but sometimes it hurts so much that I'm tempted to toss her picture across the room screaming: WHERE ARE YOU NOW, MOM?! But I just wipe my tears and carry on.

I know she is there looking at me from above and I know that she is crossing her fingers for me and my success. I know she would be happy to have a grand-child but I also know that she must be regretting now herself that she didn't give herself a chance to participate in this. I had a dream today. We were together in the room, we both knew she was dead though we still could have a conversation with each other. I felt her and I could touch her. She was there but she wasn't. She showed me her brand new LV bag (???) and something else she has bought and then we talked about things. All was calm and bright. There was this beautiful tree of artificial flowers in the middle of the room and I thought how wonderful it would be for a baby to sleep underneath. I wanted to stay in this room forever with her and the baby because I knew it will all be good. When I told her about it, I saw her face grew sadder, she closed the door and she took me in her arms, me head on her opulent breasts and she rocked me in her arms like she used to, and we both cried because we knew that her being there for me was impossible. Then I woke up.

I know she is regretting that she can't be here but I also know that she is with me all the time. I just have to get used to the reality that Mom will be there but in another way. 

I'm sure there will be many times in coming years when I will feel more this would left on my heart by her death. Being a mother was everything to her. So much that she totally forgot about herself in the process... But she was great Mom and she was Mom for everybody around her.