How can the past year have been the longest and shortest of years? This is hard to understand. On one side, a good chunk of these last 365 days have been a grind; some days feeling like driving a car with no tires, rims grinding on the concrete, slowing moving forward. On the other hand, I woke up today, and it has been 1 year since my mom died… just like that, the blink of an eye, snap of a finger… how does it all work?
Time doesn’t stop for anybody, anything; there’s one explanation. You may want to stop time, maybe you want to go back in time; I’ve wanted both of those things. At the very least, you hope to slow time down for a bit… like this past year, needing time to recover from this big blow. Nope; no can do. Time moves the exact same regardless of what you got going on in your life. Since time cannot be altered, you take a look at “your plate”; how full is it? The daily routine of work, family, work, family can vary as far as how much that fills your plate. Those are two constants; you love your family, you work for your family. That’s about as basic as it gets for me. There’s that whole thing called “work-life balance”… some people are good at it, some maybe not so much. I always thought I had a good handle on it; I think for the most part I still do. Yet, the “balance” part of that statement has been the toughest to maintain over these past 52 weeks. When you take the person who has loved you the most on this earth since your birth out of the equation, well, you feel it. No offense to my dad, wife, or son, but… there is nothing like a mother’s love.
Maybe that’s hard to understand for some people; the different types of love that exist in this world. I only have one father; there is no relationship like the one between father & son. I’m not Mormon, so I only have one wife; there is no love like that between a husband and wife. I only have one child (that was easy), that whole father-son love thing again; if I did have multiple children, the love for each of them would be equally tremendous… my son gets all of that to himself. There are your siblings, other family members, friends, etc… all different types of relationships, different feelings/expressions of love. In this same line of thinking, I only HAD one mother, and now she’s gone; the mother-son relationship is now over for me. I’m fortunate that I had 47+ years. Some aren’t as lucky…
There is no getting that back, no matter how much I would like that; it’s gone, and at the same time, it will always be with me… how does THAT work? Well, another contradicting mystery of life I guess… I can’t see her, I can’t hug or kiss her, but I can still feel her; she did a pretty good job with that motherly love thing, so good, that it continues on, even without her physically here. It’s part of my core, that can be shaken, but never broken; this year was an earthquake. This shaking was caused by my mother’s death; the fact that I’m still here is because of my mother’s love. Hey, I don’t know… I’m just thinking out loud here…
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