aaaawww...shucks.

i just wanted to say thank you
to everyone who commented so sweetly
last week when i was kind of
"sorting through my stuff"
it meant so much to me to come on here
and read what you all had to say...

i'm not a gushy person by nature

but thanks from the bottom of my heart.

progress...

so we did some decorating over the weekend...


this is one of my favorites...a stretchy santa with a reindeer
that makes me think of the decorations i had as a kid...


if you look closely, you can see a gargoyle who is suffering
from the extreme humilation that only a christmas bow-tie
and hat can bestow...

this is a close up of the knitting that i have been (cough,
cough) attempting...attempting for the past six weeks
that is, and this is what i have yet accomplished, hee hee.

again with the knitting...

a close up of my "studio"/"home office"/"santuary" heehee
if you look closely at the blue and brown card and the sark
card, you will see what i happily recieved in the mail last week
from michelle
i was soooooooo excited about getting not one but TWO
cards in the mail ON THE SAME DAY EVEN....


this is my new sorta studio, sorta sanctuary...the only bad
thing about it is that its so accessible to the kids...haha....
don't get me wrong i love them to pieces, but i need
some quiet time at some point of the day :)

i'm hoping maybe after this christmas to add both a computer
and a sewing machine to this area...oh...and some much needed
storage...heehee

are you there?

I'm sorry that I seem to be stuck on this subject.
I think that maybe I am again working through this
in a way. When I took my ECCE course, they
talked about grief and said that it was like an onion
because it has so many layers and that you are never
truly finished grieving, but rather, that every time
it hits you again, it hits you fresh and hard and true
all over again because you are at a different place
in your life.

I find when I start talking/thinking/writing about her,
then I can't stop for awhile. The dream that I had
was what spurred it this time. I often have dreams
where she is there and it is so real and I always know
in the dream that it is only going to be a short time
that I have with her and that then she has to go back.
Sometimes, she gives me things, like a red balloon.

But the strangest thing that has ever happened to
a cynical jaded person like myself is what happened
when I was in labor for my first child. This was 5 years
after the accident. R's little sister was supposed to
come in the delivery room with me. However, we
had complications and she couldn't come in. I had
always assumed that that was the reason she couldn't
come in.

A couple of years later, R's little sister and I were at
a small house party and having a few drinks. She
took me into the bedroom and told me the truth
about why she couldn't come in. I had a hard
labor and they gave me alot of drugs. I was
pretty messed up and don't remember very much
about any of it. My husband was in jail at the
time (that is a whole different story :)).

R's sister told me that my mother told her mother
that while I was in the delivery room and things
were at thier worst, I talked to R the whole time.
Like she was in the room. Like she was with me.
Like she was there.

I do not remember this at all. I was stunned.

I have done my share of "experimenting" with substances
after the accident and before meeting my husband.
I had never had anything like this happen before.
Was I just completely stressed out and high and
my subconscious was playing tricks on my head?
Or was there more to it than that?

I honestly don't know.

But I would like to think,
that it wasn't just in my head.
I would like to beleive.
I want to beleive.

the night it happened.

When I was 19, I got engaged to
pretty much the first boyfriend
I ever had. He was kind of a jerk, really,
but not only did I not realize that then,
but I would have put up an astounding
argument against that threory had
anyone given me reason.

R and I kind of drifted away a bit.
She had a job waitressing and was still
going to school. I was assistant manager
at a record store. She had her friends
and I had mine. Yet, we could still get
together and it would be like nothing
had changed.

The guy that I was engaged to (who
will herein be referred to as "J"...
not because his name started with a J
but because he was a Jerk with a
capital J) was kind of a jerk.
We spent the summer of 1990 fighting,
much the same as the summer before.
We broke up and got back together more
than Tommy Lee and Pamela. People
at our local hangout, the Seven Eleven,
were literally taking bets on how long each
reunion was going to last.

This one weekend, we were broken up. I
was getting to the point that I was no longer
ready to commit suicide while sitting home
by the phone waiting for him to forgive me
for whatever trivial error I had committed.
Instead, I was planning on getting drunk.

So, the night it happened, I was drunk.
I had drank 4 wine coolers and that was
alot for a 98 pound weaking like I was.
I was commisserating my rotten life
and getting upset about being hit on by
J's best friends when someone told me
the phone was for me.

And it was my mom.

And she said there had been an accident.

And that R had been killed.

And I refused to beleive her. I shut down.
I don't know what happened after that.
I know that one of the guys that was at the party
took me home.

My brother was with R when it happened.
There were four of them. They went for a walk
at about ten at night, as we had done so many times
before. A guy that we knew from our area had pulled
over on the wrong side of the road to talk to them.
A car came from the opposite direction and
because the driver was drunk, he couldn't put
together what he was seeing. He didn't know where
the other car was and so...
he drove straight through the ditch.

He killed two of the girls.

My brother and another girl had run the other way.

The driver did not even realize immediately that
he had hit anyone, much less two people. Much
less that he had killed two people. During the
trial, his passenger admitted that initially they
had made a joke about it...

When I got to my parent's house that night,
my brother was laying on the couch,
repeating over and over what he
had seen. I held him and said
"its ok...its ok...its ok..."
over and over.

We had to go to the hospital. I held him all the way
there. They sedated him. While I sat in the waiting
room, I watched R's parents come from identifying
their daughter...

When we got home, I started to freak out a bit.
Up until this point, my whole focus had been my brother...
making sure he held together, making sure he was ok.
But when we got home, I remember standing in the kitchen,
and my voice beginning to escalate as I began to realize
what the hell had happened, as it began to sink into my skin...
my mother gave me a sleeping pill.

I slept in my parents water bed that night. I had a
dream that R was ok...that something had happened,
but that she was ok...it was going to be ok...and I was
so happy...I knew something bad had just been
narrowly averted...

In the dream, her legs were broken but she was ok.

In the dream, I was carrying her as we walked back
and forth from my house to hers, singing at the top
of our lungs and trying to annoy the neighbors.

And then I woke up.

And it hit me again....

I don't ever ever ever remember ever feeling as empty
as I did all through the process. I was completely empty.
I was a void. I felt nothing except vast incomparable
huge silent emptiness. I was devoid of anything.
I didn't speak to anyone. I couldn't. I had nothing to say.
All I had were echoes and silence.