02/25/2024
25 years ago this week my mother, 43 at the time, was in the hospital after still-birthing a daughter and the day after suffering a massive stroke and heart attack from clots in her blood.
I with her physically when it happened. I was the one in the room with her. We had, intuitively and without speaking of why, prepared for this immediate change to everything in the days prior when she showed me how she managed the budget and we pulled together all the kid’s birth information - which allowed me quickly obtain birth certificates for the several born at home (the youngest 8 children)
I was with her physically only because of my gifts of seeing. Of lucid dreaming.
A week before I had foreseen that we were going to lose the baby in a dream, and that if I wasn’t there we would lose mom too. Because of my great work ethic I had several weeks of vacation and sick time saved up, and a supportive boss who told me to go to her when I shared my dream in tears the next morning. That was the longest Greyhound bus ride of my life, from Phoenix AZ to Lake Havasu.
When i got there, my sister Crystal was completely exhausted from caring for mom and my 14 months old brother for weeks. Mom has tried so hard to hide how awful she was feeling. She must have been so scared.
I was 21. Married, homeowner, solid career path started … but a child. Everything changed.
This past few nights I’ve been wondering why my dreams have been what they have this week.
Now I know.
It all came flooding back tonight; as my body remembers the anniversary even though it took me a couple days to put it together.
Grief is a fascinating and important part of the human experience. Stuffing it is so easy to do, because it can be so overwhelming. Yet I know it’s one of the unhealthiest things to do - stuff grief.
You probably have a story too, of grief, of gifts that are surprisingly challenging but you’re grateful for anyway, of moments you’ll never be able to fully forget that completely changed the trajectory of your life, perceptions and reality.
It’s not selfish to put yourself first. My mother taught me that by putting everyone else first to her own extreme detriment. I wish she had put herself first over financial worries, over paradigms, over everything, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. Her patterns were what they were and one day it was too late to choose to change things … things changed out of momentum.
Today, I grieve my mother. Yes; that she’s no longer with us but mainly the day she could no longer guide me in life, could no longer hold me when I cried, could no longer be the strong one. That day, roles shifted and we - the children - became her caretaker. My sister Crystal became the family angel. My siblings are stronger than about anyone I’ve ever met, with kinder hearts and more understanding views than most because they learned to read an alphabet board to communicate with their mother. They didn’t have the same version of Mom I did, but they got her soul. Her fiery committed spirit and we all learned far more from and through her than she ever thought she might teach us with the life she planned before that day.
She taught me to sing, dance, play piano, read, do math, she taught me science, daring, sewing, cooking, childcare, brought me network marketing and personal development, planted the seeds for hypnosis, energy healing and so many other things. In such a short life.
And as tonight I grieve again, I am so grateful for the mother who raised me. 💔❤️🩹🙏
