A Throng of Thoughts: Missing Children
With the children at school, there is a dip in my mood in the late morning. It’s the hardest part of my day. Sometime just past the ten o’clock hour, when I ought to be working on my wish for 11:11, the sadness I’ve been not quite looking at straight on steps into my field of vision. It’s a funny kind of sadness, when I stop to contemplate it.
It’s not like when someone dies. That’s more like a sorrow. That’s a heavier thing that is built on the foundation of permanence. It’s not the sadness of getting physically hurt or sick, which is frustrating and can be painful and obviously affects one’s mood but it isn’t centered in it. And it’s not the sadness of failure, either, though I do skirt close to that feeling. Missing the girls is weirdly similar to a break-up or when you decide to give each other some space. It’s like everything is different but nothing has changed. Everyone is physically okay. You try to find the positive, which is mostly having less to do and/or more time to yourself. Unfortunately, more time to yourself is more time to dwell on someone’s choice to have less of you in their life. Even worse when they still like you— love you even—- but “things” are better with you not around. You have to accept that you were holding them back. They want— need even— to do things that you’re not capable of doing. Which is a weird way to think about elementary school, and I definitely stretched the analogy but whatever. You get it. I miss my kids and I’m sad.
Thursday I found myself running to listen to podcasts with the same lump in my throat I used to have running up the basement stairs in my parents’ house when I was a kid.
Oh thank the lord in heaven a new episode just dropped!
Photo by Malik Shibly on Unsplash
I’m afraid of the sadness. But it’s unavoidable. You can try to avoid it and feel like you’re succeeding for a bit. But you’re not. It’s still there. It wants you to turn and face it. Maybe. Maybe it doesn’t care if you acknowledge it any more than your blankets need you to say “thank you” every night. They have you covered regardless.
So maybe you do face it, maybe you don’t. But it’s there either way. It’s weighing you down. Your feet fall a little heavier or it gets a little harder to get out of bed every morning. It gets in the way of the right words coming to your mind when you’re trying to write down a thing. Or maybe you find yourself repeating words and you don’t even care enough to fix it. Maybe.
Sadness is like hair conditioner, you need to sit with it for a few minutes before you can start to clear your head.
