Beyond Me

May 10th?  Really?  It's been since May 10th since I posted to Mom's blog?

That doesn't seem possible and yet, the computer date stamp doesn't lie.

Of the ensuing days, here's what I recall.

8 days, I went to Vancouver, British Columbia to take a 6 day workshop which was exhausting, body-wise, and put me so far behind in work that it's now for certain, I'll never catch up. This, I've accepted.  For the thousandth time.

12 days, I've puttered, muttered, putzed and plodded through all manner of seemingless endless administrative tasks and interacting with teachers in Australia, Switzerland, Scotland, Italy and England.  

4 days, but not all in  row, I couldn't stop crying.

2 days, taught at a big human resources/compensation convention.

1 day, I had surgery - a breast lump removed - benign, as we knew it would be but too dense to tell from images so out it must come.  I had an allergic reaction to the disinfectant they use to spray you down with, 4 times in the 2 days prior to the procedure, and have lost an additional

2 days to being red, itchy, blotchy, scratchy & welty.  I feel so pretty!

1 day, nursery trip to buy the plant material to set up my garden.  This is terribly late for Seattle gardening season and it's already half over but there simply was no time before this so, I'm finally green with spots of bright color and enjoying the task of watering.  

And however many "lost days" are in there, between May 10th and June 2nd, apparently I cannot account for.  

And about the crying days, they are most definitely Mom-based.  My grieving seems to come in waves, I can usually spot them on the horizon and I just let them wash over me, crashing me down and my plan has been to simply stay afloat and ride it out.  That's worked so far.  

John said the other night when he was over to cook dinner for he, Jimmy and I, that he thinks I should give it a year and if I'm still having crashing episodes of grief, at that point I should seek some help in getting me the rest of the way through the setting up of my life, my self, my psyche as it must be without Mom on the planet. 

When John was helping me with the garden, one of my strawberry pots has a sculpture of a woman's head in it, as a decoration.  It's not just any head, it's the head of Frank Lloyd Wright's Garden Sprite sculpture.  I bought about 20 heads from my favorite recycled garden junk store, they'd gotten a huge shipment of them in from Japan after the Kobe earthquake a million years ago, and I loved the heads.  All slightly different but all with the same vacant stare.  I like the serenity of them, espcially in light of having survived, albeit just the heads, that huge quake.  I had heads everywhere.  

I used to think that, as I lose my own mind as I often do, I'd have extras! 

I began giving them as gifts and apparently, I've given all of them away except for one, the one that remains in the top of one of my strawberry pots.  

Jimmy has about 5 heads.  John has 2.  I have 1.  

And when John helped me bring the "head" strawberry pot up the 4 flights of stairs to my rooftop garden, the face on the head crumbled and I thought, I know just how she feels.  

That was one of the 4 days of uncontrollable crying.  

John said, as he tried to put the pieces of her crumbling concrete face back together, that it didn't symbolize anything other than the 2 weeks of sub-freezing temperatures we had here in Seattle last December.  That occurred while I was in St. Pete for Mom's funeral and Christmas.  

Anyway, my remaining Garden Sprite is crumbling and I've certainly had days where I felt like I'm crumbling.

I called my dear friend Neil DeGroot, he knows me really well and has known my whole family since I was a kid, and I talked to him about how he's handled the death of his mother.  He said that most of my life, I've been extremely happy and that there's a law of averages in this world and that they're kicking in and he thinks I just might be unhappy for the rest of my life to offset how happy I've been in the past but that if I end up at 51% happy, my life will have been happy.  

This did not make me feel better!

I'm shooting for more than 51%.  

I'm shooting for 100% happy and will settle for whatever I get.   

1 day, I turned 52.  That was a good day.

Mom would absolutely hate it that I have bad Mom days.  She told me in September, and this is a direct quote, verbatim, "Becky, I can take this, you should be able to take this, buck up, stay busy and don't be sad."

I'm beginning to think that my Mom was always right.

I leave Thursday for a teaching gig in Palm Beach then I'm heading to St. Pete for a Rays homestand, returning to Seattle on June 14th.  I host a workshop in my Seattle studio from June 18th - 27th.  I hope to post while in St. Pete but once I'm back in Seattle, it will be until late June before I'm back at Basically Betty.  

If you wonder what I'm doing besides keeping up with Mom's blog, hour by hour, day by day, follow me on Twitter.  Big surprise, look for me as rebeccaleone.  Sneaky!

Missing her, thinking of you, getting through the days.

Love and Prayers From Here to There.