A Letter from My Inner Wise Self

You, dear soul, are doing fine. You have been finding your way through the struggle, and the muck and mire. You’ve had a lot to contend with over this past year. But you’ve done it every single day. Every night you’ve gone to bed, and every morning you’ve gotten up and faced the day. That’s big. You’ve smiled through tears some days. Other days you’ve laughed and laughed. You’ve even had days where you wondered how you could possibly cry a single tear more, and where every bone and muscle hurt, or ones where you simply existed, as if treading water.

You’ve spent time with your feelings. You’ve let yourself feel all the emotions. You’ve felt the hurts right down into your bones.

You were there for your family; for your boys, all three. But this has been a time of big transitions for you. And there have been great losses that you’ve had to accept. Your baby graduated high school, marking the end of his childhood even though he was already an adult. Then he went off to university, leaving your home empty of children, beginning his life separate from you. Your younger son, your second born is now a man. Your older son, your first born, asked his girlfriend to marry him. She said yes! And now there’s a wedding coming this fall.

Those were both perfectly natural transitions and very good things, but change none the less. And they signify the fact that the days of mothering children are behind you. It is an ending. Another end of another era. That’s big, too. It’s very significant. It’s going to affect you. Because you just love them so very much, and you know what a privilege it is to be their mom.

And you also suffered the loss of your mother. Her time on Earth came to an end, also a natural transition…but the end in its way, too. And it came to a beautiful and graceful close. It was quite amazing in almost every way, especially the shock of it, and I know that you wish that there could have been more talks, and time, and goodbyes. But time ran out. Now you are faced with going on without her, now when you feel like you need her so much, and I know some days this is a monumental task. Events have come and gone, and you haven’t been able to discuss them with her like you used to always do. But maybe she has actually been able to see them for herself in her new state of being?

You can’t know for sure. But remember on your birthday, just as you were writing her a little message that accompanied a photo on Facebook, the lights flickered off then back on three times? And just a couple weeks ago as you were cracking eggs into a bowl, the fifth egg was almost forcibly dropped out of your hand onto the floor where it smashed revealing it was a bad egg and would have ruined the entire bowl? Was that your mom? I’d like to think so. Just as last summer there was that morning when so many bright blue dragonflies descended on the cottage, even alighting on the house and screened door, seemingly pushing on it as if to come inside. They flew up and over the roof and back down onto the deck, over and over, zooming and zipping all over the place. Yet you don’t ever remember seeing them there before.

Remember about figuratively leaving a gap, an empty and open space where healing energy will collect, and then returning there often. That is her place now, where you can connect with her. You can go there to remember back over the years and revisit the past again and again as often as you want. You can look through photos and read old cards and notes and letters. You can dig deep and travel in your mind back to times spent with her throughout your forty odd years, not just the last few, but going back all through the years. You can write them down, or dictate them into your phone. You can save them, write about them; you can even make them into a book. They’re yours.

Every day you are healing, and also growing and learning about your new place in the world. You’re regaining the footing with each step that you take. You are getting stronger, too. I know that you feel fragile a lot. I know that you feel as if, if you just didn’t have these on-going health issues you could deal with the rest better, but that’s simply a story that you’re telling yourself. You can change that into a more desirable story – one of strength and resilience. This is your story, after all. You get to write it. Things don’t always turn out as you’d want them to, but never forget to mention in your daily thoughts just how grateful you are. Even when the sun isn’t shining, even when the weather app is predicting it won’t be out again for the next week (right now)! There is sunshine in your life always. Nothing shines brighter than love, and you’ve got lots of that to go around. Take heart, dear one, you are here for a reason. So go, live…and laugh…and LOVE.

Always remember –

THIS TOO SHALL PASS.

Raina K Morton   April 29 2016