Widow Mama…

Its been nearly two years since my last blog, and it was tough enough to write that one without “accidentally” saying something incriminating as we were deep in the bowels’ of a nasty family court battle.
Everything that we said in a text, email, on any social media platform or even out loud to another human being seemed to find its way back to us via the court system.

We were made to be quiet at the most challenging of times.
We have now walked away at the request of the boys – we are exhausted, we are drained of all of our money (having had to remortgage our home to pay for the court costs while they accessed legal aid) and we have been left with no faith in the Australian Family Law System. It is set up to mostly support women, so if you happen to be a woman throwing around false Family Violence accusations, it is bias towards you.
You literally don’t stand a chance if you are a man.

Our nightmare began when our boys started to show signs of parental alienation towards us. It was around November of 2019. We had just had the most incredible 10 day trip to Fiji with all five of our kids earlier that year, and life was finally great. The boys were getting along incredibly with my girls and their Dad and I, and it was the first family holiday that I can say was as close to “perfect” as a family holiday can get. We had attempted to take them overseas prior to that year, but this was the first year they had all been really keen and had agreed as the eldest had always been too anxious to fly. (Not the kind of decision three kids would make if they were terrified of their Dad I’m assuming, but hey -that bullshit was planted later).

Looking back now, the signs were there, but you want to believe the best in people, and so you chip away at the presenting issues, and you just hope that things will get better. They started to turn up to our house every other weekend and every other Tuesday for dinner on the defensive. They would walk through the door and at least one of them would be a little withdrawn, or perhaps a little snappy and it would take a bit of work to get them feeling relaxed and comfortable. The youngest had stopped turning up for dinner a few months prior under the guise that he was “too tired” mid week to catch up.

Then we would go away caravanning or similar, and they’d spend the first hour or two of the trip taking the piss out of everything related to caravanning and how lame it was (even though they’d always loved that we often went away caravanning/camping etc), but it was as though they had been prepped to bag the shit out of anything that we did in this household, even though for “five solid years” they had adored being a part of it.

Its insane to think now that these cruel people were clearly so jealous of what we could offer these children in this household that they couldn’t (or wouldn’t), that they would start planting seeds in their little brains that what they enjoyed here was stupid, and they too were stupid if they enjoyed it.

But that is exactly what they did….. I wonder now how sad their own lives were that all they had going on in it was the incessant drive to destroy another family at any cost…. even if it meant emotionally abusing and literally destroying their own children’s lives along the way.

By February of 2020, things were concerning so we attempted to attend mediation to put a parenting plan in place. We had co parented for five years with “mostly” no issues, and considering how these cruel people came to be a couple (years and YEARS before my partner and his ex had officially separated), I thought “they” were the lucky ones that my partner had been so accommodating and forgiving of their affair. We never shared that information with the boys, because you just don’t do that…

We waited six weeks for her to attend her mediation, and then were immediately deemed “as not right for mediation”, something that only happens when someone feels unsafe or a family violence order is in place. We couldn’t understand it, as these things were not the case with our families….. or so we thought.

The pandemic hit, and when the first lockdown came we received a text message stating that the boys would not be staying at our house during lockdowns. The eldest had stopped responding to our text messages and this was the only way we communicated to all of them. This was so unlike him and we were really concerned about their welfare.

We got a lawyer. We were not eligible for legal aid as we both worked – they didn’t, so they were.

And so the war began.

Our lawyer asked us if they had possibly moved house as a letter kicking off court proceedings needed to be delivered registered post style (so a signature would be required at the front door by the recipient on the letter) and we didn’t have the answer…. we started worrying that they had moved, so one evening we drove past their home –  myself, my partner and my youngest daughter. This would ultimately give them the ammunition that they needed to start the nastiest fight I’ve ever been unfortunate enough to be a part of, and the lies would start to be flung at all of us, no-one would be safe from their venom.

Even though we were chased by the man of the house that night for driving past his driveway (think crazy person style –  tailing us in his car all the way to a set of lights halfway back to our home where he got out of his car, tried to wrench open my car door, then went around and tried to do the same to my partners – all in front of my then 12 year old daughter in the back seat) it was he that piled his partner and the boys into the car that night, went to the police station and put a “stalking” Family Violence interim intervention order on my partner. He was served that week, told he couldn’t call, email, text or contact his three children or his ex himself or via another family member (or be within 5 metres of them) until the interim order was accepted for 12 months, or lifted.

It took two years and over $60,000 in the family courts for that fake interim order to be lifted. He never accepted it because it wasn’t true, but regardless he couldn’t have any contact with his children in that two years unless supervised, and of course the supervised visits never happened because those poor boys were told lie after lie after lie in the time that they were away from their other family, until they started to believe that they had in fact had an abusive childhood, that their Dad had psychically abused them, and that every car that passed their home or school was their Dad stalking them with guns, because that’s what the interim orders said right? (This is where the system needs changing – I could go and get an interim intervention order on my neighbour right now and say that they’ve been stalking me with knives – no proof is required – NONE).

Even though all of the private family reports we paid to have done during court went in our favour – the damage had already been done, and they believe what they have been told by those they should be able to trust the most.

I cannot imagine what those boys have been through….. not only did they lose their Dad, but a fake abusive childhood was created in their heads over the two years that none of our family had access to them (including their own adored grandparents) and now it seems as though they believe that they grew up in such an environment. They were taken to a psychologist six months into this court case, and by then they believed that their gun wielding Dad was a crazy man trying to steal them away from their Mum, wanted to hurt their Mum and step father, and so that is what they told the psychologist. How can a battle be fought when the most horrendous form of parental alienation has been implemented, and how can this child abuse ever be undone?

I always thought that at least my partners boys did not have a childhood like my girls, who lost a father at the age of six and ten, stunting their development and basically destroying any chance at a normal childhood.

These despicable humans created an abusive childhood in the heads of these boys, and by doing so (simply to win at a cruel game) have destroyed their chance at normality.

Parental alienation “is” child abuse. Using children to get back at an ex, or take them down for God knows what reason is the lowest form a human can perform.

And those beautiful boys are the victims. My partner and my girls have lost their beloved brothers and son. My future in laws have lost their grandchildren…. who this has affected goes on and on, but ultimately they have destroyed the very children they have spent two years in the courts pretending to protect.

A sadder story I have never told, other than the one of my husband’s death.

And EVERY word of it is true.

This weekend marks the third lot of birthdays that we will miss with our boys, and our lives will never be the same again.

We can only hope that one day they remember the truth and seek us out.

We are here and waiting with open arms and an open door when they do.

 

 

 

*Parental Alienation –

“Parental Alienation is the act of a parent or person coaching/convincing the Children to “break away” from the other parent by way of brainwashing the Children into thinking badly of the targeted Parent often to the point of them refusing to having anything or little to do with that parent, in most cases the Children actually not only believe the words of the Alienator unconditionally at the time but are also coached in such a way as to believe that it is themselves that have made the decission to not love or want to see the other Parent”.

(excerpt from www.parentalalienation.com.au)

So I recently joined a Life Writing Skills workshop. It popped up in an email one day through the Yarra Ranges Council Website, and it felt as though it had been emailed just to me! I always thought I’d rather like to write a book…. hence the reason I started my last blog in 2013. I learned during the course that my style of writing read as though it was coming straight from a wound. I typed exactly what I was feeling as I was feeling it. Something that perhaps not everyone is willing or even able to do.

When I read back through my entries recently to get some inspiration to try and meet the challenges that I was being asked to do by the writers running the workshop, it took me on quite the journey. I realized I have not often gone back through my blogs. The first one I wrote began in late November of 2013, the year I lost my beautiful husband and the father of my then six and ten year old daughters. It was absolutely the most tragic event I had ever witnessed or survived. Which made for some really deep, dark, gut wrenching, heart breaking, skin tingling, tear jerking and occasionally funny blog entries. In other words –  a great read. I have learned in this course that a great story can come when ones life is torn apart in an instant.

ie; “The day my world changed forever”.

When writing a book, you must consider your audience. So if your book is about your life, you need to think about what you are sharing, and during that time of my life, everything I was living through was nothing short of what I would call soul destroying, and I guess from the perspective of a reader, it was juicy! Looking back at the 2013 version of me, I was so vulnerable, but I hid that in my public persona, and wore it in my writing. I couldn’t say out loud the things that I was sharing late at night in my blogs, and perhaps this was my way of reaching out to my family and friends and not shutting down. I’m so glad now that I did.

In the seven years since my husband died, the adversities that my children and I, and now my partner and his three children and I have faced are many. What is left behind when someone is ripped from your life in an instant is fragments of your former self that you have attempted to put back together using other peoples strength and support as the glue. You never quite look or feel the same way as you once did, and during this Life Writing Skills course I realised that through death, I was reborn.

I started the course thinking that I wanted to write about my life with my husband, and by doing so I’d be honouring his life in a way. But all I could think about what was life had been like since he’d been taken away, and the stories were still current. The sleepless nights, the pain and grief, the girls and how differently they’d coped with everything, the many schools they’d attended and left, the pottery/pub nights, the eighty plus ambulance trips we’d been on, the police that had attended our home, the overseas trips, the caravanning adventures, the feeling of judgement in our decisions, the loss of lifelong friends, the birth of new ones, the fight to keep the family together, getting a Degree and a career, moving house, drinking too much, running a Widow Support Group, losing the boys and facing so many different mental health challenges that I can’t even remember.

So when asked to write down forty life changing experiences by my hosts to kick off my story writing, (in chronological order, no less) I really struggled. What made an experience “life changing?” And even though it was life changing for me, was it interesting enough to write an entire paragraph, or even a chapter on? And if it was still current, was it life changing yet?

I sat down and wrote them out, but I went back to that list a hundred times over the next fortnight, and I was never happy with it. And I realised this book is not yet ready to be written. Although I am now writing from the scar and not the wound, I am still living the story, and I don’t have a good ending just yet.

So for now the course had reignited my love for writing via my Blog, and I have been lucky enough to have met some wonderfully interesting and creative people along the way. It got me doing something during a pandemic that wasn’t work or helping kids home school, and it has piqued my interest in wanting to be creative with my writing once again, and so I shall……

 

Well, it’s been a while and I feel like I’ve really neglected you. For a very long time you were the very reason I got up each day, and you certainly got me through the endless long nights… So thank you. Life has been like a whirlwind since we last spoke…. this household is never boring… there is always something going on, between the combined families of two adults and five children, I guess it’s impossible for it not to be…. The kids are growing up, changing, maturing… the fights are becoming more full on, the problems more pubescent… it reminds me a lot of my own teenage years where the struggle was real!

It has not gotten passed me just how similar (yet somewhat different) the problems these kids face today are compared to the version that we got in the 90’s…. the nastiness is still there, but amplified by the ability to project it from the comfort and safety of a bedroom via a phone. The level of abuse is in a whole new realm of its own…. things that might have been said as an absolute last resort are now being texted casually at the end of a person’s snapchat or instagram post, as though they were writing xoxo. Wow… “GKY” (Go Kill Yourself) has been normalized so much that I feel some kids are writing it without realising what they are saying to each other. “Go die in a hole” is another. I feel like our everyday relationships are following suit with the carelessness of thoughtless comments.

In a time where we are desperately trying to take the stigma away from talking about suicide and depression, the adolescents of the world are sure not helping. In saying that, I have heard it come out of the mouths of Mothers in front of their young children, and between grown arse adults in the street…. so will this be the legacy of 2019? Fuck, I hope not.

These past few years with a very problematic teenager (who is also suffering from multiple medical conditions), me entering my second year as a Youth AOD Outreach Worker and trying to balance two combined families that are getting tougher to manage has taken it’s toll on us all. It’s become normal to feel utterly exhausted, and rare to feel relaxed and chilled. My relationship has been pushed to the back burner, and I miss my friends and family so much. I would love to find a balance where I could continue the job that I love, see my mates and family regularly, look forward to our five kid weekends again, and NOT stress about our cash flow. First world problems, I know.

At the end of a long day working with sometimes homeless, traumatised, socially isolated, disregarded and often misunderstood young people that have trouble with their substance use, I think I am very lucky that this is not what we face here in our home. But I must say that going from working all day with young people that suffer mental health and heading straight home to people that suffer mental health is bloody hard yakka. I think I am also one of those people, so no finger pointing. I don’t think you can survive the death of a husband or father without coming out with battle scars. And they don’t go away. Over the course of six years it has taken many forms, and played many different roles in our day to day lives. But like a shadow, it will follow us around in some form forever. I do feel very sorry for the people who have come and gone into our lives, we are not an easy family to love.

Next Friday I get to go and celebrate my partner’s 40th birthday in Scotland where his ancestors are from. It was going to be a brilliant surprise that I opened a secret account to save for, but after a year and a bit I had a measly amount, so I had to tell him and ask for his help to save! We had the most amazing trip to Canada and Alaska for mine two years ago this November, and met a wonderful Irish couple on the Alaskan part of our holiday who we will be visiting in Ireland once we have done the Isle of Skye in Scotland. It’s been the one thing that has driven me through my shifts each day, and pushed me through my weeks at home. It’s amazing what a holiday on the horizon can do for motivation!

It has also made me reflect on just how lucky we are to have these family members that we do, because although my family offers a most challenging of scenarios most days, for almost three weeks I have some wonderful friends and family members taking it in turns to move into our home and look after my girls. Wow. We must have done something right to warrant such incredible support.

So upon reflection, thank you Blog for allowing me to vent, thank you family and friends for always being there for me, thank you Dale for lasting as long as you have and for gifting me those beautiful boys, thank you Degree for allowing me to realise my dream job, and thank you readers for giving me a reason to keep writing for all of these years. It has been the best therapy a woman could ask for.

It is nearly the end of 2018, and I have to say, I am relieved that it is almost behind us. This year has thrown more challenges at my little family than most, (yeah, yeah…. you’ve heard it all before…) but really it has probably been one of the most difficult years since 2013, which is the year that started me on my blogging journey. In September of 2013, www.neeedingablogging.com was born out of a desperate need to vent what I was feeling after losing my beautiful husband very suddenly the July of the same year. I have been reading through my old posts and it has brought out a very strange mixture of feelings in me. In some cases I can see just how far we have come since facing the most horrendous of adversities, and in others I can see just how little has changed in 5 years. This brings with it very mixed emotions for me. I am proud of the hurdles that the girls and I have jumped, but I am angry at how fractured it has left our lives. I often read posts from my fellow bereaved members of our Widow and Widower Support Group, and I feel saddened by how similar some of our stories have been. It is not simply a journey like that of a rollercoaster ride where it has ups and downs and twists and turns, but eventually comes to an end…. there is no end, it just changes form constantly and presents itself sporadically and very differently, but almost constantly in every aspect of our lives.

Yesterday I watched my youngest daughter singing her heart out in the choir as part of her primary schools Christmas outing at multiple shopping centres. I watched on proudly and videoed way too much. In about song six my eldest daughter pointed out a lovely man Face timing his partner so that she could watch their child live, and I grabbed my phone out to Face time Trenton so he could share this proud moment with me. I have not done this once in the five years since he died. I have gone to message him many times, and called him a thousand times in the early days whilst his voicemail was still active….. and I have obviously thought about him often, sometimes forgetting (or not wanting to believe) that he is gone. But this was a whole new low for me. The realisation of what I had just done had me holding back tears for the next few songs. That lump that grows in your throat when you are barely holding it together just sat there reminding me of how stupid I was until the end of their set, and then I just went about my day. But the memory of excitedly grabbing my phone to surprise my daughters Dad while he was at work will not leave my mind.

It reminded me of how little she was when he was actually still alive, she was in Prep when he died, and now she is going into her last year of Primary school. She has lived almost half of her life without him now. This year I have noticed that the girls grieving is so much deeper than ever before. Whilst they keep it fairly private, they do not share it with most people (other than me), and not even their Step father. It saddens me to think of the kids in our support group that lost their parent before they ever knew them to have their own memories of that person in their mind. I think the girls are mourning and grieving more what they would have had with him now, and less what they had with him then. Obviously what they had then is all of their memories of him and there is no comparison, but grieving the “what could have been’s” is quite horrendous to watch.

Every year I feel like perhaps the following year will be “our year…….” but come December,  I seem to be reflecting on yet another challenging time,  and I wonder, “is this it”? I read through years of my blogs and I just know that life was so hard in those first few years following Trent’s death, and I still wonder how we are all still standing…. so why does it feel like no matter how hard we try, something always prevents us all from being truly happy again.

With my eldest having almost an entire year of exceptionally poor mental health and so many visits to Emergency I can’t even count them, I am surprised that with a roughly 30% attendance rate she is passing year 9. She has also (without meaning to) put a strain on this family that has possibly irreversibly screwed us.  And with my youngest still suffering anxiety about everything, and even having mini panic attacks over the strangest of things – I just wonder, will next year be their year? Our year?

I do feel sometimes like nothing has ever been easy again…… or wonderful, or blissful, or relaxing, or care free….. is this normal? I have a wonderful relationship (that has been pushed to limits beyond the wildest imagination) and a beautiful home, wonderful friends and a fantastic job. What am I missing? Is it possible that once you have lost a person such as Trenton, that nothing will ever taste or feel as incredible ever again?

I feel so selfish for even thinking it, so please 2019, prove me wrong.

So, I haven’t written since my 40th birthday last November. I have wanted to, but kept thinking that it was the same old shit…. and that you’ve heard it all before, and that quite frankly, it was boring! It kind of is boring….. because the patterns that grief create in your life after a significant loss are seriously monotonous. It gets old to talk about it, and it gets old to hear about it, just as it gets old to be living it….. I am still present in the support group that I started in September 2013, and I have met many wonderful people here. It is a forever changing group, ever growing, and there’s always a comfort in knowing that there are these people that walk the Earth, that I’d probably never have met if it weren’t for very unfortunate circumstances that we all share. It is nice to know that I can get onto the online group and say how I feel four years and ten months later, without thinking that I’ve “overshared” or that I’m making my family and friends feel uncomfortable that life is still a challenge because of that one thing that happened to us. It is I’m afraid. Grief is an arsehole. It is not a temporary thing. Every minute of every day it lingers in the background of your every decision, experience, emotion…. It feels like it lives and breathes in the walls of our home, and it’s sitting there ready to pounce on the kids or myself, right when we need it the least, and we’re exhausted from thinking about it. I recently went to a 40th on the side of the Mountain that Trent and I first started our lives out here. I hadn’t gone to an event over there since we moved the kids to a new kinder and school on this side of the mountain when Poppy was four and Ruby was eight. Due to shitty circumstances, I didn’t leave in the best frame of mind. We made an incredible group of friends over there for the five years that we resided there (half of our entire relationship together). I no longer see almost all of them. Life is very unpredictable. Anyway, the lead up to this gathering was  horrendous. I can’t look forward to an event with more than five people in it anymore at the best of times, let alone one that will present me with a bunch of people that I haven’t seen since my own husband’s funeral. One of the after effects of losing Trent, is a shocking case of social anxiety. I am most annoyed by this new trait of mine. Other than Trent himself, I felt like the most social person on Earth before his death. And it was also one of my favourite things to do. Not anymore. For a week leading up to an event, I feel sick. I get sweaty palms, heart palpitations and gut aches. I can’t sleep properly, and every stupid scenario I can dream up will go through my head in the days and hours leading up to the actual day or night. I now understand how my daughters feel daily. They suffer from anxiety 100% of the time. Ruby since birth, Poppy since her Dad died. They worry about almost everything. I, at the very least, can cruise through life most of the time and not let it consume me. I have stopped going out a lot though. I have taken the one thing that riddles me with anxiety, and stopped it from occurring as much as possible. This does not fill me with happiness either. I don’t actually want to be that person. I can’t even have catch ups here at home without it happening to me, and the girls try and organise sleepovers all of the time, (and god forbid, birthday parties) and I get just as anxious about the pressure that this brings. Years ago when I took my eldest to a group specifically for kids with anxiety, I realised that anxiety and anger go hand in hand. I am not sure if the anger comes from the feeling of utter desperation at not wanting to feel the anxiety or not, but the one common trait that all of these kids shared was outbursts of aggression towards their family and friends. This describes me perfectly when I get social anxiety. I am unbearable to be around in those days and hours before the event, and then I spend days after the event apologising for being so snappy and rude, and demanding of the people around me. And nothing cuts it. No matter how much my family try and ease me into a situation, no matter how accommodating they are, I am an arsehole. I totally understand why the girls can never explain their aggressive outbursts to me now when some new thing has begun, or a big change has been shoved down their throats. Anxiety equals confusion and anger. It’s totally shit. I ended up socially lubricating the shit out of myself at this party (with booze) and by about hour four, I was able to relax. About two hours before we left. Awesome. At my own 40th, my anxiety was so off the charts that I actually don’t remember it all that well. I know that I was surrounded by the most amazing people that had all made an impression in my life at some point. But my panic and heart palpitations prevented me from stopping, and sitting, and soaking them all in. I wish I could relive it, but alas, you only get one shot at it. The funny thing is, when I share this new thing that consumes me with most people that I know, they don’t believe it. They don’t see it. I guess I am a better actor than I thought. More the point, no-one knows what is going on inside the head of another person, nor what they’ve had to accomplish to just “turn up” or make an appearance. Just like grief, it sits in your guts and lays dormant until it decides that this, right here and now, is a brilliant time to rear its head. There is not a day that passes that I don’t wonder what kind of person I would be, or what life would look like right now if Trenton had lived. I guess I will never know. See you later “Old Me”.

So last weekend I had my fortieth birthday celebration. It was a huge 2 night get together in an old converted caravan park in Ballan, and it was a ripper weekend.  With a list of 100 new friends, old friends, lifelong friends, family (all three – mine, Trenton’s and Dales’s…) and everything in between, I was surrounded by my people. The one’s that have pulled me through the toughest times, that have stuck with me through thick and thin, that have seen me at my best and my worst, and yet were still there to have a beer with while I celebrated reaching such a landmark age. It was an absolutely fantastic birthday. I kept looking in awe at these incredible people that I have collected in my 40 years on Earth, and man, do I have an eclectic bunch of friends!!!? Since a very young age I had friends that came from everywhere. You could say that I collected people! I went to five schools, including four high schools in four years, and I had representatives from at least three of them at my birthday bash. To be able to say that I have hung onto some of these people for 25 plus years feels amazing. Having people that have known you that long is a wonderful feeling. They have watched me grow, live, love, have children, struggle, lose my Love, then my shit, then my grip on reality, regain my shit, love again, struggle, regain my grip on reality and then feel every other emotion in between that is available to us as human beings. They have really just watched me live. I felt so blessed to look around at different times on this weekend and remember how I had met each and every person, and what they had bought to my life, and what I hoped I had bought to theirs…. friendship is the ultimate blessing, without it one cannot survive the shit that life likes to throw at you sometimes…. Thank you universe for these wonderful people!!!! 40 years….. it’s a landmark that I have waited in anticipation for since Trenton died. I am now three years older than he will ever be, and I felt in some way that I was celebrating it for the two of us. To me, it was also a celebration of family…. what I would do without them I don’t even know. My kids were there on Friday, and waltzed around from group of friends to group of friends, all adored honorary Uncles and Aunties to them, as much as our own blood relatives. I looked at Trenton’s, mine and Dale’s family all intermingling incredibly, and I was in awe of what this crazy old life had thrown at these people. I watched on and wondered how they’d embraced my new living arrangements, and each other, not only a little bit, but in fact, quite a lot. Loss can do the most horrid things to people, but if you wait long enough, and work at it constantly,  it can all come back to you, and possibly better than you’d ever hoped for. I will never let these people out of my life, not ever. The Saturday was a kid free affair, and at one point I looked around and saw little groups of people from each stage of my entire life. From my very naughty early high school years and my later high school friends that both provided some of my absolute closest mates on earth, to ex lovers that are now best friends, to my hippy travelling days, to the mates that had help fill my life with music for as long as I can remember, to my hubby’s best mates that are still my best mates, to the House of Fool’s connections from my singing days, to my work friends that have helped keep me in a job through the loss of my beautiful husband and beyond, to my Weirdo’s (from my widow and widower support group) through which I would never have met if it wasn’t for the loss of my beautiful husband, nor survived it to be truthful…. to my hills family and the wonderful friends that I have met through Dale…. and of course anyone else that I have overlooked. You are all my strength, my reason for keeping on pushing through life’s little challenges, and my happiness. I adore you all!!!! So I do hope that I got around to chatting and having a drink with each and every one of you, but if I didn’t, I will make it up to you I swear.  Regardless, it wouldn’t have been the same without any of you being there. On the Monday afterwards, I officially finished my final day at Uni. Over six years I obtained two certificates, a Diploma and now a Degree in Community Services Work and I am incredibly humbled to be able to say that I have finally at the ripe old age of 40 gotten the education that I wanted so desperately straight out of high school in 1995, but instead I chose to travel.. and I can assure you whole heartedly, that I have no regrets there whatsoever! I started my seven weeks full time placement on the Wednesday and then on the Thursday (my official birthday) I stayed home with a sick Rubes, and finished my third last assignment ever….. after a wonderful dinner at The Pig n Whistle with close friends that night, I fell into bed utterly exhausted at the week that was. At one am Rubes came in doubled over in pain, and by two we had a locum around. He immediately demanded we go to the hospital, and we were there until Saturday eveing having a million tests done! Arghhhhh…. always when you are hanging on by a thread for a decent nights sleep…. Murphy’s law. Anyway, on the Friday they were sure it was appendicitis, and told me they had her booked in for surgery that arvo. I demanded an ultrasound and some further testing to at least discount that it may be reproductive organ related as she is a bloody female, and so they did so instead of going and invasively whipping her appendix out on a whim.  This bought us another night of waiting unfortunately, and after two lost test results, notes that were not written down, and 6 different attempts at getting cannula’s into her veins,  she was beyond it completely. By two pm on the Saturday, the same surgeon that was going to remove her appendix, came back in to say that there was fluid “somewhere”, and an infection “somewhere”, but they were more leaning towards the fact that it wasn’t appendicitis now….. WTF???? Then I got the spiel about the fact that one in five suspected appendicitis cases come back as “inconclusive” and we were one of the lucky five!!!!! Woah… what a start to our weekend. We missed our trip to Omeo that Dale and I had been planning for weeks (he still went with the new van and the four youngest kids on the Saturday morning, poor bugger…..) and we waited till five pm to be told the surgery wasn’t happening so we actually could have gone!!!! Never a dull moment in our household… so instead we have hung around at my folks place recovering, I have uploaded my final assignment (hopefully ever) and I am just grateful that Rubes is okay, the rest of the family are having a wonderful trip in the mountains, and that my degree is almost completely behind me!!!!! Life at 40, it’s already pretty interesting! Thanks for listening. xoxoxoxox

So tomorrow my love, we would have hit 11 years married, and 13 years together. It’s getting harder to imagine what life would be like right now as the years go by without you…. Life has changed so irreversibly since you took your last breath on Earth. I feel I’ve lived three lifetimes since that night, four years and nineteen days ago. I say it every year, but ours was still my all time favourite wedding that I’ve attended. I know it seems cliche, but it was just seamless…. (apart from you being so hungover you were nearly throwing up all day… and me being so morning sick with Poppy that I had to get a shot in my arse from the doc’s on the way to the ceremony to stop me throwing up all evening…..!) I knew from the first week we were together that I’d marry the shit out of you… and so did you…. you told me every other day! What an ace feeling it is to have your love reciprocated so much so that you never challenge or question that persons love for you, or you of them…. Rare these days, I know. I’m lucky to have found a very different version of this incredible love, but with a different man. Unfortunately for him, he gets the glued back together version of myself. The one with the shot memory, the extra emotions, the shorter temper, the quick to make stupid decisions and the socially anxious one that I am today because of losing you…….. Not to mention the partially broken children that came with me. I often tell him what I was like “before you”, just like I used to tell you what I was like “before Rubes…….” (So much more fun, I swore it!) So here I am explaining away my shitty idiosyncrasies again! Why? I will never know! The mere fact is, we are who we are, I am who I am. You loved the crazy single parent version of me, he loves the screwed up, broken, widowed version of me. Damn, how lucky I am to have always had such love in my life. Before you two, just the love of my family and friends alone would have been enough for one person in a whole lifetime. Anyway…. I’ve gone off the track as usual.

I just wanted to remember you on the eve of our wedding anniversary, remembering this night 11 years ago when I stayed at my folks house with my best bridesmaids, and chatted, and giggled till the wee hours of the morning when we were still trying desperately to put to sleep a three year old Ruby who was too excited for words at the prospect of being our flower girl the following day….. I will never forget that day, and you have made sure I will never forget you and your incredible presence. Thank you for giving me the honour of being a wife, your wife….. It was a role that I will hold dear to my heart until my last breath leaves my body. Happy 11th Wedding Anno Hubby.

XOXO

Click on link for video – https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipOkyUJysZrXftL7HndlUg1BMJc1gfISxPQcFGAp2Q8zo6oywKdDqOy8GzvV90sGdg?key=cU5NWDBXbUFmaExjVjRZNTduU0V5NDB5MmR0bGdR

 

Dear Sir Trenton Arthur Hopkins-Curry,

The day you selflessly went and changed your birth name by Deed-pol to Hopkins-Curry so that when we married, Ruby would not be the only one with a hyphenated name, I felt truly blessed to have ever met you. We had only just gotten her birth father to sign the paper-work to allow the change at all, and he refused to change it only to Curry, so we compromised. No-one out of your friends knew that you were taking on my name also….. until they announced us on our wedding night as Mr and Mrs Hopkins-Curry. There was some laughter (you, Ruby and Poppy already having two first names made for a quite a mouth full!) But you proudly stood and said that you wanted our whole family to bare the same name as one another, and my heart melted that you would do such a thing for us, although as anyone that knew you would know,  that was who you were in every aspect of your life. Selfless. There was not a thing that was asked of from friends that you wouldn’t put your hand straight up to do. You were the first person there for your sister when she needed you, you bloody adored her as though your were best mates, not blood relatives. And I bet your folks miss their weekly drunken Trenton phone calls the most…… hours upon hours of talking, slurring, playing them music and telling them just how much you loved them….. no seriously….. you REALLY loved them……! Even until 1 am when they’d already been in bed when you’d first called…. You never made a family member, blood related or not, not feel the deepest of love that a man can share with another human being. Nor your mates….. who four years later still feel the void as much as we all do. I miss that feeling Trent. That certainty in your soul “that everything will always be alright” because your love was like a glue that held us all together, no matter how rough the road, or how bleak the outlook…. you made it seem like we’d all survive…. and that was all that mattered. We have all slowly glued the pieces of our lives back together, but because you impacted us so much in your 37 years on Earth, it is not possible for it to ever look the same as it once did. I have accepted that part now. We have all learned a lot about grief…… it is exhausting, relentless, consuming and draining….. and it sometimes strips you down so that your insides are on the outside and you’ve nowhere to hide. Some days it it more prominent than others, but it’s always there, and I’ve come to accept mine as a new emotion in my body that will never leave, and I’ve just learned to allow it to be present with all the other feelings that us humans have on a daily basis. Through this grief, I have met a lot of friends… all that have survived a loss as great as yours. Including my beautiful partner. As he sat out on the deck with your sister last night, drinking and talking for hours, I knew you’d not only approve of him being here, but sometimes I get this feeling that you hand picked him for us….. we are both damaged by loss, but in a way we have glued ourselves together to survive the aftermath…. and I know that we will continue to pull each other through our darkest hours….. We’ve been thinking of a name for our deck. You know it’s become a tradition to build a space and name it after you -well Juzzie started with T-Dogs Tavern, and Damo followed with T-Dogs Beer Garden….  both incredible spaces to sit and be surrounded by your hilarious and wonderful memories. Well I just got this feeling the other night that ours should be called “Sir Arthur’s Tavern”. (Sir Trenton Arthur Hopkins-Curry’s Tavern may be a little on the long side!) When you selflessly took my name for Rubes, you earned this honour. I remember you had to have new business cards made up for the job you were doing as a Sales Rep at the time, and I convinced you to use all four names on it, because who could possibly forget such an old fashioned, unique sounding name!?? I wanted you to add the “Sir” at the beginning, but that might have been stretching the friendship at your new workplace a little. But the point is everyone remembered you after this… and your name as a rep became quite famous around the traps.

Trenton, it’s been a really, really long four years. People often say to me “Wow, has it already been that long??” But I don’t feel it that way, I have felt every hour, day, week and month as though they were a year a pop. Living in a household surrounded by people that adored you, your photo’s adorning every wall, your memories spoken of every day…. it’s impossible to forget you for a second. But it’s also a constant reminder that you’re gone. I wouldn’t change it, but sometimes I look at your face and I yearn to have a beer with you, a jam, a cuddle, a laugh about the kids…… one of our long talks about the future and what it might hold for us. And it’s still sometimes as tough now as it was the year you died. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but grief sure does change you forever. Another harsh life lesson, that I would have much preferred to have learned through someone else’s experiences…… but instead so many people I know have learned from mine. Life is short, LIVE the fuck out of it. You did, and thank goodness you did. That will be your legacy that I pass on to your girls…..

See you on the Flip-side Sir Arthur.

Your wife.. xxx

So I’ve been privy to those parents that say “She lets her kid do whatever she wants….” “No wonder she’s got no respect, she has no boundaries….” “Have you heard the language she uses?” “I don’t want my child in her class or anywhere near her, she’s a bad influence….”’

In prep I knew that even Mothers that I coffee’d with regularly had called the school and demanded that my daughter not be in their child’s class the following year, or even again in fact…. Yes, it was really painful and hurtful to hear, but I understood it. No-one quite got the complexity of her, or what she was actually trying to say or do. She never got it 100% right, never said the right thing at the right time…. She never made the team, so to speak. In prep by mid-year she had her own table at the front of the class as no one would sit next to her because without knowing it was not the right thing to do, she would talk to them excitedly all of class, even when they were supposed to be quiet, and doing work, or listening to the teacher. Yet if they didn’t listen to her stories she would threaten them. Each day she cried on the way home from school, and asked me repeatedly why she was so different from everyone else in school? Why did they not think the same way? Or understand her jokes? She started doing really silly stuff because at least the grade 5 and 6’s would laugh in hysterics, which was the closest thing to having positive attention or a friendship she had. They would take her out to the oval and let her say inappropriate things for their friends to laugh at, and they’d teach her inappropriate things to say later in class in front of the teacher, not realising how bad it was, or how much trouble she’d get into. She finally felt like she had mates, but instead she spent the second half of prep being forced to eat her lunch in the principal’s office, in shame. What a fabulous start to life she had.

I had an amazing bunch of supportive friends at the time, and cofee’ing with these gals made it all bearable…. And from three year old kinder till grade two, we were inseparable.  They made it all seem worthwhile, and like I was “one of them.” Daughter number two came along when Daughter number one was in four year old kinder, so I had plenty to keep me busy. Her diagnosis came two weeks before her sixth birthday after I’d taken her to every therapist under the sun from the age of fourteen months old…. I knew she was “different.” I just didn’t know why or what. The incredible paediatrician that I finally stumbled across was an Aspie himself, so he picked it within ten minutes. His words exactly “Emma, Do you feel like you’ve been smashing your head against the wall for six years?” I crumbled after this, and fell to pieces. Someone finally believed that my gut instinct had been right, that this beautiful, yet challenging child had a reason, and a pretty good one, for her poor social skills and behaviour.  The relief was overwhelming, and my late husband and I researched like crazy people on everything Asperger’s, and what it meant for our little family. We told her straight away, and the relief in her was also incredible.

The relief lasted 48 hours at most, before we realised what it meant for us all. This was a lifelong thing, and it would shape our future into something that we hadn’t planned. And it did.

Skip forward nearly eight years, five different schools, a complete change of friendships group for me, a thousand changes of friendship groups for her, an anxiety ridden sister who lacks the appropriate attention from her mother, the death of her Dad and my beautiful husband, a few years of grieving hell, multiple therapists, a new partner, three new step brothers for the girls, a house move, a few holidays from hell, an influx of hormones, a new diagnosis of PMT, six months of on and off school refusal, a new era of self-harming, two stints in a psychiatric hospital, an attemped Bachelor Degree, sleepless nights/months/years, a teenager that loathes her Mum mostly, a birth father that is no longer able to contact her, a few runners where she’s been chased into the streets of strange towns, and now a night of searching for her after she never came home from school…… until ten pm at night….. And well, let’s just say that the child that I created, has now created a mother that I despise.

I call it a Spectrum of Motherhood, because we don’t know in advance what type of Mother we will become. Will we be the cotton wool variety that never let our kids do anything for themselves in fear that they will break something? Will we let them grow up free range, and climb anything and everything to the despair of onlookers? Or will we set such strict guidelines that come hell or high water, we will follow them no matter how tough the consequences?  There is no “right.” This is just what comes naturally…. And what comes naturally is not always what we had planned in advance. In fact, I think if you hope that you’ll be the parent you’d always dreamed of, you will be bitterly disappointed at some stage.

I am now parenting a strong minded, severely anxious, sexually inquisitive, hormonal, defiant and desperate to do anything to fit into society, teenager. And I would rather go to prison. Is it okay to say such a thing? Well, no…. it’s not. It’s socially unacceptable. Because we’ve built this society where we’re supposed to pretend like we have it all together. Just look at all of your Facebook feeds….. Everyone is so happy, and they’re all on a constant adventure, their family holiday photos show that they’re in family heaven, and look, their star kid got another award at school, or is now in the advanced class because they’re super bright, and the parents are still so in love, even 20 years later, and blah, blah, blah. Damn, I’m so envious….. To be truthful, I don’t know anyone in “Real Reality”, not the “Online Altered Reality” that is created on social media, that isn’t struggling just a little bit.

I am. Struggling just a little bit. And that was an enormous understatement. With Mother’s day pending, I have been forced to face the facts….. that it isn’t what I was hoping it would be. I’m sure I will look back on this last 13 years one day and laugh…. Like it was a little bit humorous, and that the constant challenges that were thrown at us were “just to test the strength of this old family.” It’ll be a real gas to talk about it all in the past tense, when we’re on the other side of this parallel universe.

But I’m just not sure how to get to the other side, when I can’t even get through this one.

I just want my kids to go to school, to be happy, to be safe, not to be bullied, or be the bully, laugh, live life to the fullest, make friends, have boyfriends that treat them with respect (or girlfriends), not take bad drugs, or drink too much, or become addicted to cigarettes, or feel that they have to act and dress a certain way, or upload sexy photos to social media to fit in (cause everybody does it)…. I want them to enjoy being a kid, a pre-teen, a teenager, a young adult and then hopefully, if all goes to plan, a healthy adult with their head screwed on straight.

Is this too much to ask for? I still remember Mum always said when I asked her what she wanted for Mother’s day each year “I just want my girls to be happy and healthy.” I used to get cross and ask her what she really wanted…. Now I understand that she really wanted just that.

Hey Mums of difficult kids…. you’re doing okay, better than you think, and your kids don’t define you. They will eventually be alright, and at the very least, more independent of you, and then you can start the next chapter of your life where you get to be a little more selfish, and make decisions not purely based around them. They will always know you adore them, but they won’t rely completely on you…. there is a light at the end of this looooong tunnel.

Happy Mother’s Day. xxx

So my beautiful husband…. it seems missing your face will never end. It’ll be 4 years in July, and tomorrow is your 41st birthday. It seems strange telling you something that should be blooming obvious to you already…. but you see, I kind of dont know where you are. Sometimes I feel like I am walking around in someone elses body… living someone elses life.. cause this one is not the one that we had planned together. Hey…. don’t get me wrong. Nothing turns out the way we plan it, thats life, truly. But every now and then I have to remember where we were, what we were dreaming of, where our favourite places were to go…. what shit we spun to each other in the wee hours of the morning. Because life has changed so much since you died. To be truthful it feels like ten years since I’ve seen you, cracked a beer with, had a laugh with you…. or watched on adoringly as you had your girls in hysterics…. I miss you. Ridiculously. I wish people knew once they passed away, just how big a void they left….. I get these constant memories popping up in my Facebook feed, 4 years ago today, 5 years ago today,  9 years ago today….. and I know I can turn them off…. but I can’t bring myself to do it….. because I’d rather be reminded and smile, or cry… than not be reminded and forget how incredible you were and what a crazy old life we were honoured to have together. Ironically, this weekend the girls are back in Sydney at a Camp for kids that have lost a parent or a sibling. I say ironically, because they will be there, without me, when your birthday comes around. They were not super happy about it… nor was I. But perhaps being with 60 other kids that have suffered a loss as great as theirs is just what they need this weekend. Me… I’ll be having a lasagne, or a parma, or a pork belly in your memory, with the man that came along and took on our broken little family, and will be grateful as hell to have him by my side. This past few months has not been awesome….. I wont lie. In between full time study, part time work and full time parenting, I feel like I have bitten off more than I can chew. Who me, you say??!! Yeah, I know I always did like to take on everything all at once. I think I have always wanted to prove to the world that you can have your cake and eat it too… well… I’m not always right, (contrary to my own strong beliefs!) Daughter number one has had a stint of very poor mental health and even required hospitalization. That was tough….. really tough. It affected her little family like you can only imagine… We take for granted so much having a well mind. Everyone does. We have a team of professionals helping us to help her, so everything is crossed that someone will get into her head and give her the tools to help herself through this time. The underlying feeling the head Doc had was actually grief, which was a bit of a surprise to me…. not that she shouldn’t be grieving still… but I guess with her, its often been a case of “If I dont talk about it, I can probably avoid having to live through the pain of it all.” So I guess in some ways, she’s grieved the least obviously. But I’ve always strongly believed that everything you don’t deal with now will catch up with you eventually. And so it has. Anyway… I’ve gone off track (once again). I couldn’t have let a birthday pass without acknowledging that if you were never born, none of us would have had the pleasure of knowing you, or loving you and in turn, missing you. So wherever you are Trenton, Happy birthday. The people who still adore and miss you dearly will be cheersing you all over the place tomorrow. Thank you for leaving your legacy in my hands. (Well two legacies actually.)
Xxxx

It’s been a little while between blogs…. okay, a long while. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say, it’s more like I’ve had “too much” to say and didn’t know where to start. It’s been an interesting start to the year in this household. And by interesting, I probably mean “challenging…” But I’m trying to be less negative! I’m back at Uni full time, and starting the final year of a degree that I’m still incredibly amazed that I’m enrolled in, let alone actually doing. Rubes has begun year 8 at her new amazing and unique “no rules” style school, and singing lessons (finally) as that kid has a voice most could only dream of. Pops has started Grade 4 and is doing really well, and finally started her dream activity – “Stage school”, where she will  learn all the skills of a Broadway star!(Singing, dancing and acting – a role her Dad would have adored had he been given the chance!) And after an horrendous few weeks that followed a “surprise” emergency appendectomy, Dale is back at work, minus a little bit of his internal organs.  What more could you want hey?! Our new and much bigger deck is half built (the old one was small and beautiful, but turns out barely attached to the house, and hilariously not properly stumped into the ground. (In fact the rotting stumps that held the original deck together were sitting in dirt, not concreted in like a deck or house should be!) So hey, we dodged a bullet there! Today we leave with five kids for a five hour drive and a caravan in tow to visit a 60,000 acre cattle station in NSW where Dale’s family have been visiting for well over ten years. It’s their “go to” place to have absolute peace and quiet, and I finally get to see what they have all been talking about for the last two years. I am looking forward to setting up camp, and doing as little as possible, with no technology and a good book while the kids “hopefully” enjoy nature, and ride motorbikes and poke ant holes. Well that’s what I am “hoping” they will be doing. In reality, Rubes’ anxiety and OCD has gotten so bad that we’re lucky if she’s been going to school the equivalent of three days a week, and when she has been, she barely makes it to class. We knew when she started that with the lack of forced structure it would create an interesting situation, but I don’t think it’s the school that has her anxiety at an all time high, it’s the nearly two hour commute each morning and night. She continuously runs into kids from her old schools that hate her, and threaten her, and it’s like a game of Russian roulette as to who and when she’ll run into them. She takes four modes of transport each way, and so the odds are definitely stacked against her. Her best mate that she’d had since Grade 4 moved to QLD permanently the day before school started back for the year, and really, her world fell apart after that day. It never ceases to amaze me how important our “mates’ are. Without them we are screwed. Nothing is as fun anymore, every event you attend, or milestone you enjoy, you don’t have that person to turn to or call and share in the moment anymore, and it’s affected her in all the most horrible ways. She has likened the experience to losing her Dad all over again, and she’s not wrong. I know that lost feeling when you go to turn to your favourite person that you’ve spent a big chunk of your life with, and they are no longer there to turn to. It’s not something I needed to see again, and she is struggling just to get through each day without the feeling of wanting to die. This is also not something I wanted to experience, because watching your beautiful daughter struggle with the simplest thing on Earth, which is just getting up each day, and functioning in society, yet is failing abysmally at it…. well it has taken it’s toll on myself and our family. New meds, a psychiatrist, a psychologist and now a team of Case Workers are on side to help us, but I am fretful that nothing so far is working, and she is falling behind in school and life at a rapid pace. I am helpless to help, even though my degree is based on all things “Community Services”, but as a mother, you are the last person they listen to, even if you’re the first person they text or call and exclaim their helplessness to every 30 minutes of each day. The desperate and “I’m not coping and my head is telling me to jump in front of the next passing train” style texts come so frequently now, that I’ve become numb to their meaning, and therefore am probably not responding with encouraging and helpful responses anymore….. It has taken my attention away from work, Uni and home….. and I have this constant feeling of dread for her, and a feeling of being  a totally crappy mum to Pops and partner to Dale, and it’s overwhelming me…. I am officially unable to help my own child.  I am now relying on my mates to pull me through, and the system to pull her through. Not something I am extraordinarily confident of…. but what can you do when it’s out of your hands? Sit by in earnest, and wait. So off we go…. lets cross everything for a a bit of Mothers Nature therapy…..

XOXO

I have spent the last six months watching a beautiful friend of mine slowly lose her husband to Cancer. He also happens to be the father of her two gorgeous boys and an incredibly divine human being whom I have been privileged to know and adore. It has re-surfaced so many sad memories for me, being that we had such similar stories as well. She too met her man when her first born was around 18 months old, and then they created a second together to complete their little family. I wish more than life itself that she was not facing what my family have faced. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. This year we are entering our fourth year without Trenton. I have so many mixed emotions about this I don’t even know where to start. I realise now from watching my mate go through this hell just how helpless you all were when you watched me facing the same tragedy. Helpless….. what a perfect word to describe how you feel when someone is dying, or who has died suddenly, when they were way too young, and way too nice, and way too important to their family and friends lives to go so soon….. It will never make sense to me. Isn’t death supposed to put things into perspective? We don’t know how long we have here on this Earth. We ought to always think about that, and make every day count….. every minute in fact. But we don’t. We fight, we question everything, we whinge and moan, and want for more than we have. Constantly. Why is that? Obviously when you’re living through such an horrendous experience yourself, you see just how important every second is and how petty everything else seems to be that would normally bother you. But it doesn’t take long to fall back into old ways. Watching this family try and tackle the worst scenario that a family can face, I have found my wounds re-open just a little bit more each day. I keep re-living the night that my husband fell at the end of our bed gasping for breath…. and I can’t stop thinking about what I would have said to him if I’d been given the time. I know I’ve said it before, but I wonder exactly what would have been important enough for me to take up his last few minutes or hours alive. To be honest, nothing would have cut it as his time was too precious. I would hope he’d have had something to tell us, some wisdom to pass on, some secrets to unleash….. but I feel pretty confident that he didn’t keep anything from me. And his wisdom shone through every day in the way he loved his family and friends. This just makes me want to erase that whole part of my memory……. (Not my life with him of course, but the part where I watched him die.) You can’t un-see, un-feel or un-remember an experience like that. Last night we had a family melt down….. and the girls howled again at what they had felt then, and what they still feel now about losing their Dad. They told me that I could never understand because my Dad was still alive. Of course they are right….. You are not supposed to lose your parents when you’re still just a kid. But a lot of things are “not supposed” to occur. Becoming a Mum at only 25 was a surprise to me, but losing my husband and best mate at 35 was not on my “things I’d like to achieve in life” list either, that’s for sure. The next few days, weeks, months and years are going to be so hard for this family. I want to wave my magic wand and have it be 2020 already, so that the pain is not so raw, and they have proven to themselves that they can survive the worst thing that life can throw at them. But I bloody can’t. Instead, like most of you did, I have to sit by and watch on helplessly as he slowly loses his battle, and they slowly lose their beloved Dad and husband. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. It’s fucking unbearable. I look forward to a day where my girls and I stop seperating our lives into “before Trenton” and “after Trenton….” It’s awful, because I can’t remember life before he was in it, but it’s impossible to imagine that he’s never going to be in it again. Even now. Hold those loved one’s tight people, hold onto them for dear life……. for life is ever so dear. xxxx

Well….. just when stuff starts to get good in this household…. it very quickly turns to shit. Well okay….. lets not bullshit, its rarely “really good” in this household…… its just not possible with a good mix of Aspergers/adhd and now raging female hormones. I dont even know where to start with the year we’ve had….. the fact that Dale has stuck it out astounds me…. to be honest the fact that I’ve stuck it out astounds me… I know I dont get much of a say as far as packing my bags and pissing of, but I wont lie, I’ve thought about it….. often. Year seven, 15 suspensions, a possible expulsion by term three, multiple friendship breakdowns, a new school trial in term 4 that lasted six weeks instead of one…. a transfer to that new school after only one day back at the old school….. (and of course the new one just happens to be nearly 2 hours commute on public transport each way from home…..) Oh… and did I mention the visit to the cop shop for online abuse and a near police charge the week before Christmas? Throw in three extra kids, their Mum that just likes to make life challenging for us…. and the usual issues that come from a blended family with 5 kids…. well, my new years resolution is to find a way for Dale and I to not feel so stressed…. all of the time. There is nothing more frustrating than having a child with severe social difficulties, apart from actually being that child yourself I guess. It’s tough to watch on, but damn is it tough to parent that kid, with absolutely no control of what they do, say, wear, act…. I literally scream “no”, and she does it anyway. Of course I constantly get that brilliant advice from random people that she just needs more discipline, more rules, technology taken away from her, ground her, threaten her, blah blah blah….. yup. Tried them all. Threaten her, she gets on a train to her Grandmas, take technology away, she grabs someone elses and uses it inappropriately, ground her, she sneaks out and we can’t find her, give her more rules… I’m struggling to get her to follow the basic ones she has to do to help keep the house running. Either I am the crappest parent to ever walk this Earth, or I’ve been given a pretty shit hand. She manipulates everyone around her. She’ll turn the eldest kid against the youngest, she’ll convince the middle two that they should be enemies, if we’re on holidays she’ll befriend someone Poppy adores and have them bagging her out in no time… people just seem to be controlled by her. She could convince an Eskimo that they had no need for their warm jacket and they’d hand it over without a second thought. Then the shitter side of this fucking disorder – she has severe anxiety and has to text me 30 times a day to ask bizarre questions about whether or not something will kill her, if some dude on the bus put drugs in her lunch, if her racing heart means she’ll drop dead from a heart attack, if she is being watched by pedofiles on the train, whether or not the food or drink she just consumed will make her vomit. (Her greatest fear….) My greatest fear? That she’ll stay like this forever….. that I won’t finish my Uni degree or I’ll lose my job on account of the amount of times she’ll contact me in an hour, or a day. That she’ll never stop calling or texting me and my relationships will deteriorate because my mind is always elsewhere, even when she’s not with me. That she’ll live at home forever and never spread her wings, or not finish school because its more important to socialise (even if she gets that one horribly wrong time and time again). That she’ll continue to hate me even though I am forever trying to help her…. and perhaps that she’ll read these blogs one day and truly hate me anyway. But if I don’t get it out, I really feel that I will explode. I feel guilt 30 hours out of every 24 a day. I am brutal with her, I mean literally brutal. I tell her how awful she can be, how much some people loathe her, where her life will end up and that she’s wasting it in front of our very eyes. Who does that shit to a 13 year old? My theory of course is to shock her into stopping….. but there is no stopping her. She can’t. She does not have control over this disorder, so how can we control it? Not possible. But you know what else is not possible? Convincing her that she needs to seek help, talk to a specialist, make some changes. As far as she can see (and I’m aware that this is a typical teenage trait) she is right, and its eveyone else in the world that is wrong. But add to that that this is also a classic Aspie trait too, and I fear that if she has been this way for 13 years already, what’s to say she wont be like this for her entire life? I’m not ready to accept that. When times are tough, the only thing that pulls us through is that shit will get easier. Its not, because every day it seems to get harder. And every family holiday now is dreaded…. by all. How sad. Thats such a crappy way to view it, but it is what it is. And I have no control over it. Done. Vent out and over with. Merry bloody Christmas friends, here’s to a better year next year. Xxx

Man…. life can be challenging sometimes. No one really knows what another person is actually going through on a day to day basis….. I mean, the charcoal chicken lady got to know me pretty well after my husband died, but she didn’t know my husband died. She probably just thought I was lazy, or perhaps saw me as her best customer…… But then I didn’t know what she went home to every night either. Life is a little bit of a facade…… you can guess what someone is going through by trying to read their body language, looking at their messy hair, or unwashed clothes… or even trying to find something behind their eyes. But will you ever really know if they don’t want you to? I was able to put on my working hat once I returned to my job after becoming a widow at 36. In fact I loved to go and pretend I had a totally normal life at home. But it does follow you….. my kids were a mess, there were multiple calls or texts a day about them, or from them, and eventually it started to affect my ability to keep on task. This year I started a full time Uni degree. Three years after the event that changed our little family forever, and I am still dealing with the after effects of what happened to us. I struggle daily with the work load of Uni, having developed a new level of anxiety of my own, because between balancing school and a job, the kids and their own issues, it’s sometimes tough to not lose my shit completely. There are still multiple anxious texts every day from daughter number 1 who is currently trialling her third school. She’s the square peg that everyone keeps trying to fit into that round hole. She’s only thirteen and is travelling an hour and a half each way, every day, on public transport in the hope that they will accept her for the person she is, not hope for her to become the person that they want her to be. With the dilemma’s that she faces on a daily basis, you would never know that she has Aspergers, Adhd or Severe Anxiety Disorder. But she does. I am always amazed at how much she can tackle with these ailments….. You’d say that you “wouldn’t” or “couldn’t”, but when you’re not given the option, you just get on with it don’t you? I am grateful for every breath I get on this Earth, but damn, does it like to throw shit in our faces sometimes. Perhaps it’s all just a massive test…. or test after test after test. Whether it’s watching another family go through what you’ve already been through, or someone trying to get their head around the death of a young person, the devastation after a fallout of a long term friendship, trying to watch your child unsuccessfully tackle the system that was not not designed with them in mind, looking on helplessly as someone struggles with the demons in their own head, or watching couples silently battle unsuccessfully to have children year after year after year….. it’s sometimes just so bloody hard. Is it all just to test our resilience? And why does it seem to happen to really great people? When do you hear that a really bad person, that has made really shit choices in their life, that has thrown others under the bus to get what they want….. when do you hear that they suffered a significant loss? Or that they got cancer….. or that things didn’t work out for them the way they had hoped? I’m sure it occurs, but why do we only hear about it happening to the most deserving of people? Every time I hear a new story of sadness, it seems to start with “Oh they are just the most gorgeous couple/family/person…….” Well that’s just fucking shit! Sometimes I don’t want to just “accept it.” Sometimes I want to say “Go fuck yourself Life.” Is it too much to ask to have a break from watching good people suffer? Come on!!!! I know that we all fight our own internal battles. This is why I try and be grateful for what I do have and not what I don’t. But we’re only human. And we’re aloud to be a little self absorbed sometimes. (I think I have been a little lately.) With assignments coming out my backside, one daughter struggling to just fit in (again), another with a snapped ligament in her ankle and a need for extra care from me and my own anxiety through the roof, I have really felt just a little bit “sorry for myself.” The littlest things get to me, because I’m exhausted! But when I look around and see that everyone is fighting their own internal battles, I realise that this is just simply, “Life.” If we assume that it’ll get better or easier, then are we not just bull-shitting ourselves? Maybe it will…. and maybe it won’t. But perhaps we just have to find a little positive in every day and concentrate on that. Life is what happens when you are waiting for life to happen!

Peace the fuck out. xxx

So it’s Fathers Day number three since we lost the big guy. The lead up felt “slightly” less unbearable than the others….. This year we remembered funny stories and memories that Trenton did that still make us laugh, even now. It’s nice when you can get to the part of the journey where you can smile about them and not just cry. Do we miss him any less? No… in fact probably more, because  the distance from when he died to now is so much further than it was. But we can talk about him endlessly now without losing it, because he gave us a lifetime of stories in the time that we had him. When Trenton came along, he assumed the role of Ruby’s Dad where her father could not. I always had more respect for him than most partners, because he did it without a hesitation, with so much love and it was not his responsibility to do so. What an admirable thing he did? And he loved that kid no differently than he loved Poppy when she came along….. you’d never have known she was not of his blood. I have now experienced this once again with Dale, who found us at our most broken, and helped us find the pieces of our lives that were missing or damaged, and stayed. To top this off, he already had three boys of his own…. and now he is raising five kids with me. That is two men that I feel privileged to have met, and have loved dearly. They would have dug each other the most. Step parenting is tough, and this time I get to experience it too…… they are not your own blood, and you haven’t raised them since birth so you do not know every little thing that makes them tick. It’s like rescuing a dog instead of buying a puppy… You have to fall in love with it slowly, be wary of what you say or how you are around it, swallow your pride and overlook shitty behaviour and muck ups, and constantly forgive yourself for not knowing what to do or say to make it alright. It doesn’t come “naturally….” It is something you have to feel out as you go. I adore Dale’s boys, but I do not live with them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He does however live with mine full time. How he keeps his calm when my kids are crazy is beyond me. I can’t, and I’ve lived with them their whole lives! He has taught me how to stay calm, and think about things a little before I blurt out the first angry thought that crosses my mind…… and then breathe. Just breathe. My patience with my girls became almost null and void before he came into our lives, and I watch him parent his boys with calm, stern, and thoughtful love. It’s an incredible talent, and I am trying to learn this new technique….. I know I can share my wisdom with him also….. after all, I have been challenged in my parenting life a tiny bit, enough to have learned a thing or two. So together, we will raise them, teach them, love them and damnit we’ll “drag” them up if we have to….. I am so happy to be walking this journey with him. It has made me respect the step parents of the world just a little bit more than I already did. I guess this is just the next chapter in my book. I am excited for the chapters to come. xxxxxx

 

Today is our ten year wedding anniversary. We promised each other that we would re-marry today, maybe in Bali, or somewhere with really cheap drinks! Being ten weeks pregnant with Poppy on our wedding day, meant it was a dry wedding for me…… but not for you Trenton. I am sure you drank enough for the two of us (or the four of us!) I remember the night before you were out with your six groomsmen…. and while I was being pampered (and throwing up with morning sickness) you were out partying like there wasn’t a wedding on the next day!!!! I know you paid for it all day until the evening of the 11th of August 2006 when we were to have the ceremony, and with me being already an hour late because I had to stop at the main house of Emu Bottom Homestead to spew and re-do my lipstick before we came to the old Slab Hut to marry, I’m sure this didn’t help you with your waiting in anticipation!! Here we would marry each other in front of three giant open fireplaces, a trillion candles, and all our family and friends. What a bloody wedding it was too……. still the best I’ve ever attended by far. Moving 20 metres away into the old Woolshed, which was also lit up by thousands of candles, decorated in native flowers and with a giant open fire place where our food would be cooked in front of us, it really was the wedding of my dreams. Your speech, as always, was hilarious, and full of love and adoration for me, Ruby and all of our family and friends. I will never forget you first calling me your wife….. I had dreamed of that day my entire life. (As your baby girls do now…… it’s a girl thing I’m sure.) Today I will remember only happy, wonderful memories of you. There was nothing I loved more than to call you my husband, and I know you felt the same about me being your wife. Life does not tell us what it has in store for us, but I know it’s irrelevant, as we lived as though we didn’t know how long we had anyway. I have no regrets with you Trenton, none. If I’d known you were leaving us at the age of 37, would I have done anything differently? No. Happy anniversary. XXXXX

Wow……. Tomorrow I will be the proud owner of a teenage daughter. I find it hard to believe that I have actually kept a child alive for so long! It’s definitely the longest job role that I have had…… and quite frankly I’m surprised that she still sort of likes me…….. Ruby Tuesday is one in a million. Trenton and I often wondered if she was put on this Earth to test out our strengths and weaknesses…. and possibly to see if she could break us! She didn’t…. but she certainly made us tougher. From 14 months old she was a challenge, but what an incredibly beautiful and happy baby she was. Her first year was one of my favourites….. even though my relationship with Rob was a mess and was destined to end (in fact it did, two weeks after her first birthday) damn did we have some fun. We walked down the main street of Moonee Ponds every day and had baby chino’s as the shop keepers oohed and aahhed over this chubby little blob of happiness. She was very funny to look at, and just like her Mum, pulled the most hilarious faces. (Hence where my nickname “Rubber-face” came from when I was a kid.) Rubes had this amazing ability to make people laugh…. she would go to just about anyone, and even at one year old, the faces she pulled would have you in stitches. The funny thing is, I think that your personality from even as young as one pretty much sticks, because her sense of humour is still exceptionally witty and cheeky now. Although it is now leaning much more towards the inappropriate side of funny! The kid has endured more in 13 years than most will in 90. She completely reinvented herself when she started high school this year, so that no one knew of her disorders. She has even managed to hide the fact that she suffers from severe anxiety 24 hours a day from all of her new mates. I find this an incredible talent. High school is a bitch of a place if you don’t “fit the norm…” and I don’t blame her for needing to do so. I am so proud of what she has overcome. The death of her Dad was something I actually didn’t think that she would survive. Being very “black and white” about everything in life, she told me in the weeks that followed his death that I was to “not talk of him ever again around her, or she wouldn’t survive her childhood.” She was a ridiculously smart ten year old kid…… but I didn’t listen to her. I’m afraid I filled the house with photos of our lives and I talked about him every single day, often hiding in the toliet in between stories of their lives with him to bawl my eyes out…. but I was not going to let those girls forget one thing about him, not ever. I’m glad now that I enforced this. They both speak of him daily, and he comes up in most conversations…… and we have our own little private jokes about how Ruby inherited his disgusting habits and inappropriate humour, and I know that she secretly adores that she did. I have often talked of Ruby’s challenging behaviours in my blogs…. and in a way this is how I coped with them. The fact is, she is not an “easy” child to raise….. but damn she keeps life interesting. I could write a book with the funny stories that she has already given me, and to be honest it is me who wouldn’t have survived Trent’s death without her. She has been incredible….. to both Poppy and I. She is one tough cookie…. and I certainly wouldn’t want to get on her bad side, that’s for sure! So tomorrow I will celebrate 13 years with her in my life, keeping me on my toes, challenging me daily, having me laugh till I cry….. and quite often just making me cry! But she is mine and Trenton’s, and nothing can ever change that now. He always told her till the day that he died, that the best present he ever received was on his 30th birthday when she decided to start calling him “Daddy.” I hope she never forgets that memory. Happy birthday Baby girl.

Mum and Dad. xxxxxxx

Recently a very tired and emotional Rubes called out to me after putting her and Pops down for the night. I went in to her hanging her head over the side of the bunk deep in thought… and she said “Mum….. I really miss having someone to call Dad…… I just miss saying the word….” It broke me. Rubes keeps her emotions close to her heart. Rarely do we get an insight into how deep her scars are…. She talks about Trenton like he was the funniest, greatest and most disgustingly gross character on Earth, but not often in the same way Poppy does. Pops talks about what she misses with him not being around anymore. She wonders and daydreams and wishes it were different. Perhaps in Ruby’s Aspie brain that is not an option? Last year the visits with her birth father became less frequent and less frequent, and now they are just meeting once a month for an outing. I asked her the next morning if now that Dale was around, did she feel that she had no need for her birth father anymore? I was right. In her mind, everything is very black and white. Even though he is trying to make it up to her now, because he missed 10 years of her almost 13 years of life, she doesn’t owe him anything.  So why should she have to put herself out? She has more respect for Dale and Trenton, who of course will always be her Daddy. That’s enough for her. Poppy, who took a lot longer to come around to the idea of me loving a man other than her Dad, is now accepting of this new person that she see’s every day. She will never miss her Dad less, but she now understands that Dale in no way wants to fill Trent’s boots. But he has patched over a section of the gaping void that the big man left behind. He has this special relationship with the girls that brings out a smile in them that I’ve tried so hard to find over the last three years….. and his three boys bring back an innocence into this house that I though was lost for good. It has been wonderful for all of us…..  and although there is always some guilt attached to a new relationship after losing someone so special, I am learning to let the guilt go, and live again. In three weeks it will be three years since Trenton died. Four days after Ruby turns 13 years old. When people tell me this time has flown, I cannot help but think “Maybe to you…… ” The majority of those three years were the worst of my entire life. I still wonder daily, weekly and monthly how on Earth we all survived. Parts of us didn’t…. and are gone forever. But after the storm comes this kind of calm where you realise “This is it…. right here, right now.” Life is what happens when you are waiting for life to happen. Don’t bloody miss it. Tomorrow morning we fly the girls up to Sydney to attend the grief camp that is run by “Feel the Magic”, the wonderful people that sent the kids to Disneyland last year. It is an Australia wide event now, and it’s already proven itself to be a wonderful and healing experience for all the kids that have attended. I truly don’t think they would have been ready before now, but they are actually excited about it. Through my support group I have gotten to see just how crucial it is to have other people around you that have actually walked a mile in your shoes. They will be surrounded by kids this weekend just like themselves, that have lived through the greatest of tragedies. It’s so terribly devastating to read that three years ago today in my Facebook feed, I had just driven Trenton to hospital to undergo what should have been simple surgery for a broken ankle. I read the 45 messages underneath this post from his and my friends telling him what an idiot he was, and to hurry up and recover. He was a ridiculously loved man. It never ceases to amaze me how little we can predict what life will throw at us. All we can do is honour those that we have adored and lost, and try and bring back the happiness to those that were left behind. I’ll continue to do this until it’s my time to go. Life is for the living. XXX

 

On Saturday night I got to be a part of a nation wide Young Widows and Widowers Australia catch up in Melbourne. (The YWWA) It has been my saviour to find these men and women that have had their lives touched in the same way that mine has been touched. It’s the exclusive kind of group that not just anyone can join…. and for good reason. Everyone that is a part of this and our other Melbourne based group the “WWSG,” has tragically lost a partner/husband/wife/father or mother to their children all under the age of 50. Such an unfair age to go, which brings many more elements of difficulty into an already horrendous situation.  Dying at such a young age means that not everyone got to have “that talk.” If they died suddenly and unexpectedly like my husband did, you may not have known yet what your partner’s wishes would have been for your future. For their children. For their funeral. For their extended family. I consider myself one of the lucky one’s in that many a drunken (and sobre) night was spent talking to Trenton about what would happen if either of us would go early. I knew that he wanted to be cremated, that it would not be a religious ceremony, that it would be filled with music and speeches, that he wanted me to always be a part of his immediate family’s life and that his friends were as good as immediate family to him…… he adored them all so much. He made me promise to find love again, and live the life he clearly couldn’t if he were gone. I of course told him I’d never love again if he left me like that. (I remember furiously telling him it better be me that went first as I wouldn’t survive his loss.)  I was wrong on many levels, and he was right. I did survive….. barely at times. But here I am. Still standing. The thing is that being widowed at 35 was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to endure…. and being re partnered is wonderful in many ways, but does not take away the pain of the loss of your “pre widowed” life. How could it? Trenton was the BIGGEST part of my first 35 years on this planet. Without him I wouldn’t have experienced the deepest kind of love and commitment that we did, the wonders of marriage, creating children together, buying a first home or any of these bloody wonderful things that “mostly” I won’t experience ever again. I will see him in our girls eyes every day until the day I die, so in that way he will always be here with me. Some of the stories that I have learned through these two Widow support groups have been heart wrenching. Mind blowingly sad. Sometimes these stories remind how lucky I am to have a family by my side, for some do not even have this luxury. The very sad ways that people can die, the devastating stories of families falling apart after the loss of their loved ones. As horrible as this is, it seems to happen a lot. I know that such a trauma can make people think (or not think), and do silly shit. But damn, I just know the person that did not get to live on would most definitely want everyone left to band together to pull each other through….. it seems so cruel to me that they would then lose further people that were once a massive part of their lives. So being re partnered has changed my daily life. I once again have a solid person to turn to when things are unbearable, to share the sleepless nights with when the kids are sick, having nightmares, or just missing Daddy. To have someone to look forward to going away on holidays again with (as most of you know, one of my all time favourite things to do….) and to have a future to plan and look forward to once again…… albeit it a different one than I had before. And with him came his three beautiful, hilarious, loving, kind and innocent little boys, bringing a smile again to my once very broken little family. The joy they have given to me is unexplainable, let alone the obvious changes in my kids happiness since they all came along. If I was spiritual at all (I know….. I’m bloody not….) I would believe that Trenton plucked him out of his not so happy life at the time, and put us all together to learn to really “live again.”

If it was you big fella, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. XOXOX

So my lovely husband, this would have been your 40th year on Earth. What a celebration we would have had today….. and although at 37 you’d still achieved more than most in your lifetime, this was going to be your time. “Our time”. We used to speak happily about hitting the big “four O”. Where others stressed so much about leaving their 30’s….. you and I embraced these landmark birthdays, and boy did we like to party! You would most certainly have subtly (not subtly) dropped the hint to everyone you knew for weeks leading up to this day…… We would have the biggest God damned party planned and every man and his dog would be invited in true Trenton fashion. I’m sure there would have been more speeches than at our wedding, and yours would have been the loudest, the longest and most hilarious. What would I have said? Thank you?? Thank you for loving me, for being my rock, for loving my baby, for giving me another, for the amazing trips, the tough times you stuck by me, the times you pulled me out of my darkness, the times you let me into yours, the trillion deep and meaningful drunken conversations, the dream sharing, the fear sharing, the laughter, the tears, the parties, the hangovers…… the wonderful life that you gave to me for nearly ten whole years. Enough to remain in my memory bank for a thousand. Thank you for being your unique self…. it was impossible not to adore you. People I talk to about you that never met you adore you….. You are still in our everyday thoughts, our many story tellings, our daily giggles about your inappropriateness…. I cannot imagine a day, a month, a year or a decade where I won’t miss you….. so I won’t. I see you every day when the girls get out of bed, and every night when I take them back….. and a million times in between in their humour, faces, actions, jokes. I’m lucky, I get to keep two little pieces of you to hold close to my heart for all of eternity. I get to keep your incredible friends in my life, and call your family my own. It could be worse. you might not have existed at all. Happy 40th Babe, wherever you are, you are in all of our hearts for eternity and beyond.

xxxxxxxxxx

So really Life, it’s time you and I had a little talk. I’m not overly happy with you at the moment. In my last post I was telling you that it was time. Time to start a new, positive phase in our lives….. and that after two and a half years of mostly hell, we NEEDED some new, fun, happy times so that not all of our memories of this part of our lives would be miserable…. but for some reason when I try and get all positive about stuff, you go and shit in our faces with something that we really don’t need. The year started off fairly well considering the mix of severe anxiety, post traumatic stress and sleeplessness that the majority of the three of us all suffer from…… but it’s going downhill, and fast. After a few weeks of interrupted sleeps, nightmares from the girls, anxiety attacks from Rubes, temper tantrums and emotional breakdowns from Pops, and a serious “missing of Daddy” from both of the kids….. I’m bloody exhausted and can’t seem to catch up enough to regain a hold on it all. I finished my 28 day Tame your Temper” challenge amongst this all on the 28th of January which was a fantastic course…. but I have been tested within an inch of my life ever since. I was finding myself snapping at the kids over absolutely nothing from my exhaustion. The tiniest things were setting me off, and my temper was revolting. I felt so good after finishing it, as it proved to me that although we can’t always control our children’s behaviour, we can change the way we look at it, tackle it and over all, “accept it.” Yesterday I started a full time, two year, on campus degree. It’s been my dream to do a course in Community Services or Community Development since I should have finished high school in 1995. Back then it was called Welfare Studies, and I got in as a mature age student at the grand old age of 24. Wow….. I thought I was going to be over the hill then. In the years after high school leading up to this time I travelled extensively around Australia, then America, Asia and Europe…. and continued until I got my two year working visa for the UK, which was my ultimate dream. I had my passport stamped and ready to go, and was tossing up between this and my degree when I found out I was pregnant with Rubes. These are the pivotal moments in our life where we often look back and wonder “what if………?” I don’t regret having had my daughter, but I certainly really had no idea what I was in for did I? I still remember Mum saying to me when I was a late teenager (probably in fear of me having a baby at a young age) that it’s hard enough having a healthy baby with support or a loving partner, but to have a baby with health issues with or without support brings a whole new realm of issues. God, she had no idea how right she was. I made it to 25 before I had my first child (still WAY too young for me in my eyes….) but if I look at the life she’s lived in her nearly 13 years on Earth, well it’s been like that of a 35 year old really. She has seen more psychologists, more psychiatrists, tried more therapies, had more tests done and taken more medication than most adults I know…. and throw in the desertion from her biological father at two followed eight years later by the death of her beloved Dad, well is it really that surprising she is struggling with life so much? She has (to my surprise) loved starting high school this year, and I’ve been loving hearing her stories of independance about catching the bus to and from school with no adults, watching her create wonderful new friendships with brand new kids and even starting a relationship with a boy. But amongst all of these wonderful new experiences, she has gone to school every day on bugger all sleep, and the worst anxiety she’s experienced in her life. She ended up in sick bay on orientation day (the very first day of school) with pains in her head that she thought were clots in her brain, then she came home early on day two of the first week nearly vomiting from it, and then she didn’t make it day five at all, and came home early on days seven and nine doubled over from the pains in her stomach. Today she had a full blown anxiety meltdown as she was about to leave, and her eyes were pleading with me not to send her back….. I ended up calling her psychiatrist and demanding he see us today. So that’s five out of her ten days of high school that she has not been there all day. And ten out of her ten days at school where she has felt unbearably sick. I can’t imagine how she gets up and goes every morning….. I may find it tough having a daughter with severe anxiety disorder, but I can only imagine what it’s like for her to leave the house every day suffering from it. To make it all just that little harder to bare, Poppy has been going through an exceptionally emotional time, missing Trenton like nothing else, panicking as she is starting to forget his voice, coming in multiple times in the night unable to sleep and scared out of her wits, and having emotional meltdowns whenever I need her to do anything like get ready for bed or brush her teeth. And she is still struggling with the idea that I am seeing a man other than Daddy, as she is fiercely loyal to him. The sad thing (or should I say “lucky thing”) is that she adores my partner. Like, she really adores him. She would like his three sons to move in, and possibly even into her actual bedroom I think…… I can’t imagine how it would be for her if she didn’t love them. So we’re “so” close to having our hands on this happiness thing again Life, so bloody close. All the planets are aligned as they say, so why can’t you let me just grab it?? Please. It is time, and I am ready now. Enough devastation for this little family. Enough is enough.

 

Trenton, today our baby girl started High School…… I cannot believe the day is finally upon us….. I have lost sleep over it since she was in prep, as did you! Which school will suit her? Which school will cope? Which school will see through her behaviour and realise just how incredibly bright she is? Well this is it, after years of school tours, too-ing and fro-ing between ideas, talking about it a thousand times with friends over coffee (or beer) today I had to drop her off and drive away. No more school involvement, or hanging with the Mums in the playground and chatting about how everything is going for our kids…. it’s a “drive and drop” kind of life for her now…. and essentially she’s on her own from here…… In an ordinary life (one that we did not get to live) I would be so very happy for her. But after three months of anxiety attacks, and sleepless nights, and worry over bullying, drugs and having her food spiked at school (yes, a serious concern to her for some reason….) she has flown the coop and is even getting the bus home. It’s an incredible relief I won’t lie….. the build up for someone with severe anxiety is so much worse than the event itself. But it’s here, and she’s done it. I hope when I see her after school she can confirm that it wasn’t as bad as she’s imagined, and that maybe she might even be a little excited for what’s in store for her. Poppy started Grade 3 yesterday, and she too has been nervous as hell. She has had nightmares the last few night, with death and murder and children dying being the main subject. Poor love…. I know she is just scared to start with a new teacher, someone that has to learn her whole story over again. It’s tough being “that kid” who lost their Dad under horrendous circumstances. But to be honest, it’s just tough starting anything new without him by our side, where he always was. It rained today and Pops asked me if she thought Dad was crying on us with happiness that Ruby was so grown up now? I only made it home by the skin of my teeth without bawling my eyes out in front of her. I can’t tell you how proud of those girls I am. I am amazed that as a full grown adult I survived the greatest loss, let alone my girls who experienced it at the ages of 6 and ten…. and now at nearly 9 and 12 and a half….. they have come an awfully long way since that day. I am going back to school this year to tackle a degree. I feel excited and terrified all at once, but I just don’t want anything in life to pass me by. I have a new relationship to be happy about, and with it brings new experiences for my girls and I. This “is” the new phase of our lives…… and although it will always be tainted with the sadness from our losses, we will never take for granted each and every special moment that we get to live. That is one thing I am 100% sure of. Scoop up those very special people in your lives that you hold dear to your heart, and don’t let them go. Not ever…… every moment, whether good or bad shall eventually pass, so enjoy it. XXX

So I realised as I was making New Year’s resolutions (for the first time ever), that my life can cleanly be split into the part that happened before Trenton died, and the part that came afterwards. Even though there were 35 years before he died, it is very easily defined by how crap life became once we lost him. I know most of the wonderful people I have met on this journey since would agree. It changes you significantly….. and you probably spend every day wishing it hadn’t. For two and a half  years now I have desperately tried to fit the pieces of mine and the kids lives back together like a three thousand piece jigsaw puzzle with many missing pieces….. I have accepted now that this is impossible. You cannot have such an incredible person impact your life daily for nearly ten years, then have them ripped out of it in one 24 hour period and expect to ever live the same life, in the same way again. So my 2015/16 resolution was to stop trying to do the impossible. It’s time to recreate a new version, so that we are not setting ourselves up to fail miserably on a daily basis. I have waited for the kids behaviours to change and their anxieties to go away…. thinking that once they are okay again, then maybe I can be a better parent. Surely once they stop coming to my bed crying at night from the nightmares, or stop abusing me for trying to have some time out from them, or stop begging me not to go to work and dropping them to school holiday program (that they hate), or stop asking me if they will die in their sleep that night, or perhaps if I will die in mine……. maybe then we can have some sort of regular life again? I have since discovered that this is our new normal. This “is” our regular life. The moment I decided to stop waiting for it to change and become good again, I felt a relief come over me because it means I can stop thinking I’m failing now. I’m not failing…. I may be flailing….. like a fish out of water desperately trying to breathe…… but I am not failing, I am surviving. I “have” survived. I have beaten myself up daily since Trenton died at how my temper, my lack of patience and my general irritation at the world, and then by default how my kids behaviour has affected my everyday moods. How could they not??? They are my world in every way! I have watched them go through the worst possible thing a six and ten year old kid could go through, then I have watched on in horror as their worlds crumbled even further, slowly and painfully in the 2.5 year aftermath….. and being the closest thing that they have now, I was the one that saw the worst of it, felt the worst of it, and copped the worst of it. I see now that it was never their intention to belittle the job that I was doing, it’s just that nothing I did made them feel better. Because nothing I could have done would. It’s an horrendous feeling to watch on, but not be able to help……. like torture actually. You cannot fix a broken heart. And theirs were truly broken. So at the turn of the year, when I decided to wish for what I’d like to see change in 2016, other than winning tattslotto (a yearly wish we all make I’m sure…)  I made a decision to stop feeling like a puzzle with a trillion missing pieces. THIS IS MY LIFE. I have to bloody live it, and I have to show the girls that it’s worth living well. I started a 28 day “Tame your Temper” course online on the 1st of January. I think I joined up half pissed in December thinking that just joining was enough to prove that I wanted to make some changes in our home. But then the 1st arrived and I forced myself to sit through the first session. Then the second, and third…… and as I listened, I realised that I have so much anger built up inside at the fact that the love of my life was taken from me at least forty years sooner than I’d anticipated…. and that the life I had all planned out with him was over. No wonder I had lost control of my temper. Every day, every argument, every shit thing that has happened since Trent died I have the perfect excuse to lose my shit over it, because I lost my husband. And my kids behaviours are shit, but they lost their Daddy…. so fair enough right? Yup…… for a little while, and then No…. it’s not okay anymore. Mourning and grieving is not an option we have….. they will continue, and probably forever. But hating on life, the world, all the happy people that haven’t suffered? That’s not alright. I want to read Facebook posts about wonderful things that are going on in other people’s lives and smile. I want to see happy stories on the news and feel their joy with them. It’s time to start that new three thousand piece jigsaw puzzle….. I have no idea what the picture on it is of, but once I finish it I’ll let you know. Happy New Year friends. XXX

This year has been as wonderful as it has been brutal in some ways…… since the start of the year to now (the last day), I feel like we’ve lived a thousand lifetimes. Earlier this year as part of our case against the hospital we had to face a brutal series of probing and invasive questions over many sessions from a psychiatrist to try and compare our life before that fateful night, to the life we now live since his death. They want to know just how severely his death has affected our lives, or I guess whether or not it has at all. It’s an atrocious thing to have had to go through…. and I particularly wish that the kids hadn’t had to do it at all. Although they were certainly a lot less affected by it than I was. (Thanks to a very aware child psychaitrist.) I had to go in first for both of them and pre tell him really just how bad it had been for them since we lost Trenton. Including the details of what they saw that night. It was more horrendous than I’d imagined, and now that the year has progressed and the reports have returned to us, it’s become really apparent to me just how screwed up it has left them both. There is a wake of horribleness that is left behind a death like this, and it keeps dispersing shitty new scenarios for you to tackle sporadically….. but never when you are prepared for it.  Of course you get your typical, totally to be expected feelings, like you’ve lost a limb….. and then the desperation that follows to fight to maintain some kind of security, stability or sanity again. Throw in the loss of a routine for two and a half years now…. and I gotta tell you it’s taking it’s toll on all three of us. The lack of sleep, motivation to work or keep the house looking good, to visit old friends, or to try and get to work or school on time….. well it’s leaving me feeling pretty ashamed of what I should be doing, and what I’m really not. I have been gazing around guiltily at this beautiful home of ours and the garden I adore but barely look at…… but it’s all a constant reminder that I have this place due to the fact that I no longer have Trenton. It’s killing me slowly to have it, but not appreciate it…. because I am so grateful…… I know if he could have wished to leave one thing behind for us it would have been for us to have somewhere to grow our roots and feel safe and secure always. But damn…… it’s a catch 22. My resolution this coming year is to love this whole place like I loved that man. Fiercely, and without a second thought. My girls need their original Mum back…. the one that didn’t scream, or cry at the drop of a hat, and could swallow any bullshit to be there 100% for them. But the version of myself that could stand her ground and be tough with love, not anger. Those reports have now reminded me that no one came out unscathed from this tragedy. And if I’m honest, we didn’t have it all that easy beforehand….. I know that their anxiety of me being anywhere else but by their sides has torn me down to a shell of my former self, but after reading the reports again I realise that it is utter desperation to not let me out of their sites in fear of losing me too. How bloody awful for them. I never lost a parent, and I still need mine on a daily basis at the age of 38…. so I don’t think that I will ever fully understand their version of grief. And although I carry my own pain, I was lucky enough to have the kind of childhood that can prepare you for surviving teenagehood, and then adulthood. Theirs is now an unpredictable unstable, unsure existence that will make any kind of decision making very challenging for them. My job now is to put the pieces of my life back together so I can handle the next phase of our lives…. high school for Rubes, and some independance from Ruby for Poppy. Life bloody goes on doesn’t it? Happy New Years people. XXX

There is one standout lesson that I’ve learned this year that keeps popping into my head over and over again. “Everything can change in the blink of an eye.” I’ve learned never to underestimate this old life of ours….. Just when you think you’ve got it…. you bloody well don’t. But just when you think that you’ve finally lost it…. something will happen to make you realise otherwise. I stumbled across some eulogies from Trenton’s memorial recently, and I’m finding myself re reading something time and again in my head…… In my eulogy for Trent, I said these exact words…. “If you told me that I’d be married with two kids by the age of 30, I’d have laughed in your face……. but if you’d told me I’d be widowed with two kids by the age of 35 I’d have punched you in the face…….” Well I’m finding myself picking apart my life again on an emotional level…. there has been so much change again since this time last year. This is the toughest time of year by far for a widow/er I think…. or a parent/sibling/child that’s experienced the loss of someone very close. Christmas (at least in our family) has always been less about religion and more about family and friends. It’s always been a time to celebrate how lucky we are to have the support around us that we do, and we’ve traditionally celebrate this by meeting up for a bevvie. (In true Aussie fashion.) Not much has changed in that department I’m glad to say. But it’s a time to reflect on our lot in life, and that’s what I’ve been doing. So you can’t help but think about your lost one’s even more than usual….. This time last year I was heading into my second Chrissy without Trent. It was tougher than the first (as I’ve found all the “seconds” have been…) and when I read back through my blogs I can see the difference in how far I’ve come in some ways, and not at all in others. It’s funny, because the circumstances in your direct life can change dramatically, but the grief doesn’t change at all. This year I was lucky to have met and fallen in love with another man. A man that isn’t my husband. It’s been six months now, and I feel so blessed and lucky, and guilty all in one go to have been given another chance to look after someone really special, and be looked after in return. When you’ve been widowed, this is something you honestly think you’ll never have access to again. You probably feel you’d never want to again. And although you may think otherwise, I’ll tell you right now that it’s almost harder to dive in and “have” that relationship after losing someone like Trenton than it is to choose not to even try…. It’s not been an easy road for the kids or myself, and I’m guessing even tougher for him to walk into such a broken, messed up family. But he’s take every minute of it in his stride. He’s not only welcomed stories about Trent, but he’s asked for them. He includes him in every decision we make, every new experience that we enjoy together, and wants to get to know all of Trenton’s best friends in the hope that he will get to know Trenton himself even better than he does. It seems like a pretty rare thing to me. My home is a shrine to the big guy, and it will probably not change in the distant future. I love seeing his face everywhere in my home, and in a way I think it’s helped the kids not have their memories of him fade one bit. Not that they could to be honest. The family has now grown into a very “modern family” of five kids from two homes,  (he has three boys) one ex boyfriend (who happens to have fathered one of my girls,) his new partner and her two kids, and multiple grandparents from all the families involved. It’s bizarre, but in some way it feels totally normal. We’ve all had to make changes in ways that we may not have chosen to… his kids with the separation of himself and his wife, his wife’s new partner and his two kids, accepting new siblings and relatives, and the juggling of all of the lives involved to make it all “fit” together. It’s hard, but really nice at the same time. I guess you could say that if you’d told me that I’d have met someone new by the age of 38….. well I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have believed you. So life goes on. It’s the only one sure thing that we all have to hang onto. That it will go on. Merry Christmas all. xxxx

So yesterday Ruby stumbled across a box of memories from Trenton’s memorial. I had bought a bunch of good A4 paper and laid out some coloured textas, and asked that people write down a message for the girls, or a memory of Trenton on it for me to make a book out of at a later date. I’d never been able to read them before now. Yesterday we bought the biggest Christmas tree we could find, and dug out all the old decorations to get the house looking Christmassy at Poppy’s request. This in itself is a tough task….. we all want to be joyful and excited at the prospect, but any little thing can set us off. Last year we went to the Christmas tree farm down the road to make it a big, fun outing to possibly take the limelight off his absence, but after painstakingly picking the tree, we all cried as we watched the man chainsaw it down…… I don’t think the tears were for the tree. I was quietly happy this year that we wouldn’t be home till the 5th of December from our US trip, because the lead up to every Christmas is a really tough time on  anyone that has has a significant loss in their lives. It was once our favourite time of the year, as it was Trenton’s favourite time of the year, and he would make it exciting and fun for the girls till we had the wonderful task of watching them receive their Santa presents on Christmas morning. He was such a big kid himself. This is our third Chrissy without him, and although there are bigger gaps between the times where you just can’t function, it doesn’t seem to get much easier. I’ve said it before and I still believe it, everyone else’s lives immediately go on…. and although they miss him dearly, you’re left with the gaping hole in your everyday existence because he lived with you 24 hours a day. I know his family feel the same way…. it’s really tough. Anyway, I read through this box of messages to him, to us and a couple of funny stories about his drunken shenanigans….. and damn did it kick me in the guts. I just remembered how much I miss him. Like a missing limb to be honest. I struggled to picture his laughing face, even though I’m still surrounded by his photos. I needed to picture him laughing and talking…. and alive. If I could take the last night I ever saw him out of my memory bank, I’d do it in a second. Those visuals overtake my wonderful memories of him constantly….. as it does for the kids who re-live that event over and over again still. It’s horrible enough to lose someone so young and vibrant in their time, but to lose them in such a tragic, horrendous way just adds to the pain of trying to accept that they’re gone. I could think of a thousand ways I’d rather we lost him, but we don’t get a say in these things. And to be honest I still feel like he was never meant to die. I’m sure everyone feels the same way about their loved ones. Anyway, it’s even sadder to read these wonderful messages from people that have promised to look after his family that he left behind, and in truth you’ve barely seen nor heard from them since that horrible day. Two and a half years ago this month…. and barely a word. Death brings out the best and worst in people. It makes the least likely people shine, and the most likely people fade. Fact. So in turn, it sorts through the worthy and the not so worthy people on your behalf…. and neatly disperses of the latter. I am watching the sad and helpless messages filter through into my online Widow support group more and more each day. Christmas, even if you don’t celebrate it, is the time of year to celebrate your family and friends. So in turn, it’s the saddest time of year for these people, or anyone estranged from their families. Some are escaping the country, some embracing it head on… whichever way you tackle it, you certainly can’t escape it. I think we are uber sensitive to anything and everything at what is generally supposed to be a joyous time of the year…… So I just hope everyone finds their own way of dealing.

Ho fucken Ho. xxxxx

Tonight we leave America behind and get on the long flight home. It feels like we’ve been away for months, and also like it was all over at the click of a finger. It’s been a wonderful journey, with both amazing and frustrating experiences to counterbalance each other. Whenever you are in a different place from your home, you can see your little world like you’re looking through a tv into your own life. It can make it clearer than ever to see what makes you all tick. The girls have both shared with me during this break how they are really going since Trent died. It’s not awesome news I’m afraid. The honesty table has finally come out, and they have both shared that they hate their new lives. Wow… I suppose if I’m honest I can’t say I’m surprised…. but to hear it out of their mouths in what should be a really happy time, it’s tough to swallow…… Ruby poured out her heart to me about how shit her life has been. Her anxieties have hit an all time high and she is terrified to start high school next year because of some bullying that has been going on online, and she hates that we fight 24/7… we are not seeing eye to eye on anything. Poppy still can’t get her head around why he had to die in the first place. She misses him more than life itself, and she cried to me last night that she wishes that I was sharing my deepest thoughts and concerns with her, and not with another man. She wants to be the one to be there for me, which is beautiful. But it’s still heartbreaking to hear. They just wish this tragedy had not happened to us at all…. because things just don’t seem to be getting easier. I feel like I have gone to the ends of the Earth to try and make it as smooth as it can possibly be…. but I’ve failed. Because it isn’t remotely smooth. Not that it could be I guess. I feel like I am leaving this country less positive than when I came….. I’d hoped that some time out and away from our lives would give us the chance that we needed to bond and recoup. But it’s just made our issues stand out like neon lights. Damnit……. I guess this brings me back to square one, to where we were six months into this hell ride. How to heal? How to grieve right? How to pull these kids through in one piece? The only thing I’ve realised is that the answer to these questions is still the same two and a half years later…. Fuck knows. Fuck bloody knows…….

So the second week of our holidays have been very different….. as close to happiness as this old family gets I’d say. There have been plenty of arguments, and plenty of nasty moments, but generally it’s been a relaxed, beautiful experience abroad…. Thank goodness. Life over here is very chilled out. The house we’re staying in is a beautiful double storey Texan home on around 90 acres. There is a two storey playhouse with a flying fox coming off it, a horse called Tony that just wanders freely around the yard including up to the wrap around verandah where you might be sitting and having a bevvie, and he doesn’t mind the kids just jumping on his back saddle free for a little walk around the yard.  It’s a good ten miles to a shop and closer to twenty minutes to the main town. It’s serenity at it’s best…… just what the Dr would prescribe I guess. Sometimes the pain that I see in the girls shows more when there is no reason at all for their cracks to be showing……  If there is no reason why they should be not coping, and we’re seemingly having the best time, then I can see clearer where it comes from. Last night Rubes and I ended up in an almighty blow out. The late nights have caught up with her and her snappiness and anxiety issues are harder and harder to hide. Being in a household with two other young girls’ means that there are usually two against two…. Her competitive nature comes screaming out, and it starts continuous wars. It’s frustrating and exhausting as hell being the parent of the kid that is constantly making issues where issues don’t need to be made. I don’t agree with her 90% of the time and she is fully aware of this….. This causes issues in itself. It makes me seem like I never take her side, and to a kid with one parent at home, that must be awful. But I can’t bullshit her either. How will she ever learn right from wrong, or what is socially acceptable and what is not? I know the Aspergers will sometimes make it impossible for her to see these things without being reminded…. but surely if she listened enough she might just remember what is okay and what is not?? The problem is that she doesn’t ever listen, because in her head she already knows the answers to life….. she knows what to say, what to not say, when to pipe up, when to not…. of course we all know that this is bullshit. She certainly doesn’t know when to stop….. she must have the last word. At any cost. So the last few days here have slowly become a little more uncomfortable and a little more uncomfortable between the kids… luckily my mate is a high school teacher. She has handled it very well. As have her gorgeous girls…… Today we head to the big smoke to buy the girls some cowboy boots, I am hoping that we can diffuse the situation…. We have had an incredible time, and we have well and truly fallen in love with Texas…. for me, it’s the second time. I’m just glad that with all these issues we have, it doesn’t stop us from travelling the world and sucking it dry for what it has to offer us….. We are all so grateful that we are still here to enjoy it.

See y’all soon. xxxx

When Trenton died all I could think was “How the hell are the girls going to survive this?” After a few months I thought the same of myself. Now two years and four months later I wonder how we will ever lead a normal, or even semi normal life again. Everything that was, is now not….. everything that was going to be, is now not going to be anymore. You would think that after being given the shittiest hand life could deal you, that you might be given a break in other aspects of your life…… well, I’m still waiting. And it’s not to say that wonderful things have not occurred in our lives since that devastating night, (they certainly have) it’s just that the things we keep hoping to fix, seem unfixable. I have tried so hard to soften the blow for those girls, and I think that for nearly two years while I held my shit together I did… but instead now, my own pain has ended up making their lives worse. This holiday has shown me, in all it’s rawness, just how fucked up we all are. I know it was not intended to, but throw us out of our comfort zone, onto the other side of the planet, and then put us on show from the crack of dawn until almost midnight every night trying to battle the queues and craziness of a bunch of theme parks, and you will see us fully crack open. It may ultimately be a good thing to see, but right now the tears are pouring down my face at the sheer desperation I feel at helping those girls. The topic has come up a lot…. being somewhere that Trenton would have adored to be is a constant reminder that he is not with us anymore. Poppy has been very angry during this trip, because she feels that all the help seems to come to me. Even though it’s in the way of friends and family trying to explain to her and Ruby that I need support to raise them…. and a break once a week by way of my Dad coming to stay….. What she see’s are people constantly telling her to let me go, to let me out…. and all she wants is for me to be there for her 100%. In her biggest time of need. Ruby has been anxiety ridden the entire time since we left Melbourne… (yes, she is also anxiety ridden when we are in Melbourne.) But this trip has amplified her fears ten fold, and she is a blithering mess. She (without meaning to) has consumed my every bit of energy from the beginning of the holiday until now with her anxiety ruling every single decision that she has had to make. Before every ride she questions if she will vomit, have a panic attack or have a heart attack and die. But she loves rides more than anything, and in her life pre Trenton’s death she would have questioned it, but then gotten on and sucked in every moment. Now she spends two thirds of her day panicking and dry retching over it. It’s the saddest thing to see. I have trained up the chaperone for this trip on how to answer her three thousand questions a day, just the right way so that we can share the load. Then last night she had a full blown anxiety attack in the queue for a ride at ten thirty pm thinking she was going to have a heart attack and die, and demanded that I drag her shaky, near on fainting body through the entire theme park to the entrance where the other million people were trying to get to as well…… only to fall into my arms outside the lockers crying like a baby asking me why Daddy had died, why I didn’t tell her he was going to die (I had re assured both girls that he’d be fine when I dropped them at their Nana’s at two am the night he’d passed away…) and how could I tell her that she wasn’t having a heart attack right at that very moment if I’d got it wrong with Dad? Fuck….. Like seriously….. Just fuck. How can people go through this crap forever?? I keep watching the same kinds of shit happen to my support group of Widow’s and Widower’s, and I wonder what the breaking point is? I think I’ve hit it twelve times already…… Sure, we can get a free trip to Disneyland…. I’ll take it, those kids deserve it! But it’s not long before our situation reminds us that although good things can happen to good people, our lives will never be the same again for us to enjoy it like normal people can. I can see now that we have progressed through time, but not life. Time is passing, we are still breathing, but more in a treading water kind of way… just to survive. I only wish that five years had passed already and that we might be coping a little better. I wish Ruby wasn’t about to graduate primary school without her adoring Dad watching on. I wish Poppy didn’t have to at the age of eight have to assume the role of an adult to comfort me when things are getting too much to bare….. and I wish the two of them only had the issue of choosing an outfit, picking a boy to like or deciding on which mate to visit on the weekend…… like normal kids do. It just isn’t the case I’m afraid…… Such is this bloody life. xxxx

So…… tomorrow we leave for our trip to the US. It’s been a full on crazy year and a half since my sister nominated us for an all expenses paid trip to Disneyland for a week through “Feel the Magic,” and a year since we were chosen….. It’s a little bit like a dream actually. I feel so lucky to have been chosen, as do the kids, but of course we know we were nominated in the first place because we lost something enormous. So it’s another wonderful scenario that is a little tainted by reality. None the less, we are packed, pumped and ready to go on too many rides, eat way too much crappy American food and have way too little sleep. Ahhhhh holidays! I am very excited to see the kids experience all of this. I was around seven when I went to America with my folks and I still remember what a wonderful pace it was to visit. We got a motorhome and drove around for a few weeks, and although the memories have faded a little with time, I still remember what a fabulous trip my sisters and I had. Trenton and I dreamed of taking the kids to Disneyland one day, he too went as a child and it was definitely on the bucket list. I guess I never foresaw us going in this way, but I am humbled yet again at the support and generosity our mates, and the family that helped us raise the funds for Feel the Magic, that in turn paid for us to go. 11 years ago I took Ruby to Texas as a nine month old baby to see a mate who I’d only just recently travelled around Oz with get hitched. It was the most awesome trip, particularly being able to experience and feel the real Texas. We stayed with her Aunt and Uncle,  a traditional Texan family on a ranch, complete with typical Texan hospitality….. and truth be told I didn’t want to come home!!! Once our trip to LA and our wonderful week in Disneyland is over, we are flying back to Texas to experience a real Texan Thanksgiving with my same beautiful mates again….. I am so excited by this opportunity. The way I’ve always tried to travel is to get off the beaten track so you get to see the place as the locals see it, and live, eat, shit and breathe like the locals do. So this will be an awesome experience for the kids too…… to see how people on the other side of the planet live. This is something that a book or the internet cannot show or teach you. And this is also why I love to travel so much….. it’s my favourite way of experiencing a different culture first hand. I am almost more excited to watch my girls interact with my friends two girls, and just look at the different ways that they do things…. It’s going to be an interesting trip! Anyway, I shall be uploading many piccy’s….. sorry in advance if (and when) I go overboard with that! But you know me…… that is what I do best….. See you when I’m looking at you peops. xxxxxx

So on Monday I turned 38….. one year older than Trenton was when he died. He was always a year older than me….. and now he isn’t anymore. I didn’t quite know how I would feel this birthday… there have been a lot of changes since last year when I escaped Melbourne with the kids to spend it in far North QLD. Another year has passed. Another notch in the belt. I feel another 365 days further away from my husband…. and it’s a fucking tough gig. I often hear people whinging about their age, and now I find my fists clenched when I witness it. I was never one to “not” be proud of my age…. I actually never complained that I was getting older, because I liked getting older. In fact I didn’t like to be looked upon as being “young” as I saw this as being looked at as semi ignorant. But even I didn’t realise what a privilege it was to “get” older. How lucky we are to turn a new age each year, to share it with friends and family and reflect upon the year that was….. This year during my reflecting, I have found my flaming temper. I am pretty sure (and correct me if I’m wrong old friends….) but I think I have mostly had a decent old fuse in my life so far. I know I have been famous for calling it as I see it (which I agree isn’t always the right thing to do) but to the people that love me for who I am, it’s not been a major issue…. Possibly until now. This year after the two year anniversary of Trenton’s death, my fuse suddenly shortened. To almost nothing. And it took me a bit to realise it. Okay, so getting off a tablet that I’d been taking for seven years right at this particular point may have not been the wisest move, but I had a lot of reasons to try and live without them…… and I thought it worthy of a try. I still don’t regret that as I want to do it “al naturale…..” I hadn’t however taken into account that withdrawing from this tablet would turn me into a mega arsehole….. and that I’d end up even hating my own company after a bit. But once you are a few weeks in, there is no going back. So nearly eight weeks later I’m starting to regain the control I never really had to start with in my household. During that time however I did and said some unforgivable things….. hence the reason that I attached that quote above, and why it is so symbolic to me today. The words I used around the kids were by no means positive, the behaviour I presented them with was not positive, the response I was getting back to my not so cool words and behaviours was definitely not positive…… and the whole lot just almost became a dirty habit…… of which I will not allow it to become. It is easy to slip into shitty ways, but it takes a certain kind of strength to stop it from recurring. I am currently on the “change my crappy ways” bandwagon, and don’t plan to stop until I can breathe a sigh of relief. Monkey say, Monkey do. With my kids it’s almost instantaneous….. you show em’…..  they’ll mimic it. I also approached a few people that I love dearly this year, with some home truths….. that they probably didn’t need to hear. But they did hear them anyway….. “the wrath of Emma.” At the time, I swear it almost always seems like a well thought out plan. Nope. Not. Well. Thought. Out. I have also had a few home truths exposed to me by people I adore, and it hurts like hell to be told something you know is true, but that you don’t want to be told! Ouch……. But you know what? I can look back on that, and even if I didn’t react in exactly the right way in the beginning…. I can honestly say that being told that you’re not being awesome is a good thing in the long run. I don’t want to be seen that way…. I want to be liked, and loved. Especially by my kids. So I will take that feedback, and I will bloody work hard to change it. You can always be a better person if you ask me. Always. So its onwards and upwards from here. It has to be….. I can’t keep living in this stagnant hole. Life is for living, and dammit, I want to live. Bring on Disneyland, cause if you can’t be happy in the happiest place on Earth….. well quite frankly I think you’re fucked!

Soooooooooo……………………. we did it!!!!!! No, we didn’t run a marathon… pretty sure we didn’t even run one hundredth of a marathon! But we walked the three km part, raised a few grand for Feel the Magic (which are the organisation that are sending the kids and I to Disneyland next month) and are feeling pretty happy with ourselves in the part we’ve played to help this awesome charity. It’s seriously always at times likes these where I realise how fabulous my friends and family are. The support we were given through this time, both emotionally and financially has once again blown my mind. This year has been a toughie….. What am I talking about? This past two years and three months have been horrendous….. I know I say it every time we talk, but damn things get harder and harder…… Why? Buggered if I know…. I stupidly assumed that life would get easier, you know, once you’ve hit rock bottom and all that. The past four to six weeks in this house has been hell to say the least. The tension a thousand times higher than what I already thought was as high as it could be….. I have a feeling that my reign of crazy arse strength is dwindling…. and perhaps I have finally dropped the baton, so to speak. This marathon which is my actual life, is the toughest one I’ve faced. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s not socially acceptable to still be grieving at this point, this deeply, two years and three months after the event. I know you say that’s bullshit…. but it’s true. I shouldn’t be still screwing up at work this far down the track, turning up late and mucking up little things that I should be able to do standing on my head…… I shouldn’t still be drinking so much, and yelling at the kids when I’m hungover and have zero tolerance…… the kids should be sleeping better and not still crying at night….. we probably shouldn’t still be seeing multiple therapists a week seeing at though it feels like a lost cause…… but all these things are really still happening. Day in and day out. We fight every hour that we’re awake…. and the girls have pretty much decided that I’m a fucking crap Mum, because I have no fuse, and lose it over the smallest things. These things are not in my head. They are fact. How very, very sad….. Anyway, I have come to the realisation that I am not alone, because through my Widow support groups I can see that this is now “normal.” It’s normal if you have experienced someone that is ridiculously close to you being torn out of your life like a page from a book. So it is part of my new “normal.” I don’t really like it, but it was not something that was offered to me, nor something that I could choose to not do. So here it is. I am so grateful for this wonderful trip to Disneyland next month. In some ways it couldn’t have come at a better time. It was well over a year ago that my sister nominated us to go, and it has felt like a dream in the pipelines for so long. I have wanted to escape so many times with the kids, and just spend a few days pretending life was easy again….. so here is our chance. I am hanging to see them laugh and smile and light up with excitement. It’s just too far in between “great days” for my liking. Even with the wonderful, new and interesting things that have been going on in my life as of late, (and they have been amazing….) there is still this constant feeling in my guts that is hard to shake, that you can’t get too happy….. or complacent. I want to live life like there’s no tomorrow, because I know now that there may not be….. but something continuously reminds me that I’m not quite there yet. Faaaaaaaaark……… It’s so bloody frustrating….. I’m ready to be happy again thanks life?? Can you help me out a little????? xxxx

 

It’s amazing how the most incredible relationships in life can go horribly wrong…….. Whether it be the end of a partnership where kids are involved, or the death of a loved one….. with or without kids involved. Those who you once adored and spent many hours with, can slowly fade out of your life as though they were never in it to begin with. You’d never believe it was going to happen….. but like an intense friendship that you’d bet would last your entire lifetime……. sadly it does. And from what I’ve seen over the last couple of years, it happens more often than not. Relationships…… with your kids, your partner, your folks, your in Laws, the neighbours…… it doesn’t seem to matter, because if you don’t see eye to eye…… you just don’t see eye to eye. There are some with whom it doesn’t seem to matter too much, and you can survive this mismatched understanding without too much care…… but if you don’t see things the same way as someone you love, that you see all the time…… damn it can make for a difficult time. I know now, and particularly after nearly two years of counselling with my girls, that Rubes and I don’t. We don’t fight well either….. and for two fighters (yes, she inherited that from her Mum….) that is not a good mix. Finally we have started to piece together why we don’t gel so well…. and it’s terrifying because how do you change the unchangeable? I can change…. to a certain degree….. (no one ever wants to, lets be honest…) and I’ve had to over the years. I pick my battles with that kid, and I have allowed so much to pass that I’d never have let pass in my life “BC” (before children.) But with a stubborn unchangeable Aspie, a dead hubby and two years of hell…. well….. I’m kind of open to other peoples suggestions right now. She has this incredible way of manipulating every situation to the point where I can’t even remember out of utter exhaustion what the argument started over and then she senses my weakness and runs with it! My memory is shit at the best of times, but throw in a little post traumatic stress, short term memory loss…. Arghhhhh…. that kids runs rings around me!!!!! Then there’s my sweet little Pops. The one I used to say to Trent “Thank God for her, hey????” And we’d breathe a sigh of relief. Not because she was better than Rubes by any means….. but because even she would come up and tap us on the back at the age of five and say “It’ll be alright…..” after one of our many failings with trying to get Rubes to see the error of her decision that day, or for hurting our feelings with her words. And now, two years into this new world of ours minus the big guy, she is the one that needs consoling. 24 hours a day. Her new anxieties of the world – that I will die horrifically….. and it’ll be because she has bad thoughts….. a lot. Every hour it seems she is a little teary…. and when I finally drag it out of her if she doesn’t give it up immediately, it’s because she’s has inappropriate thoughts…… or that she is thinking of horrible things that would hurt my feelings…. and she is positive if she doesn’t tell me what she has just thought about, I’ll die… yet she’s also sure if she does tell me, she’ll hurt my feelings. So she is in turmoil. She also, since December last year, doesn’t want to go back to Pop nights, which is one night a week when her adored Pop comes to stay so I can go out without the kids. She loves time with him, but hates me being anywhere other than at home, safe with her. Children don’t forget that you once promised them nightly to always be there for them. They NEVER forget this once someone has gone and died, even if they understand that that person did not want to go. So I cannot console her this way anymore either. The in Laws…… I do love mine….. I’m lucky. But even if you had a decent relationship with them all to start with when your partner was around, everything changes once that main common denominator is gone. It places the most pressure on a relationship that I can even explain…. to go on and love these non blood relatives that you accepted whole heartedly before, but try and behave as though the pink elephant in the room is not there, WOW that is one incredibly hard thing to do. How much did we overlook and tolerate because they were the parents of our loved one? Or the siblings/Uncles/Aunties/Cousins of our loved one……. We put up with the challenging parts in our own family, because we have spent a lifetime with them….. But I wonder how these in laws view us now too, after their main reason for seeing us is gone. The cracks start to show, your walls start crumbling, and things that shat them about you before, will now eat away at them daily as they weep for their child/brother/sister etc probably wondering why it was them and not you that had to go. I am by no means saying that this is the situation with me and mine, but I assure you that none of our relationships will ever be the same again. Of that I am 100% sure. I have learned a lot from this recent support group that I joined in Box Hill. Someone threw it out there one night that their relationship with the parent in laws had totally turned to shit. And it opened the flood gates…… the amount of estranged families that had been newly created from the death of their partner astounded me. There were stories of entire families that had removed themselves from the remaining husband or wife (whether they had kids together or not) and I couldn’t believe how common it was. How could you turn on someone in their greatest time of need? And surely you can put your bullshit aside for the sake of the kids? A lovely man who’s wife had lost her battle with cancer only a year after they’d lost their young son was telling an horrific story of how the in laws had tried to take him to the cleaners after he “only offered” them her investment property and not half of the very home they had all once lived in….. What the actual fuck???? How deep in the grief can you be that you have lost sight of what your child that has just passed away would have wanted. If they chose this person to have children with and spend their life with…. surely you can swallow your pride and honour their memory by loving that remaining person long after your loved one has gone? I know it’s not easy….. I have been left with my own issues with my husbands family….. but nothing I hope that can’t be worked on and worked out. I would hate to screw up the very link that I have left to my gorgeous husbands loved ones. It would upset me very much. What I have learned however, through this tragedy…. is that NOTHING is forever. I am trying to live by the rule that you should never assume what will happen next, you should never give up trying to repair relationships that are worthy of fixing, and you should always remember what your partner would have wanted you to do….. knowing that sometimes all of the above is not always possible and some things are just plain out of our hands. (Like my mate from the support group who has tried and failed to please his late wife’s family.) I think this is all you can do to be honest. xxx

So did you know that you can go into parenting with all the best of intentions…. but it’s still totally possible to become the parent you swore you’d never be? Yup…. that’s right. Your very own child can create the parent you have hated the thought of being your entire life….. it’s almost as though they have their hand up your arse and they are the puppeteer and you are their puppet. How do I know this?  I created such a child myself. I know I didn’t ask for a kid with special needs….. nor did my child ask to have them.  But none the less here we are…….. I have written many blogs about my girl Ruby, and it is common knowledge that she can shit me up the wall! I do love her to pieces, but her incredible ability to push that big red button, over and over and over and over again, never ceases to astound me. These holidays we had to find an alternative to her medication. I knew we were in for a rough trot…. but it turns out that I still, as per usual, can underestimate just how tough things can be for her. She has been on an anti anxiety tablet that she has “needed” to be on for five years. I am happy to share this taboo topic because we tried everything we could under the sun to help her without medication for seven long years….. and her OCD and severe anxiety was controlling her little life, and it was an horrendous thing to watch.  The day we discovered this miracle tablet, her need to tap the rungs of the ladder twenty different ways to climb up into her bunk each night stopped, the chronic hand washing that saw her cracked and bleeding hands re opening and bleeding multiple times a day stopped, her fear that the very ceiling above her head would most certainly kill her in her sleep stopped, and the ridiculous rigmarole that she had to endure every day by having to walk out of school each afternoon using the exact same steps she had used at 8.45am that morning stopped…… Life started to become enjoyable again. Her Aspie ways will never change much, such as her inappropriate use of language at the most inappropriate of times, the cold and short way she can sometimes react to the most emotional of situations, the way she views the rules and this world (they are HER rules and this is HER world) well these are the things we have had to suck the hell up and accept to be quite honest. Poppy herself at the ripe old age of eight reminds me often that “She doesn’t mean it Mum, it’s just the Asperger’s…..” “You know she would help you with that if it wasn’t for her anxiety” etc etc. She has become my Trenton in her wise and beyond her years understanding of this sister, from whom has by most parts treated her like shit for most of her short life. Although it is clear that she loves her dearly, and Ruby reciprocates this love….. because they have a very special relationship in that Ruby knows that Poppy will always stick up for her, even against me. I wish I had a little more patience to take on Poppy’s advice. Over the last 8 months it has slowly become clearer and clearer that Ruby’s miracle tablet is no longer working….. and through a series of unfortunate situations, it took me six months to see a new Pediatrician, to then be referred onto a Psychiatrist, to then wait to be contacted by said Psychiatrist…. and now  months later we finally have access to this $480 an hour Psychiatrist, who thankfully has already proven himself to be worth every cent. Luckily for us, being one fairly fucked up family, we hit the threshold with Medicare months ago, so it turns out we get 80% back…. A small victory, but a victory none the less! Anyway, this incredible Psychiatrist Bill, has already taught me more in three sessions about how the body takes in and releases medications than I have learned in 7 years of seeing Pediatricians for her disability. We have her booked into the Royal Children’s Hospital next Wed at midday to have her in the operating theatre to be given the happy gas just so we can take some of her blood. Yes, that is what a child with severe anxiety has to go through just to have her blood tested. We are all hoping that once the DNA tests have been done, we will know exactly which family of medicines we can and cannot give her for life. So no more of what we’ve been through for the last fortnight of trialing new medication, and withdrawing from her tablets. Let me tell you a little of what we’ve experienced. Rubes’ anxiety hit an all time high during the last two terms of school. After parent teacher interviews we all discovered that between all of us (her two teaching aides, her teacher, the Vice principal and myself) the questions she was asking at school and at home probably clocked the thousand questions a day mark. Every piece of dust, dirt, goo, wet thing, cotton, carpet, stain on the table was surely something that would kill her. Whether it be via her hand while she ate lunch, or via her drink bottle that had sat near it, or via the air that we breathe, it would surely float up into her body somehow…. she was absolutely positively sure that it would kill her. The latest anxiety being that these things would enter her brain via her nose. Bed times have been hell because every time she lay upon her pillow or moved the doona and dust flew around it would take her another 40 minutes of questions to settle again. This part of her anxiety has never gotten to me as much as it has recently. I have been trying to teach her how to self soothe. How to use the “Catastrophe Scale” and really work out if something is as bad as she really thinks. But it’s not possible to calm yourself down when every inch of your being is telling you if you don’t ask the questions, these things will happen and you will die. She hit a peak a week ago after a week on a medicine that was great during the day, but kept her up at nights…. so after a week of no sleep she flipped her lid and became extremely irritable… to the point where rationalizing was just not something I could do with her anymore. Out of utter desperation on Sunday I gave her some tablets to chill her out, or even better, knock her out…..  and I even took the same dose as her to prove that she would be okay.  She was not. Once she felt the effects she decided that I had murdered her. She asked me why I had given her this drug that was closing her throat over and would absolutely stop her heart from beating that night? She writhed around on the bed moaning and crying and telling me what things to hand out to what friends once she was gone. She said she was glad that she’d be with Daddy again at least. I was absolutely gobsmacked. I just wanted this kid to sleep and wake up and be rational. I tried soothing her, talking it out with her, hugging her tightly……. and ultimately I cracked it at her for even thinking that anything I ever do to her is not with her best interests in mind……. but she never took it in. Three long hours later she passed out. She woke at midday the next day…. the first thing she said to me was “That was the best sleep I’ve had in years.” And so ended another shit first week of the school holidays where all other families I know are off enjoying each others time and company. We entered the second week waiting for a new medication that had to be made up at a compound pharmacist, so it wasn’t till Wednesday this week that we got our hands on it. Every day for her must have felt like a week. In the end I sent her off to Mum’s, because the cracks in my not even close to patient parenting had not just started showing but had engulfed me…. and instead of being calm and rationalizing with myself that this crappy time would pass….. I just lost my cool waiting for some medication to possibly help, or for her to miraculously stop irritating me to no end, and neither was going to happen anytime soon…… You do get to the point where you realise that there really will be no end to certain things, and this I’m afraid will be one of them. So here we are…… nearly at the end of another fabulous school holiday break, not feeling well relaxed in any way, but fucking exhausted and brain fried.  But hey, we have survived yet another crappy test from this old life of ours…… keep em’ rolling in I say! It hasn’t taken us down yet…. so I guess the odds are with us for once. Happy Grand Final weekend peoples. xxxx

So I recently had my “Weirdo night out”, or Widows night out if you would like me to be grammatically correct. My daughter started calling it my Weirdo night out when she thought that’s what I had said over the phone one night…. and it has just stuck! Ironically there is nothing weird about my Widow crew. They are all such wonderful people from every walk of life you could imagine up…… we may not have met and befriended each other at a pub or a party, but what brings us together is way deeper, more emotional and a lot stronger than most bonds that you can forge with another human being. When I wrote recently of the minority groups that I have found myself in over the years, well it was because I was sitting down one night and really reflecting on what path this old life has taken me down. When I separated from Ruby’s father 11 years ago when she was one, I was absolutely sure that being that I had already had a baby with another man that I would be seen as “damaged goods” by potential partners, and I assumed it would seem as though this “baggage” would always be lurking around somewhere and my child would be going off to see him, or always talking about him. In a perfect world that would have been the case I guess. Instead I fought for him to stay in her life even a smidgen, and even then he failed. So when I met Trenton, and he took Ruby on as his own without me even asking him to…. I felt so lucky. I felt like I had done something right, and that I wasn’t the piece of shit that I thought I was for screwing up the first family I had tried to have. It even took a little of the pain away that I felt for Rubes, who would often call out “Daddy” to random men on the street as she didn’t know what he looked like. How sad?? But how lucky we were. Trenton didn’t see Ruby as a hindrance, but more of a bonus. When I lost Trenton, it was very different than when I lost Rob. Rob was not dead, he was not this incredible person that had changed my little screwed up life for the better, and given me the gift of happiness and the shot at a real family life. He didn’t give me another child that would seal the deal on our gorgeous little family unit that we would go on adventures with, and experience real living with, struggle with, yet excel at new things with….. What Trenton gave us was the gift at a different life….. a better life, and we took it. The years we had with him cannot be compared to any other. These memories cannot be taken out of my heart where they are locked up for all of eternity, nor can they be forgotten…. they were my favourite years so far. He was hilarious, and a wonderful Dad, he was inappropriate in all the right ways, and he was extremely intelligent. He had an incredible group of loyal, devoted friends that just proved what an incredible person he was, and I loved them all instantly. He bought so much to this Earth in his short 37 years that would never have been, and could never have been if he had not walked it. When you are in the “right” relationship it is impossible to not be constantly learning new things. He would gently push me into new things, sometimes at the right times…. and even sometimes at the wrong. But always for good reason. You know it’s not often that you can honestly say that there is not a person on the Earth that doesn’t like someone…… but when you met Trenton that was honestly always the case. He left that impression on everyone… Shop keepers, taxi drivers, bar tenders, check out chicks, buskers…. random people on the street. I used to bag him out for the way his voice changed when he answered his phone. The first thing they teach you in customer service is that you can tell when someone talks on the phone with a smile on their face. This is how he answered the phone even at home…. his voice became animated and his face lit up. He was even polite to telemarketers, and I’m sure they couldn’t believe their luck even though he would not buy anything. If you called, he made you feel glad. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t wish I could take a call from him. His messages, emails and phone calls were always loving…. I wish so desperately now that I was not one of those people that deleted every message straight after I had read it. There were millions that I could have read, and reread over and over on those days where I felt I couldn’t get going. Lesson learned. At least not a call was made without ending it with “Love you.” These are the things that you remember when someone has died. That you did love them. That you did show it. That you were there for them. That you would have died for them. That you supported them at their lowest. I will never have any regrets in this way. Many times Trenton and I talked about what we would do if the other died suddenly. We spoke of the scenarios that might be, some almost ridiculous now that I think about them…. but we had “that talk” where we made it clear how the other one would deal with it, and move forward. Of course it’s much easier said than done….. but none the less I feel happy and relieved in the knowledge that I know what choices he would have made for the girls, and I have made the same one’s he would have since that night we lost him. Four months ago I met someone. It took me by surprise, and I won’t pretend it hasn’t been an interesting, tough, eye opening but wonderful experience. In the first two years since Trenton passed, I would have given anything to have had someone to curl up with at night when I cried myself to sleep, to have them waiting for me when I arrived home from work, to rub my neck when I thought my head would explode for all the images I could not shake……. to cry with, to laugh with, to talk to. During those years of lonely nights on the couch consoling myself, after hours of soothing unsoothable children…. the support that I needed I could not have. You cannot have these things immediately after losing the love of your life, because it’s the love of your life that you want to do these things for you, and they cannot. You spend hours asking the Universe why it took the one main thing that made your life worth living. The anger is unmeasurable, the grief unbearable. But here’s the clincher. These things do not go away when you feel love again. The sun shines a little brighter. Food tastes a little better. Problems seem a little easier. The light at the end of the tunnel seems a tiny bit closer. But you still grieve the man that you are still very much in love with. You cannot fall out of love with someone that was taken from you when you were still madly in love with them. It’s almost like the clock that was your life together stopped dead the minute their heart stopped. But all the others just kept on ticking. So I have been hesitant to share my news with the world. I feel lucky, blessed and happy that there is someone to face the world with each day…… but terrified that it will indicate that I have moved “on’ from the big guy…… which I have not. I do not want anyone to think that I have disrespected him by “being” with someone else.  I am lucky because this very amazing person has “made ” Trenton a part of our relationship. In fact he embraces it more than most could. He did not bat an eyelid when he first visited my house which is in some ways a shrine to the big guy (including the giant Trent head canvases I sleep surrounded by in my bedroom.) He has accepted without a hesitation the anxiety that riddles my daughters lives… the fact that I have three hours respite a week through the Council in which to see him alone….. the thousand questions a day about whether or not I will die when I am out at the shops, whether or not they will die in their sleep tonight, whether there are blood clots moving through their veins just waiting to take their life off them too…… I find it hard to bare….. and yes, that was an understated comment. He takes it in his stride and doesn’t allow it to waver his mood, he keeps everyone pepped up, and makes jokes to deflect from the craziness in the house. He is there when a cuddle is needed but knows when it is something he cannot help with. I don’t know what I did to deserve to meet someone so relaxed about my life, when I have found nothing about my life relaxing in a very long time…… but I know a good thing when I see it. And I know a genuine person when I meet them. He is both. So think twice before reacting to my news…… it is great. But it is new territory for the girls and I. I have not shared this with many people until now because of this….. but in true Emm fashion, here it is…… Enjoy the sunshine people. You never know how long it will shine. xxxxx

So once upon a time, I became a single Mum. I had met and been with Ruby’s father for three years when we had Ruby Tuesday….. and although not planned, we had talked a lot about having a family one day. I thought we were on the same page…… turns out we were not. For the first year of Ruby’s life we tag teamed our Friday and Saturday nights, so that every weekend we each had one night in with the baby, and one full night out until 5pm the following evening where we could do what we liked. Parting was what we did leading up to the pregnancy….. so partying is what we continued to do once she was born. This was only made more possible with my inability to be able to breastfeed her. We realised quite soon into the pregnancy (well I did anyway…) that Rob was not coping so well with the idea of becoming a Dad. The sacrifices that would surely come for him were starting to eat away at his mind…. and he was out more and more as I lay at home vomiting into a bucket all day and night. My reality kicked in the moment I hit ten weeks pregnant, because I ended up with nine full months of morning sickness…. so I had to literally give up everything fun and yummy overnight!!! I always find it takes the men a little longer to feel the changes that a baby brings to a family, because it isn’t physical at all for them until they are being woken all night and helping out during the days. To be honest I knew once Ruby was born that we were biding our time as a couple. When we celebrated Ruby’s first birthday, there were fifty odd adults, almost no kids and I was drinking bourbon and dry out of a giant stein glass at three am the next morning knowing we were really celebrating making it through a year without killing each other. We separated shortly afterwards. Single motherhood. My first minority group. Rob kept no regular contact up with Rubes. The only regular event in his life was taking drugs and partying actually. In the year that we lived six streets apart I think he had her overnight twice, and probably saw her ten times…. and that was while I was there. When Rubes was only 18 months old I met Trenton again, and we hooked up almost immediately. (We had met 12 months before as mates, through mates…. but both being partnered at the time we didn’t even consider getting together……. but we both admitted later on down the track that we thought of each other a lot in that year.) Things with Trenton went as I’d always hoped they would have with Rob. He loved hanging as a family, and taking Rubes out and doing all those wonderful things you get to do with young kids, watching the incredible world around you through their eyes. Christmases became like magic again, family catch ups were more often and more fun, and life just generally started to get good. Really bloody good. Within eight months almost to the day from the 8th of March in 2005 when we’d hooked up, he had proposed, I had accepted and on August the 11th 2006 the following year, we were ten weeks pregnant with Poppy and married. Like I’ve always said, when you know, you just know. Most of you people know about the rest of our story….. But aside from being a wonderful one for eight years, we were not without our problems. It was quite apparent to me from when Ruby hit 14 months old that she was different from the other kids. I thought she had hit the terrible two’s very early, and even though she didn’t walk until she was 19 months old, she could hold an adult conversation. It was bizarre. She was ridiculously intelligent and bright, but wouldn’t hit her physical and emotional developmental stages at the right time. Sometimes they were early, but sometimes very late. I took her to pediatricians, family doctors, a psychologist and an occupational therapist…. and even did a parenting technique course when she was just 20 months old as I thought maybe the Doc’s were right, and she had just inherited my strong personality type! I was wrong. Two weeks before her sixth birthday after years of struggling with her challenging behaviour, I met Dr Luke. Dr Luke listened to my story while Rubes played with the receptionist…. and then he asked me if I felt like I’d been ramming my head into a wall for nearly six years. I burst into tears at the realisation that I wasn’t just a shit Mum after all, but that there was actually going to be a reason for her behaviour. He diagnosed her with Aspergers Syndrome, and the rest is history really. As soon as I had an actual name to research, it was on! Trenton and I read thousands of personal stories, Autism sites, blogs and whatever books we could lay our hands on. I joined an intensive Autism course where I made some great contacts, and I started researching support groups. This would become my second Minority Group. Mother of a kid with special needs. We wanted to know everything we could to make this child’s life a great one. She had struggled with friendships her entire life….. and even at three at the daycare centre, the ladies would comment on how she’d scope the room in the morning, pin her sights on one kid, and come hell or high water that kid would have to play with her till the end of the day or she’d threaten to hurt them.  It didn’t make sense, and it hurt to get this feedback from the staff. At three and a half years old when Pops was born, it went further downhill and fast. We assumed she’s get over it after the idea of a sister had settled in her brain, but it never did “go back to normal.” So halfway through Prep when she was finally diagnosed, and after six months of spending every other day in the principal’s office in trouble even ending up with her own private table in the classroom where no one would sit next to her in fear of getting in trouble or being threatened…… we finally realised what was up. Her brain would forever be wired differently, she would never learn like a neurotypical child, and she would struggle socially for the rest of her entire life. A life sentence in some ways…… but there was nothing we could do but help her on her journey. When I found PSN (Parent Support Network) I still remember vividly walking into the Coonara Community House absolutely terrified at the thought of what other kinds of people I might find in such a group. What kinds of disabilities would I see? Would they be obvious? I needn’t have worried….. man I met some wonderful people that day. And then every fortnight for the next couple of years…… They turned my life around in the sense that they had already had so much time in the game, and they just simplified the rules for me. Not only that, but I realised how lucky I was with Rubes…… she may not be an easy kid, but she could do so much for herself where there were other kids there that would need 24 hour a day, 7 day a week care forever. I met a few families with ASD kids who also had second children that were not on the spectrum. We all quickly became mates. It’s incredible how different you can feel suddenly just by sitting with like minded people. Bought together by tragedy or loss, or just by being plain unlucky…. the camaraderie one feels when you’re “not the only one” is priceless and irreplaceable. Those years where Trenton and I fought and struggled to have Ruby’s voice heard at her school, with her peers, losing friendships, moving schools, moving homes….. those were some of the toughest years I remember. It seemed sometimes that nothing we did or tried made much of a difference to her at all, but exhausted the shit out of us and pushed us to breaking point many times. Poppy suffered by default as Ruby’s behaviour demanded all of our attention, and she also suffered at the hand of her sister who clearly envied the ease of Poppy’s life in comparison to her own. Lose, lose you could say. By eight she was medicated for her extreme OCD behaviour, and severe anxiety disorder…. and has not been able to not me medicated since. Although we’ve tried many times. I truly thought there could be nothing harder than watching your babies struggle in just simple everyday life, but clearly I had no vision of what was coming. I never took my relationship with Trenton for granted…… truthfully, not ever. I had experienced the kind with no help, high expectations and much anger and sadness. So I wasn’t letting a day pass by without letting my man know what he meant to me… in fact there was barely a few hours between each call, email or text message. The irony is not lost on me that I spent eight years telling him at least every other day that if he died on me and left me to raise those girls alone, that I would kill myself and then haunt him for the rest of our days in limbo……. I pushed him to quit smoking in fear of him dying stupidly at his own hand, and I begged him to stay healthy enough not to have a heart attack by the age of forty. It literally was my biggest fear because of the level of stress that we shared already in our home. Man I wish I’d never said those words to him. I know it would not have changed the outcome, but it kills me now to remember how many times I threatened it to him. I’m not remotely spiritual or superstitious, but damn I hope I didn’t jinx myself by always worrying that I would lose him. On the 23rd July 2013, I found my third Minority Group. Widowhood. The two years that have followed I can only hope will have been the worst the girls and I will ever suffer. Losing your Dad, your Hubby and best mate, your past, your present and what would have been your future all in the space of 24 hours is definitely not something that I’d like to see anyone else experience. But I have. When I discovered that there was only one support group running in Victoria for Widows and Widowers under the age of 50, I quickly joined up, only to work out weeks later that it wasn’t being run very well, and there had only been two meetups in the City, one of which had seen a brand new Widower and his baby turn up alone. I emailed the administrator offering my help, and she emailed me the link to become the new administrator. She was clearly not coping with her new role in life, but I knew I needed this group to become something, just as our PSN group had grown and then those wonderful families with special needs kids had become my lifelong friends. So was born the WWSG (Widow and Widower Support Group) and I can assure you I would not have survived in tact if I hadn’t discovered them. When we welcome our new members into the gang, we always say “Welcome to our group, we’re sorry you needed to find us, but glad that you did none the less.” It’s so important to have people around you that understand the pain you’re in, because no matter how well meaning a mate or family member can be, they can never really get what you’re going through until they have lived through it themselves. I woke up this morning feeling grateful after I’d had my Widows night out on Saturday night (which was an absolute ripper of a night by the way), followed by my Widows and kids luncheon yesterday which ended up on my deck in Montrose with the whole lot of the families coming back to my house for coffee. These people have pulled me through some shithouse times, and I have hopefully helped them through too. I can only hope that we will hang onto each other for as long as this ride shall take….. even if there is no end. Love you guys xxxx

One major thing I have been noticing over the last couple of years is that there are so many and varied levels and types of grief. Whether you’re the grandparent, parent, partner, friend or child, it really “does” make a difference to how you grieve. It also initially matters how you lose that person. And of course at what age…….. There is an instantaneous shock and grief when someone just drops dead, or dies very suddenly….. it is utter disbelief and shock, and to be honest the real reality of the loss doesn’t kick in for a while….. although the giant gaping hole that they leave behind is so immediate that it seems like a Mac truck has just taken out your little bubble…. that bubble that we don’t realise we have until it is gone. I went to bed one night watching Game of Thrones Season 1, episode four……. and eight months later I was watching episode five alone, drunk, shattered beyond repair with two kids that had needed to be medicated for six months just to get to sleep in my bed, in our new home without the nightmares of our man lying on the floor of my old bedroom gasping for air…… Bam. Just like that. If you were to wake up one day and be told that your life was about to be completely changed from that second forever onwards….. you still wouldn’t and couldn’t imagine what that really meant until you had lived, breathed and experienced it for yourself….. and thank God for that. A few years before we lost Trenton, we lost my Nana Val. One of the most independent and strongest women I’ve ever known, Nana was the biggest bogan ever. Hence the nickname Nana Bogan…. She wore mocco’s, drank Bundy and coke, was a heavy 50 ciggie’s a day smoker till nearly the end, and was the most generous, kind, loveable, (brutally honest….) and unique lady I ever had the pleasure of sharing my life with. She was the longest standing grandparent that I had the pleasure to be around (I think my gorgeous Grandma Dot died roughly ten years before…..) and I only wished I’d visited her more. I loved that even as a fully grown adult she’d ask me if I’d like her to chop up my roast chook and vege’s, and mix her yummy gravy all the way through to make it like a baby food consistency…. and of course I said yes every time! Nan died from Emphysema…. and in the end she had to push an oxygen bottle around. How humiliating it was…. especially for a woman that never drove or owned a car, who went dancing every Sat night with her mates, went on Bingo weekends away, who worked multiple jobs to support her boys and walked or public transported it everywhere she went, it was certainly the beginning of the end for her to lose this independence. But it did take a few years. Towards the end as she slowly started to cull most of her belongings. (She was the opposite of a hoarder…. even throwing Dad’s 50’s and 60’s record collection out while he was off fighting in Vietnam as they were taking up space under his bed!) We knew that she knew that her time was coming to an end. I still didn’t believe it until I got the call on that Monday saying she’d called an ambulance on the Sunday, walked herself to their stretcher bed, lay down and closed her eyes, and essentially never opened them back up again……. she survived a couple of days unconscious, just long enough for us to all be around her….. but she literally knew that week that it was her last week alive. When I spoke to her on the Monday before she sad to me “I’m not so good Darl, I think I’ll call an ambulance next week and go into hospital.” I was astounded and told her to not wait if she needed to be hospitalised, but she clearly had loose ends to tie up before she made that final journey. Incredible….. I am so glad I was holding her foot when she took that final breath. We all held on somehow, and it was my first experience of watching someone take their final ever breath. Perhaps not for everyone, and although absolutely devastated….. I knew she’d had a bloody good run…. and I knew she was no longer struggling just to breathe. It helps a little to know that the pain that someone is enduring on a daily basis is finally gone. I can only sense the tip of the iceberg of the pain suffered by people that lose their special person from Cancer, or similar, what an horrendous, sad, shattering, and possibly ultimately almost relieving end it becomes……  After watching my Uncle die a couple of years later from Esophagus Cancer, I saw the tip of that iceberg. The awful complications he had after they cut the cancer out, stretched his esophagus within an inch of it’s life, (and it never worked properly again…..) a tracheotomy that saw him bedridden with operation after operation and nil by mouth for four months solid before he chose to stop all treatment and just die. He couldn’t talk, and struggled to write….. so he was unable to express his frustration let alone his emotions. A life for Barry with no meat pies, coke, beer or ciggies, was certainly no life for him. Without being able to talk to his most adored nieces, and great nieces and nephews, his adored brother (my dad) and with Nan gone….. it was all too bloody much. He had lost one son to suicide, and another to the life of crime and drugs…… So Barry became another sad, painful and devastatingly too young a death in the family, and this really saw the end of my Dad’s side of the family gone….. I can only imagine how that will feel, if I’m lucky enough to be one of the last one’s standing. When I was eighteen, one of my best mates wrapped her new car around a pole not only killing herself, but another friend. Six months later another of our mates from the same class fell ten floors down a stairwell and died instantly…….. I never thought I would survive this time….. I realised later that I grieved more for Jules who had died in the car accident, but six months later at Rebecca’s funeral…… because I was not living with her like I was Trenton,  it took me this long to realise that Juls was really not coming back. In hindsight I can now see and actually feel what it did for Jul’s immediate family……. I now understand why they moved away and were never seen again. You just need to “go” when something like this happens. Or make a massive change occur. Not even far away, but away from the memories that engulf you……. In high school a very close friend and on again off again lover committed suicide…… Even though it was eight years after we were heavily in each others lives…. the questions that arise when someone has died by suicide are endless. And unanswerable……. Man….. there is no right or easy way to grieve….. you might bottle it up, never to let it escape….. you might question it repetitively and you might refuse to question it at all…… you may talk about it all day long, and you may refuse to mention them out aloud again….. I know mine has been totally private, and indirectly public all at once. I have struggled to show it in person, yet poured it out brutally via my blogs. When I sit in the psychologists room I seem to be able to make out like I’m doing really well, and then when I should really be doing well I seem to lose it completely in front of someone that I may not have chosen to lose it in front of. There is no rhyme or reason, and it is exactly that unpredictably itself that makes it all so fucking hard. My poor kids have definitely seen the worst of me…… yet they are the very ones who understand my loss the most in this house. So I guess I shall continue to keep on keeping on, for as long as I can……  I was left behind for some bloody reason……. I guess I will eventually find out. xxx

Well here I am, staring at the only unopened present left from today’s celebrations, our third Fathers Day without the girls Dad. We started the weekend off with a bang….. my beautiful Auntie’s and the most adored Great Auntie’s 89th birthday. It was a wonderful day…… Not only did the sun come out after a shitty week of rain, but all of the family came from everywhere to share this amazing woman’s birthday, life and lifelong friends. My Auntie Thelma was also widowed fairly young, and never remarried. She never left the family home when she married, and her and my Uncle Beau stayed living with my Grandma Dot who would eventually lose her husband too, my Mother’s father, when my Mum was only 21.  She stayed on with Beau after they had their first baby Marilyn, and they raised this daughter at the same time that Thelma’s Mum raised my Mum. So my Mum and her niece Marilyn are actually 6 months apart in age…… my Auntie is 24 years older than my Mum. Confused? Try explaining that one to your kids! So I adore celebrating the life of someone that has deserved to live it. Never one to complain, Thelma has been a battler all her life. She has survived so many changes in this Country since 1926…. what a incredible journey she has had, and what amazing stories she must know? She is smart and witty, and never bats an eyelid, even at the completely inappropriate things that come out of my daughters mouths these days. (Now more than ever.) She is a dedicated Catholic, with a heart of gold. In so many ways she is a contradiction, because she has embraced all things modern, like gay marriage, and living out of wedlock and having multiple fathers in one family…… like I said, nothing seems to phase her. Not that these things should, but lets be honest….. at the ripe old age of 89….. how many people are so open minded?! Anyway, a day spent with my extended family that I rarely see, in the old home I grew up in, with my sisters, their families and my Mum and dad….. it was just what I needed after the last few exhausting weeks. In the last week alone I have had a severe reaction to some new medication a specialist put me on, a police visit from two senior police women after Ruby ran out of school and all the way home as she wasn’t happy with the punishments that were being dished out to her for her shit behaviour in class….. and about three hours sleep a night due to my skin feeling like it is on fire….. all while trying to fill in almost full time hours for a co worker that took holidays…. a fabulous end to four weeks of emotional hell I would say! I always do like to end things with a bang……… Meanwhile in the back of my mind I was quietly waiting for the Father’s day crap to unfold…. the stall the previous week went off without too much of a hitch for once…. we concentrated on Pop who we were seeing today…. and this year Ruby decided to have a Father’s Day lunch with Rob, so she spent some money on a couple of gifts for him. Which was hard and weird for us, but turned out to be really good for them. I am glad. She has been without him for 11 of her twelve years in reality, so she has every right to see him, however little she gets from him. This morning we woke and spent our energy on Pop (my Dad.) In my eyes he is one of the greatest Dad’s to ever have walked the Earth (alongside Trenton of course) and I will never allow him to not know this. He knows as well as I that I wouldn’t have survived this last to years without him by my side. I cooked up a mega brekky for my sis and her hubby, their mates and the kids, Grandma Pop and I… and it was heaven. The girls gave out their pressies, and we ate and drank and just felt the love in the air. The girls were surprisingly happy this year. Poppy in particular (who I’d worried about more of course, not having anyone to celebrate it with unlike Rubes….) but she was amazing. And really funny. She headed off with my sis and bro in law, (happily I might add) and allowed me to nap for the arvo while they took her on a massive walk and play in the park. It all just fell into place for once. We headed off at four to collect Rubes and head out for dinner at a mates, and really, it all went amazingly well considering I was expecting the worst….. So a few cans later, a little reminiscing, and the old heart starts pounding again at the thought of never seeing this man again in the actual flesh. Yeah…. we survived another milestone, another painful day that other people will forever be celebrating with loved ones….. happily, while we’re not. Go us….. I am so proud of my girls, they handled it like two old souls that have seen way too much for their short years on this Earth. Troopers. Then I sat to have another drink, and I noticed the unopened pressie. And I realised in the continuous distractions that we threw at those girls today, that Poppy forgot to unwrap the present she bought at the stall for Trenton. I know she was hanging to all week…. a mug with the best Daddy on earth on it, and a choccy love heart card that she could eat once she’d opened it for him.  I have kept the tradition going for them both, that they can go to the Father’s day stall each year, pick whatever they wanted for their Dad, but then they could open it on Father’s day on his behalf, and keep whatever they bought for him. Strange…. a little…… but so far it has worked. The underlying meaning is not lost on me…….. I do not think for a second that she is over it. Jesus you only have to spend a week putting her to bed to see that this is years away. But we are getting to the point where even in the face of utter devastation, you can still find a little light to keep you plodding through. Thank God hey? These are the tiny things that keep me going each day. This leads us to believe that there is “life” after a death. There is. As a matter of fact, it just so happens to keep moving forward, even if you wish that it would not. But thems the breaks kid. It is what it is.  So Happy Fathers day to a man who took me on, even though I had someone else’s child in tow…… without the bat of an eyelid (just like my Auntie) and then created another wonderful daughter with me to be shared with Rubes and the family, hopefully for a shitload longer that he himself got to experience them both. I’ve said it before and dammit I’ll say it again…… this life can be a cruel bastard, and if you’re not scooping everything up and holding it tight…… well you’re an idiot quite frankly.  So suck in every minute with whoever is there to enjoy the ride…….. I am certainly going to try. xxxxxxx

So we finally finished the next chapter in our two year war against the hospital that were negligent with our man. Two gruelling days of re-living that night we lost Trent, two days of anger, tears, frustration at remembering what the hospital did and didn’t do….. and how we all reacted to it, who saw what, where and how it affected them until now… and how we think it will affect us all long term. Woah. They don’t muck around…….. We only had to see our own lawyers handpicked psychiatrists…. I can only imagine how it would have been if the hospitals defence had chosen. Ours were tough enough. The questions come flying at you like they want you to trip up, like they want to prove you’re lying about what has gone on in your life. I only wish I was bullshitting as the words came out of my mouth…….. I have come to realise that what my little family have gone through in this time is astronomical….. and so far, we have survived, although sometimes barely. I had hit an all time low in the last few weeks, particularly in the exhaustion stakes…… but today I feel great. I feel relief, and I think, or perhaps hope that the last few weeks will not need to be re lived. I gave my girls the opportunity not to have to sit through a psychological assessment of how they felt “during that time.” But they insisted….. they hold so much anger for that hospital, that now I’m starting to worry that if we get nowhere in proving their negligence, where will they direct their anger? I have started the process of accepting the reality of it all, and want to prepare myself for such an event should it occur. At some point, although you’ll never ever agree with it, you’ve gotta accept that what has happened cannot be undone, and therefore your life will need to move forward. Without that person you loved so dearly. It’s a very hard concept to swallow to be honest. They were…….. then they weren’t. All in the blink of an eye. And whether you have someone to blame or not, in the end it is almost irrelevant. Going through in detail the events that unravelled in the three weeks from when Trenton broke his ankle to the day that he died was tough. But it reminded me how much we have suffered. A fuck load. From coming home to an empty house with his kids after the twelve hours of hope that he would make it at the Alfred Hospital, but without him in tow… to facing his clothes the next day hanging in the cupboard and strewn around the house, and his book still unfinished by the bedside table. Then realising that the worst possible thing has just occurred and now you’re expected to organise a funeral honouring his entire life…… in three days. Within the week the paperwork starts flowing, and then you discover that the life insurance that you’d always had has lapsed…. a few days of horrendous and sickening terror follows…. until you discover that his super has death insurance and you will at the very least keep the house. Over the next six months you will need to copy and have professionally certified all of his identification many times to try and stop the flow of bills, debts, memberships, junk mail and general paperwork from coming in. Even though they often still come. All these years later. Then proving that your over the counter cheap Will pack was really filled out by Trenton before he died, and that you as his wife really are the benefactor….. damn that was a shockingly difficult thing to prove. You would assume it was a no brainer….. but never assume. All those days would not have been survived if it wasn’t for the constant support from my life long mates, my newest and closest Outer Easties, my family and the local community that embraced and protected me. But I wouldn’t re live it if you gave me ten million dollars. And I wouldn’t wish it on my absolute worst enemy. Not even the surgeons that did not fulfill their job description. Here we are, still standing, although a little aged throughout the process, and it’s now time to leave it in the hands of the Gods (or should I say the Lawyers) and move forward. We have suffered enough, and I want to live now. I know for a fact that’s what I’d want for Trenton, and I know that’s what he wanted for us. I am grateful now that we talked so much that we touched on these topics many times. My second last gift to him will be to try my hardest for this to never happen again to another person at this particular hospital. My last gift will be to raise these beautiful kids that we shared, and keep them safe and hopefully even happy. Damn I will love that big old man for the rest of my life, and he’ll be forever 37 in my head, even if I live to be old and wrinkly……. What he gave us in that short ten years was a new love of the earth around us, and an appreciation for the little things in life, which ultimately are actually the most important. And he shared with me his beautiful family of which I will never lose hold of. So today I am grateful I had him at all….. and I know that everyone that knew him was better for it, and they know it. Until next time. xxxx

So Yoghurt (which is Yoga) is my favourite thing on Earth at the moment. It is literally the only hour and a half in an entire week where I get to that level of relaxation. God damn it I try…….. but it’s bloody tough to get there. Even halfway through I’m only just touching the edge…. and by the meditation at the end, I could just about fall asleep I’m so relaxed and happy. It’s my own little piece of heaven on Earth. I have started trying to get to a second class a week, just to buy myself a second little slice of Heaven….. but it’s not always possible.  I must admit, as I’m typing that out it does seem a little sad! An hour and a half of calm a week?!!! WTF?? No wonder I feel slightly psychotic…… Home is a mess. Actually… home is Hell. (I really am hanging to be able to “not” say that….. honestly…… to say “No really, things are going so well here……!” but we are not there yet I’m afraid……)  I love those girls, but I am at the point where I can go from zero to psycho in point 3 of a second. So what can be a brilliant day, moment or even hour, can turn into complete shit in the next breath. The anxiety levels in this house can almost be seen by the naked eye……. On Sunday night my girls had an intervention of sorts for me. I have been literally begging Poppy to take my Dad’s offer up of coming back on a Thursday night so I can have a regular normal persons night off every week. She adores Pop……. but she is totally freaked out at the thought of committing to even one Pop night at the moment…. let alone multiples. She has this weird thing about wanting to be around females only right now. I don’t know if it feels more like being with me, or if she is just missing Trenton so much she doesn’t need the reminder…….. whatever it is, she is a total mess about him right now. They both told me that I am angry and grumpy “all” of the time. And worse…. that I scare them with my anger……… Ouch. It seems to be worse than any other time in the two years and thirty three days it’s been since we lost him, if that’s possible……..  She howls most nights as I put her down, and like I said in my past blogs, she can go from hysterical laughter, to anger, sadness, utter devastation and then right back to anger or hysteria in the space of ten minutes. She is totally confused, and 100% sure that her life will be this shit forever onwards. She keeps hearing his last words said to her over and over…… which knocks the wind out of me every time. Forget about telling her that she’ll always miss him but that it will get easier……. she will scream at you that you have no fucking idea what is going on inside of her body….. she doesn’t believe anyone knows…. and I guess she’s right. It’s very hard seeing Pops like this, because she is the deep, loving, positive and beautiful one in our family. She is exactly a little gal version of her dad. She will tell you a thousand times a day how much she loves you, how far she loves you, and what she would do to save your life. She is fiercely loyal, even to Ruby who belittles her and berates her on a daily (hourly) basis….. Rubes as gotten her OCD back with a vengeance, and now I have realised that the three hundred questions a day about whether or not something will kill her, is not her severe anxiety as I assumed, but her OCD which is forcing her to ask the questions and get a response from me that all is totally okay, or she thinks that she will die. Arghhhh……….. Yesterday Poppy suggested that she’d really like to ask Pop to the “Father’s day and Special persons breakfast”  (lovingly renamed this year upon my request…… ) I said I thought he’d be totally moved to come, and Ruby said “Oh I just might ask Rob to come seeing as he’s my Dad…..” And then turned to watch Poppy for a reaction. We had made a little pact that Rob would never be called Dad, but perhaps her “father.” It seemed less traumatic for Pops to cope with. And it was clear Rubes didn’t even want to call him that anyway, seeing as she calls him Rob……… She certainly NEVER calls him Dad. Well all hell broke loose, and there was screaming and abuse, and we were trying to get ready to visit a mate, and I completely lost my shit at her and told her “if she loved her Father so much, then maybe she should go live with him……” Yup. I have a real knack of saying “just” the right thing at the right time in my little fucked up world. Well of course the spotlight was on me for the evening, and once again I was immediately apologising….. and begging her to believe me that it wasn’t true. And once again she got away with being a total cow and starting it all in the first place. This is a tiny taste of a day in our household. Today I have to watch both of my kids sit through a psychological assessment organised by our lawyers for the hospital case….. I have literally lost sleep over it in the last month. They have to somehow prove that losing their Dad made a significant “impact” on their lives. Are you freaking kidding me? I’m pretty sure if they read my blog from the last year and a half they might realise just how big an impact it has made. It will affect them till the day they die. As it will the rest of us. The sad thing is that no amount of money could ever suffice….. it is now just a battle of Us versus Them. If I cannot prove that the hospital were negligent on roughly five different occasions….. I will probably never sleep a full night again as long as I live. Life can be a cruel bitch sometimes…… it is one thing to take one of the greatest men off us that ever waked the Earth…. but to then be able to say they did everything they could…….. well that would be the final nail in my coffin, that’s for sure. I feel like the least I can do to honour that man is prove them at fault. I hope that it will bring some peace to the girls as well. I am desperate for our little war to stop. Wish us luck. xx