Brain Dump

• Lea linked to this post today- I think all of us need to read it to remind us just how good our lives are – warts and all…
• Today we say goodbye to my sister in law by marriage’s Mom.  She passed away last Wednesday and her passing has brought a lot of what I felt when my Dad passed away back to the fore.  It’s made me realise that I never really allowed myself to grieve for him properly and also that I had to sort out the anger issues I had towards him before I could grieve.  My heart is sore today.  For me.  For him.  Mostly for Barbs who has to put her Mom to rest – I cannot imagine losing my Mom.  Losing Dad was hard enough, but my Mom?  I can’t even think about that…
• Work is manic busy.  As much as I love Christmas, I am not particularly enamoured with this time of year – there is too much stress on me work wise and I can’t bear my clients who are all fighting to get the biggest piece of the ‘Christmas spend’ pie… it doesn’t help that this year is a tough financial one and lets face it people are being very careful with their spending this year – my clients products?  They are total luxury and are battling this season – something that is apparently all my and my team’s fault…
• I have yet to start my Christmas shopping – every year I tell myself to get my ass into gear and buy EARLY to avoid the rush, but every year I leave it later and later and end up stressed to the max.  MUST.PULL.FINGER.OUT.BUTT!
• I need to find a good maintance programe to keep the weight I lost after I had Kade off – have been doing small runs every now and then but want to supplement this with something else to tone – any suggestions?
• I have some good friends who are battling with life at the moment.  I wish I could make it all better for them.  The pain they are going through hits too close to home and I just wish I could change their realities.  I know that God will answer their prayers, I just wish I knew when and how so that I could ease the hurts they are feeling.
• There is not a day that goes by that I don’t fall to my knee’s to thank Him for my child.  Kade is my healing.  This child is my destiny.  I always thought I knew how much I would love my child.  I could never have imagined the depth of my love for him.  A mother’s love is infinite.  And amazingly beautiful.  And fierce.  So much encompasses what this love means… Words fail me when I try explain my love for my child.
• My husband as a father is so incredibly sexy.  I just want to jump his bones when I see how amazing he is with our son.  More on this in another post…
• I drink too much tea.  This started while I was on maternity leave when I was pretty much living on tea and the love affair continues daily.  I need to get back to drinking good old H2O…
• Brain dumps are good for the soul – think I might do this more often

6 months

Hi Dad

I can’t fathom that it’s already been 6 months since you left us. 

Exactly 181 days since we’ve had to say goodbye. 

Most of the time it does not feel real.  It’s almost like you’re still living in Wales just without the odd phone call here and there to remind us how much you miss us and how you’d like to hear our voices a bit more often.  (You always were the master of guilt induction)  It does not feel real that cancer ate you from the inside and took you from us too soon.

The rest of the time I find myself getting increasingly pissed off with you.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the “coulda woulda shoulda” in my life and I am so angry with you that you caused a large part of those “coulda woulda shoulda” issues.

I know you thought you were doing what was right by leaving us and moving overseas where you would get free medical care for the disease which was killing you.  But in truth?  You robbed us.  You robbed us of over a year of time that we could have spent with you.  Granted not all of that time with  you would have been sunshine and roses, but it was still time that we would have had with you.  You robbed my niece - your granddaughter who you loved more than life itself – of that extra time with the only father figure she knew.  And that pisses me off so royally.  We have one of THE best oncology wards right here in a hospital where you could also have gotten free medical care.  Here where we could have, would have and should have been with you to the end.

I know you thought you were protecting my sister and I by forbidding Mom to tell us once you had finally admitted to her that you were sick.  But in truth?  You should NEVER have put Mom in that position.  NEVER.  We are your children we had a right to know that we needed to prepare ourselves to say goodbye.  Thank God my Mother knew better than to hide your illness from us.

Many people have told me over the months, “You would not have wanted to see him like that”, “It’s better you never saw him ravaged by the disease” and the like.  One of my biggest regrets is that I was more worried about paying an obscene amount of money for an IVF that ended up failing anyway than following my gut and flying to see you when you were hospitalised the first time.  I guess part of the reason why I am so pissed at you is cos I’m pissed at myself.

I should have moved heaven and earth to come and see you Dad.  But you should not have taken away my right to say goodbye to you either.  I often wonder why this is only hitting me now.  It’s been 6 months since you died after all.  I can only think that my heart has been on overdrive of late and it’s now coming through.  The dam is literally overflowing – this heart cannot contain the pain and sadness it’s been delt so far this year any longer.  

I love you Dad.  But I’m so frigging pissed off with you too.  Looking back I can now see all the decisions you made thinking you were making it better but which in the long run turned out none the better.  I know you were acting to trend and that you felt you were making the ultimate sacrifice for your family.  But you were wrong.

I’m sure that one day I’ll be ok with your decision but not today.

Today 6 months after you’ve left us (I hope you’re having a great time up there by the way) I can admit to myself and to you that I’m pissed off with you.  I know I’ll never get an apology out of you (not just cos you’re no longer here to give one, saying sorry was never one of your stronger traits) but I needed you to know that I know that I’m cross.

I’m working on forgiving myself for not pushing harder to come over.  For allowing myself to sit in denial to how quickly your illness was progressing.  Hopefully soon I will get that right.  

Take good care Dad.

I miss you more than you will know.

Love (I’m still angry…)

Your Green Eyed Baby Girl

xxx

A Day Full of Ghosts

First off thank you to each and every one of you for your unfailing love and support for us at this time.  You all rock beyond any “deservedness” I might have earned to have you all in my life.  A lot of us have never met face to face (crumbs many of us don’t even live in the same country) but the love you have poured over us is just… well amazing, so thank you.

Today we as a family went to the Pilanesburg National Park to show our Dad’s mates his place.  The park is special for so many reasons but mostly because this is where Dad loved to be.  He loved to be in the bush and whilst it was good to show his friends who so kindly brought his remains home for us, his “world”, it was incredibly hard for us as family to go past all the places where Dad had made his mark.   The bar at the Manyane Gate where he so often sat drinking brandy and coke, the dam where he shat all over a Spaniard who thought it was cool to feed wild hippo’s some of her bread, the hotels where he came often to visit his girls who worked there…

It was  a wonderful day and it was a hard day, full of ghosts.  All too often I would look over my shoulder and see him sitting somewhere or see his red bakkie driving along the dead beaten roads, him with a ciggie hanging from his mouth.  And a few times I swear I heard his distinct laugh today.

I did manage to take some cool photo’s while out in the middle of the bush…

And then when I got home I was greeted with the most beautiful flowers for Cliff and I from some very special friends, they truly were a beam of light in what was otherwise an odd mixture of a good day and a very difficult day…

Tomorrow we leave for the farm where we will be holding Dad’s African memorial… On one hand I cannot wait to have it over and done with so we can try to heal our hearts and move on with our lives after his death and on the other I wish I never had to even think about what I’m going to say at the river side as we scatter his ashes…  He was a good man, but trust me he had his faults.  Many of them.  I don’t want to “martyrise” him but I want do him justice.  I think that probably much like my wedding speech I’ll write my last words to him in the early hours of the morning of the important day as the sun kisses the sky…

It’s going to be a hard weekend chaps.  In many ways.  I hope I can get through it with dignity and applomb.

PS ->  How normal do Cliff and I look in this photograph taken today?  I love this man who was given to me so much… it’s so hard to believe our hearts are aching when you look at this photo – just goes to show how as people we can pretend that all is well when in fact underneath we are broken…

I take you with me…

I take you with me every day

Expecting to get a call from you

Lamenting how long we’ve been apart

I take you with me everyday

Memories I play over in my head

That laugh you had

The smile you had

The love you had of life

Swinging me round and round

Kissing Mom in the kitchen

Hugging us all the time

Tears you shed on the birth of the apple of your eye

Those blue eyes flashing with anger and forgiveness

I take you with me every day Dad

Forever in my heart

Whole lotta babies going on…

A while back I posted about the weaver who lives in my garden and the fact that he never seems to be lucky enough to have any babies – WELL!

There’s a whole lot of bird babies going on!  IN OUR GARDEN!!!  The one where it seemed that even our birds were infertile… a few weeks ago I found a pair of baby doves and for the last few weeks we’ve been hearing a chirpy cheep chirp chirp sound coming from one of the many weaver nests we have in our tree.  Yes!  Weaver Beaver managed to make some babies – real live ones!  

Two weeks ago Thursday evening when I got home we noticed that Jazzy had found something in the garden and was trying to eat it.  Thinking it was a park town prawn I got Cliff to investigate and this is what he found

 

A dead baby weaver who must have fallen from the tree in a gust of wind before a storm… It was horrible to realise that even in nature parents lose their hard fought for babies.  I wondered what Weaver Beaver and his partner thought when they checked the nest that day.  I wondered if they felt the loss as keenly as a human would have.  I like to think they did.

I’m seriously hoping and praying that all the bird babies going on in our garden means that there’ll soon be one or two human babies going on inside the house…

It seems as if God and nature are telling us that there just might be… roll on 2009.