Its not a bowl of cherries......

Life that is. Its not all peaches and cream either. Or sunshine and lolly pops. Or roses.

Sometimes its storm clouds and mud puddles. Sometimes its a bowl of brussel sprouts or creamed spinach (or whatever vegetable you don't like). Sometimes its dead weeds on crusty brown grass. Sometimes it stinks like hot garbage!

There. I said it. Life's not all good and even the eternal optimist is sometimes unhappy.

I'm really enjoying this "digging out" process I've started here. I'm loving peeling back all my layers and getting to the heart of my issues, and why I've become who I have become, and why If forgot who I used to be. And I think the reason is life! Life made me who I am. And sometimes life is not a box of chocolates but rather a mine field, you still never know what you're going to get but the potential for life shattering pain is much greater!

Life is hard!

Since this blog is about brutal honesty in the pursuit of some personal enlightenment and increased self satisfaction, I'll just come right out and say that I can feel myself careening into a darker place right now. Its the time of year. It gets to me. Once I'm done celebrating the birthdays of my three fabulous kiddo's, I'll immediately transition into mourning the struggles and death and subsequent grief of one of those three lovely children. I'll celebrate Everett's birthday, relive the nightmare of his battle to live and the tragedy of his death and the difficulty of having to bury our baby, all in a 20 day span. I won't do this graciously either. Nor do I feel compelled to. I'll do it authentically though. The real deal. I'm going to be mean when I feel angry and I'm going to be sad when I feel the depth of my loss. I'm going to avoid conversation when I can't bear to speak a word about it and I'm going to bawl on the phone to anyone who will listen when I can't bear to not speak about it. I'm going to let stuff slip around the house because honestly, does it really matter when you're thinking about how badly you miss your baby who died before we got to introduce him to the world, or even to his own bedroom? No, it doesn't. I'm going to slack without caring and love my other kids too much. I'm going to over indulge their every whim because they're here with me, with breathing lungs and beating hearts and for those reasons alone they deserve to be spoiled. I'm going to go to bed too early some days and too late on others. I'm going to stay up crying and wake up with fat puffy eyes and then take my kids to lunch the next day with funny looking make up that can't cover those fat puffy eyes. I'm going to call people to talk about these emotions eating away inside of me and get angry when they don't immediately get it and I may just hang up on someone. And I won't feel sorry right away, but I will eventually and I hope they won't take it personally. I'll read my bible and my other books on grief and then I'll pray a little, and I'll thank God for his comfort but I'll still question his decisions, and I won't feel bad about that right away, but I will eventually, and when I come out of this funk I'll concede to His wisdom again, and He'll understand because he knows what I am going through. I'm going to throw myself head first into this whole grief business until I feel like coming out of it, and that's good I think. Its authentic. Its real. And that's what I am all about here right? Getting real and finding the real me in this mess that probably is the real me.

Life's not perfect, sure it has its silver linings, but for each one of those, there's a cloud.

I miss my son.

I miss the life I thought I was going to live right up until we found out he was likely going to die.

I hate that grief and loss and sadness have made me into a person I don't recognize.

But I'm happy that I'm finding myself able to transform myself now, nearly 2 years after I broke into a million pieces, I'm now finally putting them back together.

Katie