Today’s Blog is dedicated to my mother! Friday, we celebrate her heavenly birthday. When I think of all of the magic of my early life, it is her love which enchanted me the most. In my lifetime, I have yet to meet someone like her. I have known some amazing people, but she was definitely a once in a lifetime kind of person. She radiated with love and light. It’s ironic how her choices in how she lived impacted so many people in her thirty-seven years of life. She didn’t come from a happy life. She struggled, but she was someone who was so selfless in her goodness to the world. Her eyes and smile were so inviting and illuminated with light. I am so proud to be her daughter when I think of the legacy she left behind. I wish the world could have met her just once.
My mom loved to write. She worked for Hallmark Cards as a Project Scheduler and my profession ironically is that of a Project Manager. She would bring home the coolest stationary with matching envelopes. I recall her sitting at the kitchen table writing to her loved ones, always trying to stay connected, and sending her very best. When she was diagnosed with her disease at twenty-nine or thirty, she knew her time was limited. She made the most of the time she had and fought the most courageous fight for seven years. Because I was so young through the journey, I am just now learning things about my mom I wish I had known earlier. Growing up without her and even now is extremely difficult. It’s a feeling many who lose parents’ young understand.
As a teenager in the early 90’s, I started to suffer from anxiety, depression, and PSTD. I wasn’t diagnosed until my late teens when I got my own insurance and started going to counseling. I would have anxiety attacks so bad I’d sit over the toilet gaging and anger consumed me. Last year, my dad found a video of mom on a Christian television show and in her testimony, she acknowledged fighting her own battle with depression and even considered taking her own life when she was diagnosed. It brought me to tears to hear that because all of these years I felt like it was me thing. I have often hidden my journey because I was ashamed. I believed that what my mind was telling me was all because of her being sick and dying. Come to find out, it was genetic.
I am so grateful for her foundation of love and encouragement because I have been able to share what I hold onto with the world as well. Anxiety and depression look different for everyone. I am what they call functioning for both. I keep myself busy to avoid my thoughts and feeling or at least until Covid I was able to keep them at bay or at least hidden. There were events in my life that left me paralyzed, in bed, and tuned out from the world but low and behold, I’d show up to work every day like nothing was wrong. During covid being confined and away from people just exuberated my symptoms because I had nowhere to run away from them. I was there at home with my family, my partner, and our four kids, working from home in healthcare, and death was all around us.
My own journey and being transparent has opened up the opportunity for others around me to seek help as well. I hope you continue to shine your light wherever you are. I hope you know that you mean the world to those around you, and they need that magic that only you can bring. I hope you remember you are perfectly made by the creator who loves you for the masterpiece you are, just as you are. I encourage you to take steps in fighting your own demons, one day, one moment at a time. Seek counseling, rehab, take the medication as prescribed, exercise, rest, whatever works for you. Remember, when people mistreat you, it has everything to do with who they are, it is not a reflection of who you are.
In celebration of my Queen, I ask you to dance for her. Her legs were weak at the end. She could not walk or stand on her own. We buried her with shoes on because it’s what she wanted most. She would no longer feel the pain of them being on her feet. November 10th, as in the words of the great Lee Ann Womack, “I Hope You Dance”, for my mom on her special day, for my aunt (her sister) who joined my mom on November 10th, and for anyone you’ve lost, dance!!
All my love!
jenniev
Words with jenniev 