Grief is still weird.

I wake up most mornings and want to write, but it’s hard to motivate myself because there’s no subscription system for this blog yet and so no one will know I’ve updated and so it sometimes feels like writing into the void which I don’t mind at all…but it’s just not motivating because no one will know that I’ve done it and so I can put it off a little longer. I can’t add a subscription system here until I’ve moved everything over from substack which I’ve also had ZERO motivation for doing. So, I’m going to try to force myself to do that this week. I’m going to write here every morning and ALSO, every morning, bring at least one entry over from substack.

Let’s see if I actually do it.

I’ve been wanting to talk to my Dad so much lately. Probably since Mom died, really. My Mom and I were not close like my Dad and I, obviously, he raised me. There’s a closeness to that you can’t replicate. But I still was able to kinda generically update her on my life in the way all parents expect and without her, it’s like his absence is spotlighted again.

I really want to talk to him about what it’s like teaching Nikki to drive because he and I clashed horribly during the learn-to-drive years. I didn’t even really teach E because it was too difficult with my own driving anxieties but that was okay because he was in Driver’s Ed and his Dad took him driving every other weekend. But with Nikki it is me, or no one. So I’ve had to face my anxieties and OH MY GOD IT HAS BEEN SO DIFFICULT. And I just want to talk to him about that.

I also want to talk to him about how he handled us having friends who could take them to do cool things that we never did as a family. My kids had their first river/boat day (we live on the TN river, lots of people spend their weekends on the river) recently and I hated I didn’t get to be part of if. And Wes is going to the beach with a friend at Fall Break so he’ll see the ocean for the first time in his memory with someone else’s family. It feels so weird to miss out on those things but I did both of those things with friends too, growing up. So I wonder if Dad felt weird missing out on those experiences too.

Honestly, I’d like to talk to him in general about how he handled seeing our friend’s families/lives and how different they were from ours. Did he feel the guilt pangs I sometimes feel? And then did he feel guilty for feeling guilty? Or is that a special skill I’ve developed on my own?

I don’t know. I’ve cried a lot recently, really missing him. And then I’m glad I don’t believe in an afterlife because I would feel really guilty if Mom just saw me sobbing over missing Dad instead of her.

This week’s Ted Lasso did not help my grief train slow down at all either, by the way. Although I do think the writers on that show do some pretty amazing things with demonstrating human emotions in such honest ways and so while I cried the entire length of the episode, I still was in awe of it as well.

So, yeah. 12 years later and I’m missing Dad again like he died yesterday. Grief sucks so hard.