52

I had the strangest thing happen a few days ago. I was talking with one of my co-workers about birthdays. I have no idea why this came up but I said that I would be 53 in July. I wasn't upset about it at all, I told her that was because ever since my last birthday I had been saying - "I'm going to be 53". So this next year it will be like I'm still 53! We laughed because somehow I just jumped from 51 to 53! 52 never existed.
Later that afternoon when I was home and working out in the yard, I got to thinking about it again. I mean why would a person do that? Why jump a whole year? Then suddenly it hit me. Hit me hard, like someone slapping me in the face. My Mother died less than a month after she turned 52.
I have this problem (?) where I can't remember a lot of my younger childhood years. I was fourteen when she died and my sister was ten. Yet my sister can remember more. She says that I have selective memory or that I just choose to block out most of it. Maybe it's like that lyric in that song "memories that are too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget".
So, I went inside and started writing everything that I could remember on my blog. I thought maybe if I just "put it all out there" just expose it and THINK about it...maybe it would help. But I just couldn't hit the "publish" button. It's still there. lurking, waiting to be edited. But....how much should I put out there? out HERE? It's something I just never talk about. Something I WASN'T supposed to talk about.
So, I called up my sister and I start telling here this birthday story and before I can finish, she interrupts and says "MOM". That pretty much did it. I just burst into tears.
What is it that I can't remember? I remember all the CRAP that my father did later but...
OK. So, she thinks I should go to a hypnotist and see if that would help. She thinks I NEED to remember. She thinks that whatever the problem is, it has been holding me back.  She thinks it's the root of many things.
One of those being my lack of faith in myself. To be able to be all that I can be. She went on to say that she didn't think I would able to BE an artist because I don't believe it myself. She thinks it's the answer behind my emotional eating, my financial woes and my complete inability not to worry about EVERYTHING.
Well, those are my words, not hers. She was much kinder. Which made me cry more because obviously this is something she's given a lot of thought.
The next day I went to this great flower nursery with her and my eldest niece. It was a little road trip and nice to get away, and talk....
My niece had been living in Chicago and just moved back. She had been volunteering at this New Age type Clinic where they practice energy healing, raiki, aromatherapy, among other things. She felt there were many different ways to go about remembering things. She was talking about books when my sister reminded me of a book she had given me years ago called "Motherless Daughters" by Hope Edelman. She had read the book and felt like it helped her with the loss but when she gave it to me, I had to struggle to just get through the foreword. I was sobbing so bad that I couldn't breathe. I never tried to read it again, it was too painful. Just for a moment I thought about my Mom's hands and how her nails looked. Kind of a strange thing to think about and even stranger to make me cry so.
WHOA! I'm just spilling this out, now I'm not sure that I can post this one. And I'm not even going into the stuff I can recall, like I did in my other "post" attempt... It's just that I have read some other posts by some of my blogger friends and they are not afraid to share and maybe someone out there has experienced something sort of similar.
Today  at work I looked up that book on Amazon, they had a feature where you can view some pages. I read a tiny bit of it again. I could feel my throat closing up. But maybe if I forced myself to think about it. Maybe one memory will lead to another. Maybe I need to do this. There was a paragraph about how sometimes you can just go along fine and then it all the grief comes soaring back to you. How it can be years later. How sometimes something just sparks it. Like a graduation or an event or when your birthday comes and you're the age your mother was...
I plan on ordering that book. The library probably doesn't want me sobbing all over their copy.
So there ya go, my guts are spilled everywhere.
Here are some pics of that nursery.