Vacancy

Sorry it has been awhile since you have heard from me, I have been a bit busy reinventing my life! About every 10 years it feels as if I need to shake things up a bit, mostly because I have never really fully understood who I was or what I was meant to be or do. It is really sad to me how many of us spend lifetimes trying to figure this out. If we could have just known earlier in life, how much more gratifying would life be? OR if we could have been told it doesn’t matter what you want to be right now, it may not be what you want to be some day later down the line and that is OK if it changes. I cannot say that I have not enjoyed every one of my “reinventions of thyself,” but definitely some more than others. If you summarized my life’s inventions in a headline it would look something like this:

Woman manages corporate fitness center, community fitness center, bartends and waits tables, paints houses, paints government ammunition tubes, handles steel fabrication bids, buys a bar and builds amazing pizzas, works on a cruise ship for two weeks, takes pictures for county taxes, orders art supplies and becomes a Life Coach.

That is an awful lot of reinventing but enough about where I have been.

It has been one year and 4 months since my Mom left this earth and while I think about her every single day in some capacity, there are some days more than others. Kristina and I have traveled out of town the past few weekends and with each trip, my heart got heavier and heavier almost to the point that I would describe myself as melancholy. I did my best to enjoy the trips, the visits with friends and family, the sights, but through all of them something was missing and I could not put my finger on it until we arrived home from our last trip. In the past, whenever we would go on these adventures of ours, my Mom would require I let her know when we were leaving, she would check in at least multiple times of the day, “where are you now, what are you doing, who are you with, where are you staying…” and she would insist I let her know when we were coming home and when we got home. Not in town. Home. “Do not text me that you made it to town, text me when you are in your house.” I realized that I was no longer doing that. That there was no one out there who cared about any of these things the way she cared about them. There was no one on this planet who cared like that. And it made me wholly and completely sad to my core. And I find myself, when I am in a place that she loved, feeling about as sad as a human can feel and it should be the opposite. I should be remembering the moments and finding joy in them. We recently went to Galena, IL, one of Kristina and I’s favorite places on the planet, and all I could think about was her. The times we have taken her, where she liked to eat, how she would have spent hours in one store and been upset when it was time to leave stating she had only been able to go to one store. This is not the first time this has happened. Me being in a place she loved and not getting that memory out of my brain long enough to enjoy the moment. I know it requires work. To remind yourself to be happy in the moments that may make you sad. Its hard work. I just know that when I am going somewhere, when I arrive somewhere, and when I leave somewhere, it is no longer the same for me. There is a vacancy in my life that cannot be filled by another person. For the record my Sister likes to have my itinerary and to know when I get home, but God love her (and she already knows this) it is not the same. It will never be the same.

We currently have a teenager and two young adults who get wildly annoyed that we like to know their comings and goings and I want so desperately to tell them to cherish this, to appreciate that someone is that vested in their lives because someday that someone will be gone and you will be left with nothing but a vacancy.