I took my kids to Paradise this weekend, with their bestest mate Princess Boofhead and her mum.
They ran themselves ragged at the beach. Ate ice cream and drank lemonade and played at the park and argued and fought and had the most awesome time. I think you only have fun like that as a kid, really. You spend your adult life smiling on at it, or, if you happen to have kids of your own, facilitating it.
And I took photos and slept and relaxed and slept more. And I missed my husband with this big, aching chasm of grief that I've been unable to shake for weeks now. I don't know... but the the last month I almost miss him as much as I did the first month. (And I tell myself that, knowing it can't possibly be true...)
I find myself talking about him more and more, reminiscing over what we did and how we did. And I find myself confronted more and more with big gaps in things I should know. Things I used to know. Little things. The things that make up life (We drive past a bush walking spot on our way to Paradise, and I say to Chop “We went there, your Daddy and I, before I was even pregnant with you. And we saw.. I think... I can't remember. Was it a wombat, or an echidna...?” And I still don't know, of course, because there is no Tony here for me to ask.)
Maybe– probably– I'm missing him because the festive season– our festive season, all our birthdays and Christmas rolled into a few short mmonths– has officially already begun.
I'll be thirty one years old this week.
Or maybe it's not that. I always prefer to think poetically, it seems to make life prettier... maybe it's to be blamed on all these holes that seem to forming where memories of him used to be. They have to be filled with something. So it's layers of tears, a swath of deep blue. All the pain of wishing he were here funneling into them to fill their empty space.