Fear

I wake up in the morning with a hand gripping my chest.  It feels like it is trying to squeeze the life out of me.  The owner of this hand is fear.  It grips me in the morning, when my defenses are down.  When my determination to keep it at bay is still lost in the place between sleep and awake.

All of the what if's run through my mind.  When will Bob find a job?  Is usually a central theme.  Yet, fears and worries about relationships that the kids and I are trying to develop sometimes pushes it's head into the game.  Mostly, though I worry about Bob.  I worry about the toll this experience is having on our marriage, on his self esteem, on everything.  I am tired of being tired.  We are in this purgatory, where nothing can happen until this one piece of the puzzle is completed.  Once that is completed, the floodgates of possibility will open, decisions about various things can be made.

My mother was sharing with me a story about the time after her first husband died.  She said she would sit in bed and wonder how she was going to raise 2 small kids (ages 4 and 2), by herself.  She was fortunate to have enough money to ponder her options, but the money was not going to last forever, so what sort of work was she going to do?  There she was, in the blink of an eye, her life changed when the policeman came to her house.  She said that she took a deep breathe everyday to shake off first the hand of fear, and then another to get the cobwebs left behind.

Everyday, she looked for one thing that she could be happy about.  In the end, she was alright.  The kids, well they turned out about as well as most kids do, not perfect, but their scars are probably not because of how she handled this situation.  Her message to me, was to not let the fear win.  To keep it out of your life as much as possible.

Besides she told me, if Jerry hadn't died, she wouldn't have gotten me.  You never know what life will bring you.