young widowhood

It’s a Martyr Thing


It’s a bit past eight in the morning. Katy is still sleeping and I have the house to myself. If you have been following my in-law saga – now in it’s sixth day – you will remember that my sister-in-law and her teens are stranded here due to a car breakdown on New Year’s Eve day. Well, it’s a martyr thing. Last evening sis-in-law emerged from meek pity-seeking mode to reveal a more action oriented one. With it came a bit of snarkiness and the ridiculous idea that the best way for the car situation and her “imposing” issues to be solved would be to go into town with Rob this morning and have him drop her off. She and the teens (yes, she dragged them along) will spend the day on foot trying to find someone to fix their vehicle. And okay, it’s not a big town by any stretch of the imagination. You could probably walk from one end to the other in 30 minutes at a good clip. Crossing the highway to the shopping area isn’t too dangerous either. But the repair shops are not near each other and it would have been easier to have Rob drop of the keys at the OK Tire he originally towed the car to and had the owner call sis-in-law with a prognosis and estimate. Providing that he could get to it today. It’s the day after a holiday and Canadians are very serious about their holidays and time off in general. Add to that the rather severe worker shortage – skilled workers especially – and all I can envision is sis-in-law walking the length and breath of the Fort today with two recalcitrant children in tow and being basically told to come back tomorrow (or god forbid Friday). Did I mention that the sun is barely up here and it’s well below 0 celsius? With wind too.

The thing is that I have seen this. When sympathy doesn’t arrive and it becomes apparent that people expect you to do something more pro-active on your own behalf than simply bemoan your fate and play the widow card, half-baked plans like this are the result. Win. lose or draw, when they arrive back here later today they all will be cloaked heavily in the grievous air of martyr-hood, having been “forced” to spend the day tramping about on foot like poor relations because I didn’t want to spend my day playing taxi-cab. And this is what irritates me most of all. I will look like the bad person and in every re-telling of the tale, I will come out worse and worse.

I have been here before with Will’s mother. I was telling Rob last night, after I retreated to our bedroom to read and try to find Zen somewhere, that this whole affair was reminding me too much of the last month Will was in hospice two years ago. His mother had everyone tip-toeing around and letting her have her way in all things because of the sorry state of her life and overall appearance. Even I was expected to give precedence to her and it rankled. Still does. When I had eaten past my fill of being denied time alone with my husband, I asked that she not be around when I visited which only intensified the martyr act. Poor mother-in-law to have such a cruel and heartless woman for a daughter-in-law and she would being her litany of complaints against me never once hinting at the fact that our poor relationship might have been her doing. Rob reminded me that this is my house and I needn’t make myself scarce or stay out of his sister’s way to keep peace, but I reminded him that my being the wife of the dying man hadn’t made a difference two years ago either.

I have worked with kids in at-risk programs several times over the course of my teaching career. When you do this you end up doing a fair amount of counseling and my counselor friends were always telling me I should consider looking into the career full-time because I was good at it. I always shrugged the suggestions off because I am too problem-solving oriented and have only a limited amount of sympathy/empathy for those who refuse to see logic or help themselves even the tiniest bit. That, is what they told, is what made me good. Counseling is not consoling. It’s about helping people help themselves to the best of their ability. It’s not about aiding and abetting self-defeatism or feeding someone’s need to play the role of the cursed or downtrodden. I used to get in trouble on the widow board for doing the same thing. Offering solutions (and occasionally a kick in the pants) instead of tea and pity. I understand that someone fresh to a bad situation needs special consideration, but my mother-in-law was twenty some years into her widowed pity party and Rob’s sister is going on eight years herself. I don’t buy into the idea that grieving is the be-all end-all and should take as long as it takes. Both these women had/have children who they dragged/are dragging down with them. And they are not dumb. Or helpless -they just prefer that because playing the poor me thing will sucker enough people to keep them from having to do something themselves.

I might be pleasantly surprised by what walks in the door later today but the realist in me thinks I am closer to the mark with my original prediction. Let’s just hope in the meantime that the car is fixable and some mechanic has time for it today.

Ghosts of Christmas Past


My widowed sister-in-law is here for the week with her two teenagers and we have had a couple of lengthy conversations about widowhood. Two themes emerged in respect to myself. First of all there is the ever annoying comments on my inner strength and determination which render me “amazing” and which I will never really understand I’m afraid. I am not special or amazing though I will concede on strong with the caveat that I see it as my dislike of giving in – I am a more stubborn person than anything else. Then there came the observation that my grief critics are critical because of this tough persona I have. This came during a point in the discussion this morning when I was talking about Will’s mother, extended family and friends. I conceded the point because I had to. It’s completely true that I do not like to admit total strangers into my emotional circle. And I don’t consider blogging to be a portal either. I have friends and good ones who read this blog and comment – some more than others, but the majority of people who read (and it’s not a sizable audience) do so without much interest in me as a person and without commenting. I read few blogs where I don’t comment at least occasionally, even if I don’t a warm and fuzzy relationship with the writer but I have come to regard other people’s lives and struggles as merely different from my own and not a direct reflection on who they are as people necessarily.

But getting back to ghosts. I find that each time I talk/write about my struggles and the residual baggage (as my sister-in-law terms it) that I feel like I have unloaded some and walked away from it. In some respects this as dangerous as leaving bags unattended in a airport because you don’t know who will find it and what the reaction will be or if you have left something of importance behind.

I have been thinking for a while now that perhaps it is time to walk away from blogging. I keep at it because I like writing but don’t know if this is the most productive use of my time and because it is a way for friends to keep up with my life and I have been horrid in the past for keeping in touch, so blogging you might say is my lazy answer to that. Still, it is stealing time away from real writing that needs to be done, and when I say “needs”, I mean I have a stories in my head screaming to be written. It’s funny how conversations can trigger all sorts of seemingly random reactions but this wasn’t isn’t that random at all. This blog, though it is mainly about my journey of the past nine months has me tied a bit to tightly to events that preceded it and it’s time to move farther away. Blogging is not a forward moving thing for me anymore.

Us


This time last year I had known Rob for about ten days. He introduced himself to me via a PM (private message) on the YWBB (young widows bulletin board) in response to my response to one of his posts. He had posted about his daughter, Jordan, commenting on his teenage like behavior and I had replied, jokingly offering to be his evil twin as we seemed to share many of the same behaviors. His reply message to me was entitled, Hey there Evil Twin. Our hailing each other as twins proved more prescient than either of us could have known at the time. He offered an ear via email despite the fact that he’d recently had a bad experience with another person on the board. Someone who had contacted him, and he misunderstood the true intent behind this woman’s reaching out to him. Despite that he reached out in friendship to me anyway. He had been reading my posts, sensing that we had much in common and also they occasionally made him laugh.

We began writing to each other off the board on December 18th which was just short of a week later. We nearly stopped communicating a few days after that when he told me I reminded him of a character from the Chuck Palahniuk novel, Fight Club, and I googled the character only to discover she was a support group junkie and a nymphomaniac. I was more than taken aback, and he was profusely apologetic, and persistent, and we continued writing. Now Rob tells me that his initial impression of me, based on my posting on the YWBB, was way off, but I have since watched Fight Club and I can see why I reminded him of Marla Singer. He remarked the other day that “last time this year I was on the verge of fucking things up” and I had nearly forgotten all about it. Later that evening I went back and reread the letters from that week and the week of January 1st. I was at a low point then, and I remember how much I looked forward to hearing from him, reading his emails. They weren’t necessarily grief-related, and they certainly weren’t romantic or even leading to that way. They were just the kind of emails you would send to and receive from a new friend. Full of information about daily goings on and sharing interests and interesting things. They are long letters. I have plans to print them out someday and bind them for posterity – whoever that might end up being.

A year ago tonight, Rob was in Vancouver with the girls and Katy and I were just getting back home from Christmas Eve dinner with friends who are like family. Tonight, I cooked a Chinese feast and we were all together. I don’t think I could have imagined this back then. Even though I knew I would someday meet someone and know love and marriage again, and even though I thought I would be lucky to find someone just like my new friend, Rob, I don’t think I was quite ready to imagine it was Rob. Or he me. But we were closer than we knew.

Merry Christmas to all my friends out there.