That doesn’t sound so bad I guess. It seems more like 4am tho.
It’s been a long few weeks yet our anniversary is still to come
I have a draft post that I started writing a few weeks ago which discusses explaining death to a 3 year old. My little girl is really struggling right now. And then tonight she woke up with a really bad cough, spit up a few times, and now you can hear that her breathing is labored. I’m laying on the floor in her bedroom right now, trying not to wake her. She’s tossing around a bit. I’m just hoping she can sleep through the night.
Things started to get tough for her a few weeks back; just before Cari’s birthday. I think things peeked on the day of her birthday. She seemed to think that Cari was going to come back. For some reason there was lot of talk, around her, about doing something for Mommy’s birthday (bad idea … but it wasn’t me doing the talking). The idea of celebrating her birthday, we did dinner w/friends, probably seemed to her like this is something we are doing for Mommy because Mommy is coming back. Coming back from Heaven, right? Heaven is that place up in the sky, isn’t it? To a 3 year old is that any different than the neighborhood a few blocks down or the next state over??? They don’t know any better.
Perhaps part of this is on me; the way we describe things to her. We always talked about Heaven. I believe she understands death now (this is recent) but it was never associated to Mommy. After her birthday and after numerous questions I used the word died. Her jaw dropped. Unfortunately (which is hardly the word to describe this) she never before made the association and now we are trying to pick up the pieces of what this 3 year old understands about why someone so important to her left her and won’t be coming back.
The biggest issue we face in this little 3 year old’s mind is the thought that everyone else in her life is going to leave her. As much as you try to reinforce the fact that no one is going to leave her (maybe not in those specific terms), someone is eventually going to leave her. How the F@#$ am I going to deal with that.
I think about that issue frequently. And now that she’s aware and struggling with the topic I just don’t know how we would deal with anything else. Day to day stuff is tough enough; preschool, gymnastics, friends, grandma’s, daddy’s, what to eat, what to wear, going potty, brushing our teeth … everything is a little more complicated
Why should they have been put in this situation? Why did a walk with their Mommy on a warm May day turn their little worlds completely upside down … never to be the same again. It is just not fair.