Christmas again!

We moved away from Washington state in 2008 to rid ourselves of family and scrutiny. Not saying all our family is ill in their will, but let’s just say most have been less then friendly about Tim and I being …

Letting Go

My daughter just turned nine. She is halfway to society’s vision of the adult age. She is young , vivacious, and still plays with dolls. Not baby dolls, don’t get me wrong here, but Barbie type dolls. Yet as young as she looks, and as young as she acts, she is growing up. My darling little girl is half way to her adult decline.
Watching her grow this past year has been difficult. Where her legs grow longer, her hearing has grown less effective. As her feet grow, her value in my opinion seems to be overshadowed by her own.
All I want for her, as an adult, is to be happy and healthy. I do not care if she ever marries, or has tons of children. I chose that life for me, she doesn’t have too. I hope she chooses a different life then I did. I love my life, but the road I took to end up where I am was hard, and I could have made better decisions.
She has already picked out her wedding dress, planned her wedding, picked her husband main attributes. She has her vision of who he is already. All little girls do this.
My mother married a man prior to the man who raised me. He ended up being more like a dark looming thought more than anything else for me. I rarely saw him, and if I did it was stories of how wonderful he was. All these stories coming from his own mouth, so who can really gauge the merit on that. She ended up divorcing this man when I was too young to know any different life and remarried the man who raised me. I had 15 blissful years with him before he was taken from us.
I followed my mother’s footsteps in a way. I married a man,had a baby,then remarried. My biggest fear is that Ariana will do the same. The fear she will marry a man who becomes sick and leaves her keeps me up at night. I want to tell her to not marry a diabetic, but who am I to tell her who to marry or not? Is that discrimination? To have a fear that my daughter will also marry a man who will leave her and beg she chooses someone I didn’t?
Is that me saying Tim is not an upstanding man? Is that me saying that I have regrets? I don’t have regrets in marrying Tim. I don’t , believe me. The life I
chose to live is not something I would wish on my own child. We ARE happy, we do love each other, he is what I wanted in most senses of a little girls dream. But I do not want my daughter looking into her future and seeing nothing but fleeting possibility.
That being said brings me to the main point. I am letting go. Letting go of what I thought I wanted and comparing who Tim and I are ,to who I wanted us to be.
Today at church I saw a couple during worship ever so slightly holding hands. I know church is where you come to learn about God, and to worship and praise him. The fact that they were worshiping yet touching each other ever so slightly was beautiful. I almost took a picture. Yet I am sure my phone would have made a loud noise and I would have been glared at. The thing is, is I wanted that.
Once upon a time when I was young ,back when my barbies were fighting over who was married to Ken and before they all died of AIDS…..yes I understand how sick that is. It was all over the news and quite honestly my friends and I were odd. Back all those years ago I had dreams of being married so long our picture would end up in the Guinness Book of World Records. I wanted to be so old with my husband that people thought we looked alike.
As a child I would watch couples hold hands and banter back and forth and I imagined my life like that. Now Tim is blind. He doesn’t hold my hand, he holds my arm for guidance. He doesn’t open my door , I open his. I carry the heavy loads because he is busy trying to stay balance due to lack of stability.

We have all seen Titanic and know the real couple that stole the show was the older couple who died holding each other. If you have yet to see the movie, oops spoiler alert,and quite honestly don’t even bother watching it. I wanted to be like that couple. Not in the suicide pact , give up on life and let the ocean suck us under kind of way. In the ” hey we are old and I want to hold you until I die” freak kind of way.
During the Christmas rush this heavy sadness hit me. I saw grandparents shopping for their grandchildren and I know that I will never have that. You may think that my husband getting a transplant will cause him to live normal and forever. It doesn’t. Most transplants like the one my husbands needs last only 5-10 years. That means considering our age he would need four to eight surgeries to get him into his 80’s. That is if we get one today.
I have a confession. Most of my friends are married. No that’s not the confession. I used to be jealous of them. They all have husbands who hold their hands. Why do they get to be seen, or hold hands , or grow old while I wake up to seizures, while I am unseen and used as a guide instead of held like a woman should be? Why do some grow old and some are forced into an early demise? I am letting that go. No more comparing and feeling envious of them. I am letting go the dream of growing old wi my husband. I am not giving up. I am altering my path. I am letting go of the thought of growing old with the father to my children. My husband. If we get the chance to survive this then I will relish it. But as of today, I am not longer held hostage by the stupid little girls dreams of years ago.
This has been a hard process for me. This “letting go”. Who wants to give up on their dreams? Someone who knows even the simple wishes and dreams are ridicules and unable to be achieved. Holding hands, Christmas shopping for the grandchildren, who wants to do that anyway? I did. I won’t be able to. Regardless of the turn out.
What I do have that most do not though is amazing. My husband trusts me enough to let me guide him. Yet I have walked him pelvis first into big rods before. He trusts me anyway. We flow well together,no awkward bumping , we follows my body language and knows how I move when I am approaching a turn or a steep hill. We may not have forever together , but we have now. A lot of people don’t live for now. They live for the future. Someday we will yadda yadda, one day we will blah blah. We get our yadda yadda blahs now. If you know Tim and I , we yadda blah pretty well together. I am letting go of what everyone else seemingly has, and embracing what I do.