dear diary ~

I was thrust into the grieving game at a very young age, forced to grieve the loss of a primary caregiver that was very much alive, without regret for having lost me. 

What's long since felt like a gradual, thereby appearing normal acceptance, has begun to sing a new song of late. 

Eye-opening truth reveals itself once you've grieved... The truth is that you'll always grieve, whether it's symptomatic or not. A silly, foolish girl was I. 

I realized that when she dies, and not a moment before, I'll be relieved, but not for the reason you may think. I've long since forgiven her because I know that nothing she did had anything to do with me. 

But two things can be true at once. The second being that I'll finally be able to close the door on the 'what if' mindset I didn't even realize I held until I began this latest chapter of grieving. Grieving the loss of future (specifically to disability and divorce happening together) also revives the losses of my past. Boom. For me, it began with the realization that in a healthy family, I'd be able to reach out to my mother (either parent, in fact) for support, and that although she's very much alive, she's been effectively dead to me for over 40 YEARS! That means in the grand scheme she is an ever shrinking sliver of my life story. 

Reality from my personal perspective means closure doesn't come until she takes her last breath. That means I'm unwittingly trauma linked (until death do us part. Hers or mine) 

I've paid heavily the cost of my own existence since I was born. I lived with half the potential of family, which means so did she. She likely never wondered what she might have missed, but it's all I've ever wondered.