I wonder if anyone missed me

Saturday May 23, I haven't written in ten days.

I am in a different place.

I've been at my computer desk since the beginning of this year...blogging rather than journaling

But a long long time ago...last summer...every morning I would be here, on the front porch swing...journaling, reading, praying, drinking coffee...

I wondered how I could be in my favorite spot all summer and still blog without purchasing a laptop?!?! but alas the boys are home from college with theirs and they 'usually' sleep in every morning, unless they work.

So here I am with a password, and my coffee, exactly where I want to be.

Exactly

I couldn't have said that a week/ten days ago.

I didn't even realize that I'd gone, let alone where I'd gone.

It comes on gradually, little questions in my mind, little disconnects, and writing about it after the fact doesn't seem genuine. Because I'm not in that same place anymore, I'm seeing differently. It's like posing or recreating photograph.

Yet I know I cannot just pick up and begin anew without putting this week to journal.

It's been a perfect week...the weather's been perfect...in the 60's, clear and blue, and if it never got any warmer this summer I would be perfectly happy!

But when I woke Monday and went in to work at the hospital, I knew it was going to be a different day than any other Monday that I've gone in. I went into my supervisors office, a kind and wise gentle man, and when he asked how I was I began to cry. We sat and I talked.

I had shared at the supervisory meeting how my visits had lost that bit of a glow that everyone else was experiencing. No one really responded.

So I assumed it was just me who wasn't equipped for this work. And the feeling of inadequacy lingered...why am I having such difficulty?

I'd get little glimpses of answers...I've shared them here...

But he told me that he too has felt the same way; 'the bloom has fallen from the flower' or some such silly saying?!??!

He said when I shared initially, he heard me expressing a sense of maturity... a realization that comes. This work is difficult, it is continuous, it is never solved, and never stops... it is rewarding yes... and that is one reason we feel the need to continue in it, but the high does fade away. It's hard to walk into a room and have no idea what you are going to confront.

death, fear, faith, suicide, strength, faith, hope, love...

Will you walk away blessed or devastated.

He told me he felt I was one of his stronger ministers and basically affirmed me! And so I continued on...

I told him that not only did I not feel strong but that I was feeling some of my old feelings of 'not being good enough'...

and then out tumbled what I was really feeling, guilt for caring for my 'care-receivers' and not taking better care of my very own husband.

I told him about my friend who is in mourning the loss of her husband...how lonely she is... how she stood in his closet to smell his clothes and cried.

I told him the story of my husband and I over the past two years (a condensed version!?)

How his depression has effected him and our marriage.

Our security and safety, provision and protection.

How it's effected how much I talk and how much I feel I can share...

I told him how guitly I felt for having a perfectly good and kind and loving, functioning husband right here, still, beside me, next to me and I act as if he were totally gone... just because things are 'different'.

He told me a similar story of he and his wife.

And it was yet another validation.

'I'm okay'.

I knew when I came home and told my husband how my day was and that I had talked to my supervisor he would respect that I needed and wanted and actually sought out someone to talk to. He knew something was going on and had been asking 'what's wrong?' and 'do you want to talk?' And I gave him genuine little snippets of the whole...all that I had... but I didn't really know all that was going on and how it all was interrelated until that little talk therapy session that morning.

All he said was that he was sad that I cried with someone else.

And so we talked and I cried some more and we are together again, different as we always will be, and have been..but the same...us

I am in a different place.