Update.

 America,

It's been two months since America sent my favorite human being away. I don't think I would say I'm doing well. Times like these do not allow for wellness. One does not feel "well" when embarking on a marathon. Instead, the mind shifts to survival, endurance, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other... It's a constant fight to feel anything at all. There is so much pretending when one's husband is away. Our children need me to be "me." My husband needs me to keep everything running smoothly. My friends and family need me to fill the roles they've grown accustomed to. So I smile, I make a joke, I listen, I pretend. No one really wants to hear about the heartache, and even if they did, I don't know that I could muster up the energy or the confidence to define it. 

I am not disintegrating, but in every single moment of my day there is a hollowness that can not be erased or shared. There is no person on this earth who can help me process like he can. No one who understands what it's like to be in my head and my heart. There is no one who grasps the complicated set of feelings that I share regarding our daughter becoming an adult, our son's blindness and epilepsy, my own health issues, our other childrens' needs, our grief, our losses, our successes. He has seen me curled up in the fetal position screaming at God that HE CAN NOT TAKE THIS CHILD AWAY FROM ME and shutting down as my son lost his mind hours after my father died because of medication. He has seen me skinny and morbidly obese and every variation in between. He has held my hand while I cried and cried and he knows without any need for explanation that Mass is my safe place. Except he is also my safe place...

America, I miss him. I hope you understand that there are real families aching and sobbing this Father's Day away. I hope you grasp, when you read or talk about Ukraine or Russia or Europe, or anything war at all, that there is a real human being, with a real spouse, real children, real parents, on the other end of the grand statements of what we need to do. I hope you measure the cost and are willing for it to be you, your spouse, your child, your actual self. I don't pretend to know any answers, and I would not be so presumptive to think my voice holds any relevance on the subject of necessary (or unnecessary wars), I just ask for you to reflect on the ache, the cost, the hardship. It is more difficult than words could ever say. It hurts more than I could ever begin to describe to you. This year I will have celebrated our eighteenth anniversary, my fortieth birthday, our daughter's eighteenth birthday, our triplets' sixteenth birthdays, sicknesses, dog illnesses, major life transitions, all without him. That sucks.

Everything has a cost. Some days paying it really freaking sucks.