A jackalope was used by my eldest child, Jason, as part of his email address. And here I am, four years after he died, looking back at this site I forgot about until now. It’s given me perspective, this elapsed time. I’ve become seriously focused on my mental and physical health. So as not to give the wrong impression, I have in no way, “arrived.” But I have realized I deserve to start the journey.
So what’s the end goal? Being better. Everyone wants that, right? But most don’t pay much attention, just tootling along until they wind-down into a previously purchased hole in the ground.
Who pays attention? Who truly becomes mindful of daily habits, time passing, lessons learned? And then – Who watched the watchman?
I have learned not to let things lie; to try to heal relationships, something I couldn’t do with my son. I didn’t know how.
How many things contributed to this disconnect with a child I so cherished when he was born? I can point to the difficulty of raising a child who was smart, but had a need to seek out, or create from whole cloth, crisis after crisis. Or I can blame being a child raising a child. Should I have done the mature thing; given him up for adoption? But the genetic factor was there. I saw it in his father, as well as other relatives. I sometimes wonder if this potential adoptive family would have had the same problems as I had. Would they agonize over their parental mistakes, blaming themselves for something that was twined within Jason’s DNA? Would he have been an eternal source of frustration an guilt? Or would a better environment allowed him to focus on his positive attributes, and become someone a mother would be proud of? Either way, the brain hemorrhage would most likely have happened,
He had begun to settle down to some extent. he rented a beautiful house in the Virginia woods with this girlfriend and had a good job working for a security company. I wish I had called more, but keeping him at a distance had become a habit. He was not a good influence during the times he stayed with us, and I wanted to protect my other children. but then, calling him when he was across the country owuld not have injured them in any way. I will always feel guilty about that.
I have worked very hard to become more of myself; to trust myself, to stand up for myself, and to make myself accountable. I think I’ve made some progress. Here’s an excerpt from four years agao, unchanged.
I am worn out from life. I will try to write with some regularity, but this post has taken over a week to finish and I haven’t even said anything. But this is the month my son died, and I don’t have the energy to fight this depression right now.