Little Bit of This Little Bit of That

Life. It's like a recipe isn't it? It's made up of so many things that when added together, give you the life you have made and created for yourself. For me, it's this..

• one part marriage-My marriage. It has shaped me and given me strength and different sense of myself-I still know who I am on an individual level but I also innately understand who I am with him
• two parts death-the death of my second son, it too shaped me but in a different way
• one part lessons from death-what that life and subsequent death taught me. Kindness to some degree and a quiet knowledge about what may lie ahead. The stuff I never used to think about I now think about all the time.
• one part career success-this too has shaped me in hundreds of ways. More ways than I can say. Loosely I can say that I have grown so much since 1997. When I think back to that young so young girl who started as a leasing consultant and how fast I grew and thrived it amazes me I am who I am today. I learned how to treat people. Learned how to say hard things in kind ways. Learned that sometimes in life, people don't appreciate, don't care and no matter how kind you try to be, it just doesn't matter. Learned that for those people, what goes around comes around. Learned that the good news is most people are NOT like that and it's those people who make me keep coming back for more.

You know it's funny how you come to certain things. I guess your life is exactly what you make of it. Exactly how you allow others to treat you (or not treat you). It takes a lot. It takes a lot to stand up for yourself and demand respect yet kindly be tolerant of others different opinions and thoughts. I have a lot to learn in this endeavor but I know it and I daily try to improve in a genuiune way. When I realize how I've changed and look backwards at the person I used to be it's like an image of an old friend. Then I look at my life now and who I am, who I have become and it's like a warm blanket because I know that Lucas' death changed me in ways I cannot explain (and ways I can) but in changing because of his loss I realize that to step back and look at all of it I couldn't be who I am without any of those parts of the recipe of my life. Things that changed me. Molded me. Watching my biological father die certainly put a marker on my life. Not that I was by his bedside, but we visited my dad, to introduce him to the Oldest when the Oldest was the only one and I was pregnant with Lucas. And what I learned watching him struggle, pretending he wasn't smoking when he was as we knew he was so sick and probably dying, I learned that people will do what they will do. As much as it can break one's heart, you have to let them do it. Even when they are being detrimental to their own selves, even when you know with all you are that they have to stop or they will die you have to let it happen. It's life.

It used to be when I thought of dying, I'd cry. It scared me. Everything about it. But when Lucas died, I immediately felt unafraid. And then even THAT scared me. Did THAT new feeling mean I didn't care about the ones I had here or myself? I have come to learn that no, it does not mean that. I now understand that in life, in learning the true meaning of life, you realize that death is a part of that life, the ending part but a part. It takes a little bit of this and a little bit of that, one part this and two parts that which sums up our whole. What we learn in this life and what we allow ourselves to become is a result of those parts. Our very own recipe.

I don't know. Life is so precious. It is....you know? But maybe our faith now and how we live now determines the peace and calm that probably comes later. Fifteen years ago, ten years ago, even maybe five years ago, I would not have been able to write that statement much less think it. I see now I have come a long way. This doesn't mean I don't still have my rants and raves, mostly internal now with God and that Doctor who operated on him and the huge injustice of it all. Sure, maybe that's natural. The rest has been a slow progression. A slow progression of me, a mom, a wife, a sister, a 'boss'....not the perfect recipe of a human being, slightly off, maybe not totally baked yet, but maybe halfway there. More ingredients I'm sure to come, more things to learn. More times to realize I'm wrong when I think I'm right...but thanks to Lucas I have become a better person. I know now that I owe him so much and that one day, one great day, I'll be able to tell him that as I cradle him in my arms.

---J