Life's About Changing, Nothing Ever Stays the Same

Okay, so you caught me.  Not all these songs just HAPPEN to come on the radio. Sometimes it is the Ipod of my life.  Every once in a while I purposefully want to go back.  I want to remember the times, good or bad... Happy or sad.

So I flick on How Can I Help You Say Goodbye by Patty Loveless.  Not all of the changes in your life are a matter of choice.  Sometimes it is a matter of circumstance.  Lines of this song happened to me, just a bit out of order.

I was a Navy brat.  I remember a hard move that we made when I was nine.  I remember waving to my friend until I couldn't see her and crying to my mom wondering why we had to move.  Her words weren't the same but the sentiment was.  It's okay to hurt and it's okay to cry.  I clung to my mom; I needed her.  She was the constant in my life.

That was a great thing while she was there but the second biggest life changing circumstance happened when I was sixteen years old and found out that my mom had ovarian cancer.  We lost her eighteen painful months later.

Dealing with her illness changed the person I was.  It pushed me over an edge I wasn't sure I would ever recover from.  Not long after her death, my son's birth father left me.  Just to add insult to injury he left me and our son for a woman with a baby that was six months younger than our boy.

The lyrics of the song are right, time does ease your pain.  Life is about changing and nothing ever stays the same.  It's just really hard to say goodbye.  Time has eased the pain but not erased it.  So much time has passed since her death that I have actually lived longer without her than I had with her.

The harder part of that is that there are very few people that know me and also knew her.  There are also so many things that she missed.  She never saw me graduate from high school or college.  She never met my husband.  She never got to hold my daughters.

I frequently wonder what life would have been like with her still in it.  I seriously doubt that I would be living in Jacksonville.  No, I was a Momma's girl, I wouldn't have moved that far away from home.  I think about what it would be like for my kids to have had her as a grandmother.  I ponder what kind of mother I would have become with her guidance.

The other losses in my life I have somewhat overcome.  I don't know if her death still affects me so much because it was the first significant death in my life (not even the family dog had died before that) or if it was because she was my mom.  Perhaps it was that I lost her so young; only being seventeen.  Maybe it's all of the above.

Listening to this song makes me cry.  I don't often indulge in recalling this memory.  It brings her back only to let her go again.

I will have to flip through the Ipod some more.  I need to find a better song... Something with happier memories.  It is good to remember, changes make you who you are today.  There are times though, that you need to remember who you once were.