It's a terrible photo I know, but you can see how widespread the storm is.  It's supposed to snow all day and into the night.  I wanted to go visit a friend in Saskatoon but that got put on hold.  I'm too old to brave snow covered highways anymore.  It never used to bother me, but I was young then, and ignorance is bliss.

Jack has recovered from his illness and is back to school.  He'll be visiting with his other family for a few days over Christmas.  It's nice to have a break for us, and I worry about him while he's there.  I guess that's pretty much life, isn't it?  

I was listening to Zadie Smith on the radio this morning, the author of "White Teeth", a book I've never read but have now put on hold at the library.  She said, that she was paraphrasing Freud and that she wanted her children to have ordinarily sad lives, to have some work that was meaningful, and to have love.  That caught my attention, so I looked up what Freud said, and he did not believe that a life could be lived without ordinary unhappiness.  I would have to say I agree with Freud about this.

Life is full of loss and sadness, intermingled with moments of joy.  I suppose it's how we deal with the losses and enjoy the moments of joy that decides how we live our lives.  

My youngest daughter was born full-term.  She weighed 10lbs 11oz.  Her apgars were fine.  We went home the day after she was born. When she was a week old, the doctor noticed a small cataract in her left eye.  Children shouldn't be born with cataracts, it meant something was wrong.  We were told she might end up blind.  What followed was more than a year of blood tests, CT scans, opthamologist appointments, and pediatrician appointments.  And in the end, all they could tell me was that my beautiful baby girl was retarded.

Katie's diagnosis almost killed me and it certainly killed the dream child I had imagined in my mind and in my heart.  It took me five long years to pull myself out of that deep well of grief that I found myself in and it fundamentally changed me.  It was not an ordinary sadness that I felt, it was a sadness that hurt my soul and turned the world into a dark place.

I discovered that life could hurt me beyond what I thought I could endure.  I turned away from my husband, from my children, and from my family.  I existed and that was all.  There was no joy left for me in the world.  I wanted the pain of that loss to stop and I kept moving in the hope that I could outrun it. The mother that my other children had, before Katie was born, died with the death of my dream child.  The wife my husband had, before Katie was born, also died with the death of my dream child.  There were no funerals but the world changed and I changed.

And now, now I hold back.  I'm not so brave to love as I once was.  I keep people away, at arm's length, even while I appear to be open and unafraid.  I'm not so different from my own father afterall.  I just fake it better.

And this is why I write, because I had no idea that I felt this way until I started writing.  My thoughts are usually jumbled together, knotted up, and writing it out allows me to untangle them and make something of them.  Some people can understand this, and some people can't, but it's how I am and I'm finally starting to understand this.