This is the story of a little girl who's slowly finding her own little path in the world.

When I was three my dear mother was diagnosed with  breast cancer, stage 3 in fact. The doctors told my family she'd live 6 months to a year. But, my mother proved them all wrong and lived nine precious more years. Each day,week,month and year was a gift to our family. Never easy and almost always terrifying, not knowing that perhaps this visit or the next to the doctors may be the last. When she passed in November of 2004 my world shattered, I slipped into manic depression, I became a shell of what I was. 

 But, after two years of merely living something in me snapped. As if my brain was giving me a back-handed slap and saying' Did Mom just pity herself? Did Mom just sit and bemoan her existence? No! She lived and worked to see you grow up happy, now get to it young lady!' So with much tears and pulling one's self out of the gutter. I got back on track with my life. I figured out what I wanted to do and got to it. I saw my Father struggling to be a good Dad while working full time and told myself I'd never be his burden. That if anything we would pull equal weight in this mess of life. So I became a little adult, I taught myself to cook,clean, and take care of my Daddy. After all, I may have lost a mother, he lost the love of his life. I learned how to live in a world full of pain and hardship. Always searching for the tarnished silver in need of a little shine and loving. 

 Jumping a head to last year, after long and hard times, my life's become quite amazing. I live in Thailand with my Daddy, we work to help the locals here. Mostly teaching and encouraging those who have gone through tough times. Just last December I took a trip to Indonesia to teach college students how to tackle life. Granted I am younger then most of them, but they still wanted to learn from me. I've been accepted into Le Cordon Bleu culinary school and shall be out living on my own before I'm 18.  I've learned to accept that I will always be a little girl who lost her mother, but I can't let that handicap me. I have to let it be a part of my character and to drive me to be all I can be, to make her proud while she looks down from wherever she is. To make her see that even though I didn't have her to help me along she's still a part of me. Watching my mother live to the fullest while dying before my eyes truly taught me something. She taught me never to take life for granted, but to always find the good in things. To cherish what time is given to you. Not to wait for 'The right moment' because, it may never come. But, to just get up each morning and say ' Today I will make someone else smile and feel loved'


Martha McBride:
www.swimmingfrog.blogspot.com
http://jimmyfund.com/gif/

 I feel things, I love people, I think I’m a decent writer…but when someone experiences a great loss, I’m mute. It’s awful. I let days and then months and then years go by, thinking of the person, framing things I’d like to say, or wish to convey in my head, and do nothing.  It’s really a horrible failing, because to me it means that I’m ignoring people dear to me, when they might need affirmation most. I’m working on it.  Two summers ago, my Aunt Ruth was killed by a falling rock. She had been hiking with friends. She was my Dad’s beloved older sister, and a glamourous intellectual figure in my young Southern Illinois childhood. Like: she had a degree in anthropology and traveled to Taiwan with her husband. Her daughters studied ballet and piano. And my Dad had nothing but glowing stories of her: she introduced him to everything fair and good.

I don’t really know my Uncle Barry, her husband. I think he and my Dad didn’t get along. And my family didn’t go to lots of extended family trips and things like that, so I didn’t see Ruth’s family, or those cousins. Maybe twice in my entire childhood. Barry, maybe once.  Facebook has meant that I am now in touch with my cousins, and that’s wonderful.  But when Ruth died, I had all of these feelings, and desires– I wanted to say something to my Dad, and my Grammy, and perhaps send a note to my two cousins, and Barry.  And I did, said, nothing.  It was overwhelming, to pare down the difference between what I wanted to say, and what ought to be said, and what one writes and sends off into the post…  Terrible.

Last week, I got a congratulatory wedding card, with gift, from Barry.  Mind you: I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to the man– I have one memory of him running on a beach from childhood, and the unfounded sensation that my own Dad didn’t get along with him. That’s all. But I had sent him a wedding invitation because if I didn’t, he’d be the only person in my whole family not to get one. And that just seemed wrong. Also, if Ruth were alive, I’d have of course sent one. So I sent one.

His note was late, and he wrote, “I’m sorry this is late. Your Aunt Ruth would never have let that happen.”

My eyes promptly filled up with tears. What a perfect, sad, and good thing to say.

I wrote him a proper note in the thank you note. I told him how sorry I am that Aunt Ruth is gone, and described what they as a couple (an idea of a smart couple traveling the world) meant to me as a child, and that I had thought of him frequently– and that if he ever came to our city, he should let me know, because I’d like to see him in person.

Anyway. I felt anxious when I mailed the note– flurries of “it’s too much!” and “it’s not enough!” and “why even try to say these things?!” for a full 24 hours.  I eventually told myself, “You had to write something. We’re only human. Better to try and write something clunky, and convey it awkwardly, than ignore these things.”


(Contributed by Stephanie, from an original post at: www.girldogtorch.wordpress.com)