Somehow, it’s July. I don’t exactly know what happened to the month of June…except that it rained a lot, and I got my son’s neuropsychology report back, and we made it through the last week of school and the first weeks of camp, and probably a whole bunch of other things. When I look back over the blog posts that I wrote in April and May, I’m disappointed that I didn’t find time last month to process in writing…but alas, here we are. June happened, and it was a blur.

What I remember most about the month of June was that it felt full of big decisions, or at least full of potential big decisions, and the weight of having no one else with whom to process those decisions felt particularly heavy. It’s a load that I just wasn’t prepared for. It’s one thing to be lonely — losing one’s partner / friend / confidant, and also losing out on basically all of the spare time to be able to maintain friendships (much less pursue anything remotely like a romantic relationship). But it’s something completely different, it seems, to be going through life trying to take care of one’s self and one’s kiddos and realize that there just isn’t anyone on the planet who shares the emotional burden of it all. I’m almost a year into not having such a partner, and it’s shocking how often I catch myself talking about “we” — as though there really is someone with whom I’m walking through life with.

News flash: there isn’t. As a case in point, the aforementioned neuropsychology report summed it up pretty well: “Although invited to participate in the evaluation process by [me], no input was received by [my son’s] father as of the writing of this report.” Sigh.

That’s really the best I can do — to sigh. I think there’s part of me that wants to scream, or to sob, or at least to cry. But there are always just so many things to tackle that I just haven’t found the time or emotional space to feel much of anything, except, I guess, exhaustion. When you take depression and add a heaping serving of thankless life-chaos, it makes for an exceptionally numb existence.

Thankfully, every so often my kiddos leave me written mementos of the goings-on in our life. So while I didn’t find the time to write about them in real time, I’ll save the little treasures here for posterity. And then maybe, someday, I’ll have the time to have all of the feelings about these moments and the precious kiddos that ARE walking through life with me.

Image one: a letter from my daughter. She penned it a couple of weeks before she found the courage to give it to me.

Image two: a contrasting letter from my son. The full story is better saved for a longer post, but the gist is that he was feeling all of the feels after I’d imposed a consequence of “no screens” for 24 hours. He told me later that he’d written this letter instead of breaking my glasses, so I suppose that’s a win.

So there you have it. I made it through the month of June. It was an uncharacteristically busy month, one in which I barely had time to process my feelings…much less write about them. Thankfully my kiddos captured two of the biggest moments with writing of their own…and when life slows down, those writings will be here for me to look back on and feel the feels right along with them.

#onward