Getting started...again.

I once read a quote that stated "having children is like having your heart go walking around outside your body".  I was pregnant with my second child when I read that and it said everything I had ever felt as a mother.  Every day, the push and pull of motherhood - the sheer joy at watching them engrossed in an activity and the aching you feel when they hold back tears and look to you to save them, and you can't.

This last year has been a difficult one but it has also been one to bring us all closer together in ways I would not have expected.  My husband, and the children's father, suffered a massive heart attack at the age of forty-seven.  It is still difficult to write about but we thought we had lost him and we were fortunate enough to have him with us today, loving us and annoying us in turn - but alive.  And we know it was no miracle from god, but the earnest hard work of several paramedics and a whole lot of doctors and ICU nurses.

In the days leading up to the heart attack, I sensed something going wrong - but I never would have dreamed it could happen to him.  He looked fit and tanned and healthy - but his heart is a soft one, just like mine; and it was straining under the pressure of years of undiagnosed depression and the heart-ache that brings.  I knew he wasn't 'normal' when I met him - on a stairway in the youth hostel in Denver, Colorado, where I was staying whilst backpacking across America - but I never wanted 'normal'.  Indeed, I still don't know what it is, but I know I don't want it. 

But the children have taken it the hardest.  They always saw the world as safe and warm and full of joy and softness.  How do you explain to an 11 year-old boy that his father might not live another day?  It comes from a place that you would never willingly go and even contemplate.  It comes from that place under a child's bed where they don't want to go in case something is down there.  My 13 year-old daughter went into a running loop of words that were repeated over and over to keep her papa alive.  She fed this perpetual loop with DVDs of "Kath and Kim", "Little Britain" and "Friends"over and over and over, until she was lulled into that other world that is so hard to leave once you sink into it.  My boy asked for help and I said I would get it for him - I was amazed at the time that he could have such foresight and courage at that age to know he needed more than I could give him.  On that same night, when I asked him how on earth he had kept himself so together and brave over the awful days and weeks that preceded it, he told his sister and me that, when he felt like breaking down, he pretended he was his favourite super-hero and asked himself, "What would Rorschach do?".

Yes, I am Tofu-Hearted Mother.  It comes at a cost but it's worth it.