Hey there! It’s been a while but I’m back! Now that Z is in school I find I have time to process some of the things that have gone on over the last 5ish years. I didn’t realize how much being a solo parent has demanded of me until I’ve had a second to come up for air. I will refer to my situation as solo parenting, parenting without another parent, because it’s different from single parenting. When you lose a spouse you lose a parent and a partner, there is no second voice. No person to tap in. It’s all on you. Of course I’ve had a wonderful support system and I don’t mean I’ve done it all on my own. But the hard decisions, the tantrums, the late nights, the sick days, there is no reprieve. At times I have been envious of divorce situations because with joint custody you get some “me time”. I do know, that I don’t know, that divorce situations also have issues I don’t have to deal with (like differences of options). But we as humans tend to envy what we don’t have and my envy was with having someone to tag in.

Since my last writing, I have remarried. I never thought this was in the cards for me. I was prepared to raise Z on my own and had no desire to actively find a partner. There are certainly perks with being single and alone. I enjoyed not being accountable to another person and deciding how and in what way I spent my time. It took me a while of being in a new partnership to realize the benefits of having another person in my life. One of those main benefits, that I did not account for, was having a father for Z. I am amazing at how much she loves having S as an additional support system. She has learned so much from him, things that I couldn’t offer because honestly I am so damaged. Things like the importance of comfort when you are down or encouragement and excitement when you do something great. I was living in this vanilla space where as long as things weren’t good they also weren’t bad. Like coasting in neutral. I was moving, I didn’t really care how fast I was going or where I was going as long as I was going. It’s hard moving forward and leaving the past behind. Some times movement, even the littlest of movement, needs to be acknowledged.

In my time of processing I’ve realized a lot of things and I hope to be able to express myself adequately. I have gone to therapy over the years and had some really good insight into what has happened in my life and why I think and feel the way I do. I’ve also realized that no one gets through life unscathed. There is no way to go through life without a few bumps and bruises and most of us will experience some major life changing battle wounds. My new train of thought is that it’s important to feel the way we feel. Feelings are good. Good feelings are good but bad feelings are also good. I was raised a “stuffer”. If I felt a feeling well up inside I tended to suppress it. To compound that I am a people pleaser. So instead of getting mad or frustrated I got quiet. I absorbed the grenade instead of letting the blast go off because I feared the repercussions of the blast. For example, when I was a kid I was picked on ruthlessly by my older siblings. I took the teasing and the mockery but instead of getting mad and fighting back I internalized it and assumed I was being made fun of because I deserved the mockery, “They are right, I am dumb.” In addition I didn’t tell my parents because I didn’t want my siblings to get in trouble and further the persecution. I learned to be strong and I prided myself on being resilient to the point of unbreakable…

Until I finally broke.

Let me circle back to the point I’m trying to get at because I’m getting a little off topic. The point is I had learned to not say how I feel and I’m coming to realize that how I feel is valid and it’s not bad to feel the feelings. The truth is my experience with the accident has led me to not trust and I didn’t trust before. I was never a trusting person and I finally met and married a man that taught me it was okay to trust. It took years to build this trust, it didn’t happen overnight but it did get lost overnight. The person I trusted the most betrayed my trust and took from me what I loved the most all in the blink of a moment. Let that sink in…

The person I trusted most

Took what I loved the most

In an instant

It’s taken me a long time to verbally express how I feel. IE I feel betrayed. The truth is a lot of people love R, I love R, and I don’t want to diminish his legacy. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead and I don’t want people to think I don’t have forgiveness in my heart. On the flip side, I also have a right to feel betrayed.

It’s easy to understand betrayal or at least sympathize with a person who has been betrayed in a traditional way, like adultery. It’s wrong. Period. No one deserves to be deceived and have their life script flipped without their consent or knowledge. Betrayal is much harder to understand when it’s demeaned an “accident”. But both types of betrayal are rooted in the same principle: a lapse in judgement…traditionally over time.

There is also another key component to betrayal and I think it’s starts with the perpetrator’s betrayal of themself. Betrayal is usually seeded in self deception. In the case of R, he was raised in a home that fostered self deception. He was taught from a young age that, “what mom doesn’t know won’t hurt her”. He was taught that some rules don’t apply. He was taught narrative that takes away from self regulation and a narrative that I have more control than I actually do. What goes up must come down, whether you believe it or not. Rules are rules and eventually rules catch up with you. R had pushed the rules so may times and learned to deceive himself far too often to the point that he eventually had so many lapses in judgement that they caught up with him. Isn’t that the case with most self deception? He had several near death experiences and we had many many talks about how it would catch up to him and it did. He had a choice. He chose to believe his internal false narrative. Choices have consequences. Someone has to pay the price for consequences and that’s not always/only the one making the decision.

It’s been said, “Dying is easy, living is harder”. Preach Lin-Manuel Miranda. I’m trying to write the rest of my story. At the end of R’s story people tried to dictate the narrative. Tried to brush this off as some bigger plan. That divinity had a hand in this decision. These words I assume brought a sense of comfort to them. But these words have been extremely hurtful. Without saying it, people have implied that I have no right to be angry or feel betrayed. R has been cast as the hero and me the villain because my response hasn’t been what people have wanted.

It wasn’t until years after the accident that I was able to read the NTSB report and see the words “pilot error” that I finally felt some sort of validation. I hated that he was a pilot. I was never comfortable with him flying and stopping short of telling him he couldn’t do it we set clear boundaries and rules for when and where he could fly. Over the years he would tell me that plane accidents aren’t that common and when they happen it’s almost always pilot error. Then he would assure me he would never, ever put himself or our kids in a bad situation. That promise was broken. My trust had been violated. I wasn’t the villain. I am an individual trying my best to survive. My life didn’t need to be this way. I didn’t need to bring a new baby into this world without a father and without her siblings. We didn’t need to live with this pain. The pilot, he did this, he did this to us. No amount of external justification can take this away. Cause of death: PILOT ERROR. There’s the self deception. There’s the betrayal.

I’ve had to distance myself from people over the years that have continued the dialogue “this is all part of God’s plan”. People who I assume mean well but have no understanding. This again is dialogue based on self deception. People want to believe, “this can’t happen to them”. No one is except for making mistakes and some mistakes are very costly. I’ve learned that some mistakes can’t be made. And some mistakes leave very deep scars.

I believe that R isn’t in heaven living some paradise. He is in his own emotional prison. I think he pays for his choices as much I do. He sees my pain and Z’s pain and I think he cries all the tears we cry. He knows we are here because of him and our sorrows lie squarely on his shoulders. Most of all, he can’t possible be in paradise without a care or worry because isn’t here to see Z grow and become the amazing kid that she is. At the end of the day I’m here because she’s here and she is the miracle. Somehow I’ve been able to reconstruct a beautiful new life filled with happiness but is still sprinkled with grief. There is room for all the feelings.