I Miss You All the Time
My mother passed away when I was eight years old, and for some time after that, I journaled to cope with difficult feelings. She wrote in beautiful notebooks while she was sick. I suppose I was trying to find a connection. I shared thoughts and feelings about a variety of topics: what pony I was going to ride that week in my horseback riding lessons, stories about my dolls’ lives, and random emotions. At the end of one particular journal, I wrote a poem that appeared in the local newspaper under my mother’s obituary. This was the start of a long writing journey peppered with growth, self-doubt, and loss, but also small successes.
I recall hiding under my blankets at night with one of my many diaries, a pen, and a battery-powered book light, trying to carve out the words that reflected my eight-year-old feelings. I turned to a variety of memories such as feeding ducks at the local pond, wearing Mom’s gold eyeshadow, or playing kitchen on the bedroom floor. But none of that got to the depth of what I was feeling or experiencing. I didn’t think it had a name other than “sad.”
It was soon after she passed, and shortly after my poem came out in The Daily News, that writing became more prominent in my life. So did the sadness and anxiety that came with her passing. I picked at my skin to cope with my emotions, though I certainly wasn’t able to connect the two until much later in life. I remember jotting thoughts and feelings on the creamy white paper in multi-colored gel pens while digging at hangnails. I bled onto the diary sheets as I rushed to process my grief and remember my mother.
My biggest revelation came when I turned twenty-nine. I had lived to be older than my mother. From the time I was young, maybe around when I started picking, I had a worry in the back of my head that I wouldn’t get to be twenty-nine because she hadn’t gotten there. When I finally had my birthday, I felt as if I had been given extra time to live in ways that she hadn’t. I called them “bonus days.”
For a long time, I focused entirely on these bonus days, dropping the journaling. I hoped to do things and experience life events my mother hadn’t gotten to fully appreciate. It became a game to me, doing the things she might have wanted to do while remembering her in tangible ways. I adopted a cat that looked similar to her cat. I wrote a fictional book about my sadness and the way I picked at my skin to cope. I bought my first car and moved barely far enough away from my family to be considered away. But none of those things compared to how connected I felt when I wrote that poem and dug around in my head for something only creative words could provide.
It took a while, but I eventually dropped the bonus days. I had a small epiphany on social media one day after seeing a post that eludes me now. They weren’t bonus days for my mother’s memory at all. They were beautiful days in my own life. I needed to experience the things I was interested in and wanted to understand. Not living for her didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to miss her. Rather, it meant I was going to live my own life to the fullest capacity, no matter how long.
Around that time, I sought help for the way I was feeling. It was getting worse, not better. My worry developed into preoccupation with my own death, or maybe it had been like that for longer than I was willing to admit. Having someone listen to my struggles and history, I was able to write again. I found the happiness and peace I had been looking for inside of myself while still telling stories others might want to hear.
In the end, I adopted more cats. I wrote more books. I moved back to my hometown. I picked up my notebooks again and remembered more. Connected more. I started moving on. One day passed that I wasn’t preoccupied with my days being a part of her. Then a week. Then a month. Two, three, six months. A year. I came to accept that even if I missed her all the time, it shouldn’t keep me from living.
Life is like a journal. We write pages every day, some happy, some sad, some in the middle. We cry, smile, laugh, and sometimes rip out the things we didn’t mean to say. But in the end, that book of our life showcases us at our best and worst, all our days, whether they’re bonus ones or not. Some books are short, and some are long, but they are all different. And they are ours.
-Nicole Bea
Nicole Bea is a technical writer, poet, and author who focuses on deep stories to dig into: books that include romance, honesty, hope, and self-discovery. When she isn't busy updating her manuscript portfolio or catching up on her To Be Read pile, she can usually be found gardening, horseback riding, or perusing the shelves of a used bookstore. She and her husband share their home in Eastern Canada with a collection of multi-colored cats and a lifetime's worth of books.