Happy Birthday Mom!

Happy Birthday Mom!

Today would have been my mom’s 66^th birthday.   I started this blog with a post about the pain of losing her to cancer a year and a half ago, but today I want to honor her awesomeness on the occasion of her birthday. 

Easier said than done.  A few days ago I started to go through my photo library for pictures for this post and suddenly plummeted into a deep and gloomy funk.  I miss my mom!  Seeing these beautiful, vibrant photos of her—so full of life, so full of vivacity—happy and alive, well it was hard.  I totally broke down. 

When I get super sad about losing my mom, I also instantly tune into her.  What she said to me as I was crying and carrying on, was that she didn’t lose any of that vitality, but she only gained more of it when she passed, unencumbered by a human body.  She didn’t become any less warm, loving, or funny, she became more of that person.  She is right here with me all of the time, completely still the same awesome mom, but only more.  I am immeasurably comforted by that. 

I want to honor her wonderful life and the amazing person she was.  I wish I had more and better access to photos of her as a child or of her from when I was a child.  I will get a hold of these some day and do another mom post, but for now let's look at some of the cool things about my mom Janette Dean.

This is where she and my dad lived for years before moving to Washington near the end of her life.  They built their dream house on this gorgeous Colorado property.  Brennan and I spent many Christmas vacations up there in the snow and nose-bleed altitudes (nearly 10,000 feet and close to Pike's Peak--my mom was made of hearty mountain-woman stuff).  

This was the used bookstore that my mom and sister Sherri owned in Woodland Park.  It was called Blue Heron Books and was fairly thriving for about 9 years.  It was awesome!  She and Sherri really followed their passion on this one.  I wiled away many an hour perusing the used books while visiting the family in Colorado.  It was also the halfway pit stop from the airport in Colorado Springs up the hill to nose-bleed Victor, so it was always the first place we'd stop when we visited.  Happy memories!

This is a typical Christmas shot of my parents Janette and Bill.  My mom loved her dogs too!  

Here is mom with her mom--my Grandma Mabel, my sister Sherri, and I having lunch on Alki in West Seattle during one of her visits up here.

This is one of my favorite photos of me and my mom.  We're in Hawaii a few days before my wedding and we are so healthy and tanned and relaxed.  This was a really special time for me and having my mom with me made it all so much better.

This is one of my favorite pictures of mom and Megan.  They both had such a funny sense of humor!

I feel very blessed to have spent 37 years with my mom.  She was an amazing woman and today, and every day I celebrate her.  I love you mom!

My Mom's Last Birthday Present

Today is my birthday and I am SO fortunate for all of the loved ones surrounding me today.  That includes my mom, whose presence I feel very strongly right now.  My mom died a year and a half ago, but she is here with me now more than ever.  Two years ago on my 37th birthday she bought me a gift card to Eastwest Bookshop, a new age bookstore in Seattle, and I never used it.  Today I felt a deep calling to go there today and use the money to buy myself a gift.  I think she wanted to give me one last present.

This stood out to me the second I saw it.  It's a sticker decal for your car window, and if a single picture could embody a person, then this picture is my mom.  If you look closely on the bottom it says "Rainbow Mountain".  She loved and lived in the mountains, and she felt a huge connection to rainbows.  I love this sticker.

    

I also bought the most beautiful little statue of Kuan Yin.  She is a bodhisattva associated with compassion and my mom really loved her.  I remember she had a lovely white statue like this that she kept in her sanctuary, and this purple one (my mom's color) reminds me of her.  When I saw this I knew I had to have it.

Even though this is the last gift my mom will ever "buy" me, I know that the gifts she continues to give me...her love, her positive energy, her support, are constantly felt and appreciated.

My Best Birthday Intentions

As I sit here in a coffee shop by myself, (I KNOW!  What’s next?  Human sacrifice? Dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria!), on my 39^th birthday, I want to not just think about what I wish for, but what my intentions are for the last year of my thirties.   After all, intentions are the building blocks to the reality you create. 

I have had a great decade.  My thirties have been a time of growth and prosperity.  I went to college and graduated with a degree in art, I got married to the man of my dreams, I had two awesome kids, we bought two wonderful houses, I traveled.  Sure I had some major losses, the death of my mom is the biggest, but I have had many, many more incredible gains.  I want to round out my thirties with a running momentum-filled leap of prosperity into my forties. 

Right now I’m in a coffee shop called the Wayward Cafe in Seattle.  I love this place, not only because it is the only place I know with a Firefly theme (I KNOW RIGHT?!), but it also has some lovely art on the walls right now.  And that inspires me to make the intention to do more art this year.  I love doing art, but I have barely eeked out so much as a teensy little drawing since graduating from UW with a degree in Interdisciplinary Visual Art.  I think it’s partly because, even though IVA should have been a super fun and creative major, the building block classes that I was required to take were quite mundane and dry.  I think I could only take so much in the still life/figural drawings with charcoal-type practice art, and had to take a long break.  I also think that it’s not that easy to have messy non-kid-friendly art supplies lying around, so I don’t usually bother.  But PISH I say!  I am going to find a way to make art happen this year, and it doesn’t have to be painting if that’s too hard right now, it can be sewing, it can be paper art, it can be more refurbishing of cool furniture.  I just want to be creative.

I want to write more.  It has been so wonderful starting this blog!  I love to write, and I have a lot to say.  I have also been “writing” a book for a while now.  It’s a young adult book that I started writing right before my mom died.  I stopped writing it for the most part because I had the excuse of babies and grief, but I don’t want excuses anymore!  It’s started and I want to continue it (if now finish it).  I think that writing this blog is a great outlet to get me writing more, and I look forward to continuing this as well. 

I want to continue my healing.  I think I’ve done a good job healing from grief after my mom passed, and this happened, which was a major shift for me, but I feel like there is so much to do.  I want to continue to heal any lingering crap that I deal with on a daily basis.  Sometimes it feels like a tornado of crap, sometimes it feels like a light dusting of crap.  But, I think I’m done having crap in my life.  No more!

I want to be a more patient person.  And I am thinking about my kids when I write this.  I am tested a gazillion times a day.  Bajillion, really.  And sometimes I pass with flying colors and do a little happy dance, but a lot of times I look and feel like a tired zombie-meanie-mom who just wants to snap at them for climbing on the counter for the hundredth time or for having a temper tantrum for no actual visible reason.  I think I need the patience of Mother Theresa and have not illusions that that’s how I’ll actually be, but a little more patience for now with suffice. 

I want to continue to have a great relationship with Brennan.  I think that in the last 3 ½ years (hey, isn’t that the same amount of time we’ve had children?  Huh, go figure), we’ve struggled to maintain smoothness in our relating with one another.  It’s been more of a “let’s survive this day of pandemonium so we can get to the next day of pandemonium” thing with us.  I do not want to have the energy of survival in my family and my marriage, I want the uplifting energy of THRIVING.  I want to take a breath, bring some peace to our house, and more connection with us. 

Finally, I want to just learn to BE.  I actually really struggle with that.  I tend to let my internal voice get me down, or let the external (ie: internet, facebook, the latest episode of Who Cares tv), influence me and divert my attention.  I want to stay in the moment, be present, and just be who I am.  That would be lovely. 

SO.  Here’s the list of my birthday intentions (in no particular order):

1   .     Art

2   .     Writing

3   .     Healing

4   .     Patience

5   .     Relationship

6   .     Being

I’m going to do it people!  Happy birthday to me!

A treasured video of my Mom

A few months ago I was going through my iphoto library.  I like looking back at the videos I have stored amongst the photos (and am wondering if there's a better way to organize them).  I happened across a thumbnail that I had never noticed before.  It was a video with my mom.

This video was taken with our crummy old camera.  I think it was the only video taken with the camera because shortly after that I got my iphone and started using that for everything.

When I watched it, I cried and cried.  It was taken on Father's Day 2009 when Megan was just a few weeks old.  The video is of terrible quality, completely over-exposed, and really short, but Mom is there and beautiful.  She was happy and laughing and pre-cancer, and I feel so blessed to have this very rare bit of memory.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do...

Losing Mom

     I was trying to think of a subject for today's blog and couldn't come up with a thing.  Not a good start for a blog.  I had a few subjects tossing around my head but nothing was sticking out.  I think though that I'm just dancing around the true topic that I need to write about.  My mom.

     It's scary to write about her.  I'm in a good place right now and don't want to bring up the pain again.    It's been almost a year and a half since she died and, miraculously, I feel okay.  I didn't think I could ever get to this place.  Ever.  So I suppose writing about her from this place is better than the other place.

     My mom's name was Janette Dean and she was beautiful.  She was hilarious, and warm, smiling, grounded, gorgeous, spiritual, feminine, artistic, creative.  She was my best, best friend!  All I wanted when I was a kid was to be physically close to her.  I wanted to crawl into her lap and melt into her and stay forever.  I don't think I ever got past that.  When I saw her I would often just sit next to her on the couch and want to snuggle into her, even as a grown woman.

     I would call her nearly every day.  I would tell her everything, especially the emotional and spiritual stuff that were the puzzle pieces of growth.  She helped me sort through everything....even my own feelings about her cancer and the possibility of her death.

     She really was the most amazing person.

     I guess I'm trying to lay the groundwork of how awesome she was so that you get the picture of how fucking horrible her loss was.  And it's all tied inextricably to my kids.  When I found out she had breast cancer, my first child Megan was about 4 months old.  She lived for a year and a half after finding out, so I spent the majority of Megan's little young life dealing with the fear of her dying and seeing her sick, and she never saw Megan's 2nd birthday.  Also, 9 months of her year and a half were spent pregnant with my second child Finn.

     When Finn was three weeks old (I still can't believe that I went through all of this), my mom went into the hospital.  Then cancer had spread to her brain.  She was way, way out of it.  I remember feeling completely abandoned by her.  While most new moms have their mother come and help with childcare and housework my mom was dying.  I remember Brennan had to talk me down and tell me that she needs me now.  I think it helped shift my thinking.  She pretty much stayed in the hospital for the remainder of her life, about four more weeks.  I brought the baby to the hospital every day and he slept in his car seat in the corner while me and the family mourned and tried to stay upbeat, but mom was basically in a coma most of the time.  It was horrible.

     There were a lot of small things to be thankful for at the time.  The childcare given to Megan that allowed me to go to the hospital every day, the support of friends and family, the increasing closeness of the family when we could have easily been broken apart, the kindness of the doctors and nurses, health insurance, the fact that I had had Finn already and wasn't going through the last month of pregnancy and labor and birth without my mother.....many things to be grateful for (and I truly want to write a different post about all of those things).  But holy crap, it really fucking sucked.

     Watching my beloved, strong mother shrinking and sick and unconscious.  Knowing it would be just days, then just one day, then hours.  She died on May 2, 2011, my sister Sherri's birthday.  (Another post...how strong my sister is for getting through that).  I remember that my grandparents and dad were in the room and Sherri and I took Finn to eat lunch in the cafeteria.  I had a salad.  When we came back there was a noticeable shift in the room, her breathing was different and it felt strange.  Finn started fussing and needed feeding so I got him out of his carseat and under my nursing blanket so I was across the room.  My grandma said to come over because it was happening right now.  But I couldn't because I was futzing with Finn.  And then she breathed her last breath.  I missed it and honestly I am so thankful because I didn't want the image running over in my head like a video.  My dad cried out, a sort of primal sound and we were all crying and he hugged her and called for the doctors to come in.  I remember some poor young male nurse came in and dad yelled at him to get the doctor.  But it was obvious that she was dead.  It was surreal and horrible.

     It calmed down after that.  It was done.  We all said goodbye one by one.  Grandma and Grandpa said goodbye, such an incredibly heartbreaking thing to see--two parents saying goodbye to their daughter.  We started cleaning up the room after a month's worth of accumulated stuff and garbage and cried on tissues had built up.  I held mom's hand and it was cold.  I would never be able to crawl into her lap like a child again.  I said goodbye and took Finn out and down to the car.  We all met at Grandma and Grandpa's house.

     Whew!  I am glad I just wrote all of that.  Sorry it was so depressing!  And I promise that not all of my posts will be this sad but I think I needed to tell that story for a while now.  I know that for the longest time I had a sort of PTSD from it all.  I still can't smell hand sanitizer (an ever present hospital smell) without a wave of grief hit me.  But, like I said, right now I'm in a good place.  A lot of the initial shock and grief have naturally worn off (I don't think a person can maintain such an amped up level of sadness for too long).  In another post I will describe the moment the shift into positivity happened.  But for now I'll leave it at this.

Love to you all,

Shauna