Two thoughts are challenging each other in my mind for speak out, yet while the one is what is currently causing my crash and will be continually happening, the other needs to finally be said.
When you are known as a fierce mama bear, when you would give and do anything for your children, when you are known in the family for not even letting them travel out of state without you to visit family for over a week; how than do you handle your oldest leaving for a church mission for 2 yrs?
I'm not sure I can explain but I am willing to try. I thought I had my son for at least one more year before he left on his mission, than the Prophet announced that the age for missionaries has been changed to allow 18 yr old missionaries into the field. My heart knew it was Anthony sent. He was lost, the youngest of his friends and would have been left 1 yr home before he could join his friends in the mission field. He had no job, knew he wasn't supposed to be in school - he was straggling and looking for answers. One day on the way home from work I told him that maybe God had something else for him and was sure he would tell him soon. The announcement came a week later. He immediately set out to get everything done so that he could turn in his papers along with his friends. His call came in 10 days later (unheard of) at the end of November and we had until mid-January to get him ready and drop him at the MTC. Leaving ahead of all his friends except one.
I love all my children, I am an obsessive mom. However, as my oldest, Anthony and I have developed a certain relationship. He has seen me at my PTSD worst and was there when it started, old enough to remember and to understand and be scared. Not fully understanding, he, like my other son Ben, have learned to accept and just deal. Unlike Ben, Anthony talked to me. Unlike his friends to their moms, my son told me when he made mistakes, when he had questions, when he just wanted to straighten it out in his mind. He became almost my best friend although I must say lol, most times he would look at what I wanted to say and comment: Talk to someone else about that. =]
Speeding through getting him ready helped me to not focus on it. I have always been the type that can repress feelings, one of the reasons I believe that my PTSD took so long to hit and why it hit so out of the blue and hard. It's my coping mechanism and it fits against my PTSD that wants to let every emotion out, cry whenever or whatever, etc. So how do I handle my son being gone? Honestly, I don't feel it. I don't allow myself to. I know that he is where he is supposed to be, doing what he needs to and in the Lord's hands. If I allow myself to start thinking about what could happen to him I will be back where I was 6 years ago. It hits me, out of the blue, every now and than. Like on the way into work this morning, no clue where my mind was or what brought the thought in but as I was driving up the street an image or memory of something my son and I had done (probably traveling the road since he took me to work many times) and it slammed me. He's gone, he's not here, I can't touch him, hear him, hold him and it literally felt like someone stabbed me with a knife right in the heart. The pain hit, my eyes instantly watered up and than I repressed it. I can't do this, I can't allow it, I can't think that way. How cold does that make me? Because I literally can't withstand the pain of my son being gone, I refuse to feel it, think about it and therefore, sometimes don't think about him. I told you it was difficult to hear, harder to fully understand and nothing I can share with my son because even though he knows I care and love him beyond - it sounds as though it is out of sight out of mind. Never the case, never a possibility always a struggle to repress along with a lot of other PTSD crap just so that I can keep being "normal" on a day to day basis and get up and go to work and yeah, crash on the weekend because physically my body says TOO MUCH, ENOUGH - and it shuts down.
