I sneeze just like my mom. I laugh explosively, just like my mom, I am a snob about education, just like my mom. When I would visit and answer her phone, people couldn't tell our voices apart. But I have spent YEARS trying not to be just like her. She was stoic, didn't believe that "talking" about feelings really helped anything. She felt that you got over bad times and strong feelings by getting active, doing things, getting things done. I on the other hand have been in therapy for five years working through my feelings, trying to figure out my own patterns of behavior, noticing her patterns, and my brothers, learning how not to take their negative comments, their prejudices personally. Learning how to let what used to piss me off or annoy me about them just roll off my back (most of the time). It ultimately helped by letting me see the codependency between my mom and brother. I gained a bit of compassion for what she must have gone through watching my twin self destruct with alcohol. 

After my Dad died, 15 years ago, my mom got a raging case of shingles, then she got vertigo. I always thought that was an odd way for the body to manifest grief, and must have been because she couldn't really express her pain. She held it all inside. While his death was hard on her, she never let any of us kids know HOW HARD. She dove into house rennovation projects, started weaving baskets, had bridge group, and dominos, had 5 dogs to take care of, had lunch dates and became a rabid University of Arizona basketball fan, Sweet Sixteen Baby! There were times when I'd call to talk that she would say, "honey the game just started, call me back at half-time."Really? 

This morning I woke up covered in hives. Red, blotchy, itchy hives. My asthma is kicking up a fuss, I'm tired all the time, I don't have patience, I can't make decisions. And now the hives. Grief is insidious in the way wraps itself around your body and soul, finding your weaknesses and exploiting them. Omnipresent and persistent. My ego that thought I was so much more emotionally advanced than my mother, that secretely thought I could weather her death, my brothers death, my dogs death "better" than she could have has been put in check. There is no better, there is only grief. All the work with my therapist coming up with strategies to to work though these intense feelings, honoring them, letting them flow through me and acknowleging the fragility and preciousness of such a raw time in my life and I still get hives. 

So this morning I took a cold shower, powered down some benedryl, taught my classes, took more benedryl, and thought -- I am trying not to fill my days to get rid of the pain, I am trying to carve out time to feel, hearing my therapists voice in my head, "emotions are like the weather, don't judge them just let them happen." Then I worried that perhaps all of this was a little self indulgent and I should "pull myself up by my bootstraps" and not wallow in the self pity that is my emotional state right now. Then I laughed, scratched at my hives and thought, damn you Mom, I am just like you.