Left mom at the airport, her flight leaves in about an hour. I have a lot of mixed feelings, emotions, thoughts. A bowl full of mixed jelly beans including the bad tasting Harry Potter ones.

I think the bowl if full of good tasting ones but it is a little hard to tell. When savoring a good one, it brings a warm smile to my face, I sit back comfortably well grounded and pleased. If you look too closely, the cracks and fractures show up and get larger. When encountering a bad tasting one, I feel like I need to smash myself with a metal bat and rip my flesh with pointed claws. The negative side of me is rather harsh lately, I try to keep it in its cage. The variance in intensity makes it hard to review the last few weeks to get any sense if it has been an over all good or negative experience.

I can say it has been an experience. Shitty stuff came up and it was dealt with in mostly good ways. I feel more connected to my mom and to my SIL and more willing to work with my brother. I will add dad back into the system in a week or so.

This has been a good growth opportunity and I think I managed to work through it instead of just run away. This counts as a big win.

You know that heavy thing you had to carry around and complained about all the time and you can’t help but miss when it is gone? Yeah, I feel like that. In a way I feel free and I can run and play, in another way I feel like I have stepped off a cliff into open air and am about to fall.

I told myself last night that tomorrow will be different. I stayed up way too late (6am got up at 7:45am) and it wasn’t that much different. Had a therapy session with mom that really pushed at me and made me tense, had a break from mom for an hour and a half, picked her up and dropped her at my place and went to visit a friend. Had lunch (almost 4pm), picked up mom and took her to another friend’s house for dinner (I managed to invite my mom and I to his house, we brought the ingredients and he cooked), then took mom to the airport. Things feel very different now than they did yesterday, or this morning or earlier this afternoon.

I was nice to be able to be with friends in a different environment after an intense time with mom. The dinner was lovely. My friend and mom got along better than I do with either one of them. I sort of wished I had a picture of him helping her to the car. It hit a soft spot in me.