And now that the toddler news is out of the way

I had a pretty deep discussion last night about my feelings toward Amanda, moving on socially, and where I am emotionally right now. I got a little choked up a couple of times, but I'm starting to think that maybe I simply haven't allowed myself to be carried away by the emotions. I certainly did for the first week, but I've rationalized all my feelings into submission.

I miss Amanda every single day. There's a large picture of her on my desk at home, the same picture is also in our dining room. She watches me every night as I work/play on the computer, and occasionally I find myself muttering to "her".

But I don't experience anger, denial, shock, or bargaining. Those, I've decided, are tilting at windmills. Being angry isn't going to bring her back, and I can bargain with God all day long, but he's not going to turn an urn full of ashes back into my wife. Ain't gonna happen. And frankly, if it did, ew...

I'm never really alone, because I have Alastair. But loneliness & depression are the only real suffering I experience, and not even all that often. When he's with me, and we're having fun, that is where I am: in the moment with him. When he's not with me, like at his grandparents' house, then I'm left alone with a head full of demons.

I've chosen to replace or augment those demons with racing, tinkering, and partying. Is that fair? Certainly the tinkering gives me a quiet opportunity for reflection while keeping me physically occupied, and that's a combination that has worked very well for me. Racing is just pure distraction of the most joyful form, and partying usually means alcohol. And, uh, pretty ladies.

When I'm not doing one of those three things, though, I'm generally lost. It takes me almost an hour to get ready for bed, because that's a mundane task that forces me to wallow in my alone-ness. The same is true with house-work, which usually piles up to the point of being nigh insurmountable.

But back to the point: my grieving process feels like I'm doing it wrong. Not to me, mind you, but to the experience of being me, if that makes any sense. Everyone tells me I need therapy, but I don't feel like I need therapy. But the fact that I don't feel like I need it is making me question whether or not I do. Because everyone says I do. With me?

Just like everyone says to wait a year before making any big changes. But I've already bought a car and gotten rid of a lot of her clothes. That, to me, feels like the right thing to do. I didn't like her car; couldn't drive it without wandering all over the road, and certainly couldn't park it. Why should I keep something that makes me unhappy, even dissociated from memories of her? But that's "the wrong thing to do", which gives me pause: should I have done it?

And last, I'm ready to go out with people, have fun, and experience joy. I'm told this is wrong, that it's too soon. But it doesn't feel too soon. I had a year to come to grips with Amanda's disease. A year. A year to grieve before she died, to be angry with God, to bargain for my life instead of hers, and all that stuff that's normal. I completed that process, so shouldn't I get a pass to the next stage? I tested out of Grieving 101.

I never managed to finish reading even the first of the grief counseling books. At some point I realized that I was no longer experiencing what was written, and I felt guilty about continuing to read them. I felt like if I was going to read them, I needed to regress and continue to feel the acute pain that was mentioned on the pages. But who wants to do that? Pain is good for the soul, but so is joy.

I've joined a couple of groups on Facebook for young widows & widowers, and joined the petition to add "Widowed" as a relationship status, and what I've learned from just glancing through some of the discussions on those group pages is that each grief is experienced uniquely. There are people who have been widowed for years and still refuse to even consider dating, and there are people who were seriously romantically involved after only a couple of months. Those who went through disease seem to have moved on more quickly, and those who lost their spouses to accidents take a very long time. Not as a rule, but just in general.

So it feels weird to me that I'm ok. Because I'm not "supposed to be" ok. Either I'm breaking the unwritten rules, or I need counseling, or I'm just a big creep who doesn't miss his wife. Or maybe I just need to be ok because I'm 33, have a little boy who needs as much joy as he can find, and there's just too much to live for.

Either way, if you don't like my grieving process, try your own way. When the time comes, I promise to support you in any way that I can. But please try not to judge me until you've been where I am (and I hope you never ever come here). There are no rules for grieving, only nebulous suggestions.

F1 Toddler

And he loves it. 5mph is really surprisingly fast. I was also surprised at how easy it would be to really hot-rod this thing. Yeah, the turning radius is crap, but it's restricted only by a couple of plastic tabs that could be ground off, and there is actually a spot to mount a 2nd gearbox, which would take it from 4x1 to 4x2 drive. Might make it tougher to turn, but would really help it get up the driveway.

And there seems to be enough space to mount a 2nd battery. Score! 2 gearboxes and 2 batteries should be enough to propel this puppy to almost 9mph. When he's older, of course.

At that point we'll need to switch the front tires to pneumatic, add a little positive caster, and maybe add a mechanical brake. This could be fun.

After getting it all assembled, we went to Target to pick up some more little plastic orange cones. I will make an autocrosser out of this boy!

I'm such a fool

I just ordered this for Alastair:



Many of you have heard me rant on how ill-prepared our children are when they take the wheel of a car in the big mean world. I think our nanny-state child-safety laws prevent us from experiencing the world from a training perspective, and expect us to simply understand the physics of driving when we climb behind the wheel at 15 3/4 years old. That's retarded. I grew up in the front seat, learned how the car behaved in traffic, with the road, and what to expect when I shifted 3 feet over to the left.

Today's kids are kept in the back seat until they're 10 years old (and sometimes much older). So now Alastair will have a head-start. Even if he doesn't take to racing, performance driving, or anything else, he'll at least know what happens when he pushes the throttle & brake, how much steering input to provide for a tight turn vs. a broad sweeper, and some of the responsibility that comes with driving.

Of course I hope he falls absolutely in love with it and wants to be a champion racer. Now I just need to get him a helmet, fire-suit, gloves, boots, and baby-HANS device.