This is a week of anniversaries for me.  Anniversaries and craziness.  Shall we start at the beginning?  Yesterday was my wedding anniversary – three years and two kids and many memories.  Yesterday was supposed to be grand.  There was going to be lunch with Seymour and an afternoon spent making a gift while babies napped and then supper out while the kids were at church.  But then my car broke down in the midst of a busy intersection.  As I struggled to turn around and get back to the repair shop, I prayed I’d be able to make it home in time to finish my projects as planned, but it was not to be.  So instead there was time spent reconnecting with an old friend while my car was being fixed.  Eventually, there was supper out while the kids were at church.  It was an unexpected day, but not altogether bad.The evening spent curled up on the couch with Seymour was, in fact, particularly nice.

Today is the anniversary of my grandpa’s death.  My family is weird (morbid, perhaps) in that we remember things like that.  He died very suddenly four years ago and I remember feeling so hurt and cheated and shocked; I couldn’t understand how he could be gone.  He was 73, but he was always active and enjoyed the best of health, so much so that he seemed much younger.  I blogged about it at the time; you can find the post here if you’re interested.  We were finally repairing our relationship after some years of difficulty (or perceived difficulty from my view, anyway) and when he died, I felt I had been robbed.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of my mom’s death.  It’s been eighteen years now.  I’ve spent more time without a mother than with one and the older I get, the older my kids get, the more time I seem to spend thinking about this.  There are so many things I want to ask her, to share with her, and I can’t.  Now with my dad gone, too, it seems doubly odd.

September is bittersweet for me; in addition to the deaths (and the subsequent funeral anniversaries), there are birthdays galore, too.  Tomcat’s birthday falls in September, right smack between my grandpa’s birthday and my cousin’s.  Seymour’s mom celebrates hers at the end of the month.  Add to the birthdays my own wedding anniversary and there’s one more thing to celebrate; we’re a busy family in September (okay, okay, we’re a busy family pretty much all the time :)).

But I am trying to make some changes in my life, for the better, and so I’m trying not to dwell on things like that.  It’s a struggle, but one I hope will be worth it in the end.  There are so many good things in my life and life is so short, a point which has been emphasized repeatedly over the last few weeks.  I don’t want to waste the little bit of time I have in this world feeling sorry for myself and being miserable.  I want to be happy and carefree and have fun and feel joy and love and all the things I felt only a few short years ago, before whatever it is that has suddenly gone wrong inside of me took hold.

It won’t be easy.  I know that already.  I am not a patient person by any stretch of the imagination and I am, unfortunately, prone to seeing slights and insults where none were intended.  These are flaws I need to work on.  I read once that when you pray for patience, you receive opportunities to be patient.  Evidently, I must pray for patience a lot, because opportunities to be patient seem to be abundant lately.  But I must conquer my impatience if I am to be the happy person I once was again.  I must conquer that darker part of my nature in order to let the light shine through.

Maybe my writing will be the key to my success.  The pen, after all, is mightier than the sword.  And I’ve been slowly making gains since I started querying The Lokana Chronicles.  Only time will tell.

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