Verbal Vomit.

I so did not want to go to our grief counseling this week. We hadn't been to the past two meetings because four weeks ago I was sick with the flu and two weeks ago I received news just before we were getting ready to leave that our former Pastor's father was about to pass away and it hit me and threw me into a basket case-crying, I can't breathe and I sure can't drive and sit in a room full of grieving people and hold my composure overwhelming hot mess mode.

So this Wednesday, after missing a couple of sessions, I felt anti-social and was just not in the mood to sit in that room with the other adults. But the kids wanted to go. It means so much to them to be able to sit in a room full of other kids their age and hear them expressing the same feelings they have about losing their parent and being able to talk about their daddy. They had missed going and looked at me with those pitiful, pleading eyes as they asked me "Mommy, are we going to The Warm Place tonight?" I told them "Yes, we'll go but only because I love you so much."

I have a serious love/hate relationship with our grief counseling. I hate introducing myself every other week and telling everyone who I lost, when I lost him and how I lost him. It pisses me off when half the adults there were already separated or divorced or whatever and so they don't feel the loss as deep as I do or at least that's the way I feel. It makes my heart beat fast before I have to speak and I feel like I can't breathe and like I need to run out of the room screaming. I hate feeling like that.

I put off speaking until I absolutely have to when it's my time to share because I am such a mess. Then I open my mouth and verbally vomit all my feelings. I choke up and pause and everyone is staring at me, listening to the un-edited, non-eloquent words as they pour out of my mouth, revealing my weakness, my anger, my fear, my horror, my loss, my frustration, my annoyance, my bitterness, my desperation, my hopelessness, my angst, my rage, my anxiety and my loneliness.

I stop and I say I'm done and they look at me with understanding and nod their heads and wipe their eyes after crying with me. And I realize this is why I still need to go. As much as I hate it. As much as I detest sitting in that room and hearing everyone's pain and feeling their anguish as we go one by one around the room describing our loss or our feelings, I need to be there. In that room, I feel abnormal and normal at the same time. Awkward and accepted. Angry and forgiven. 

I love going there. I hate going there. I have to keep going there.