Survival of the Weakest

Dear Harper,

It has been 10 months since I last wrote to you, I haven't had the words. It is surreal to be approaching your third birthday. And in this moment I feel words pouring from my heart.

Ten months, so many things can shift and so many things can change. Life has kept me on my toes. I woke up, like an epiphany. I realized that I had been floating through life this last decade, not really ever coming or going. No plan of action in place, which is not like me. I always have a plan, I am a planner. I have been waking up, breathing, then going back to bed. Sure, there is activity in between but days began to meld into one another, weeks and months pass but no real concept of time because every day was the same mundane schedule. I was surviving, nothing more.

What does it mean? Surviving?

sur·vive  

/sərˈvīv/

Verb Continue to live or exist, esp. in spite of danger or hardship. Continue to live or exist in spite of (an accident or ordeal). In the last decade, I have been broke, I have been exhausted, I have been sad, I have been happy, I have hurt in ways unimaginable. I ran the gambit of emotions. But all in all, I just survive. I manage to make it to my next breath, my next moment. Waiting for that divine intervention to tell me what I needed to do. Months came and went. Then March came, I realized then that I am barely treading to keep my head above the water. I am a fighter, I had kept my head out of the water for 10 years. I was tired and I felt the surface beginning to hit my nose, I needed more than just surviving. Everyone said it was you, that losing you broke me. It wasn't you, it was before that. I am not sure exactly when I went from being who I was to this weak version of me. I have always been a fighter, and strong willed, and opinionated. It is who your dad fell in love with and who I had lost touch with.   Much of what your father fell in love with can be acredited to the fact that I am a Leo. My August birthday brought many things with it. Leos are usually generous, warmhearted,creative, enthusiastic, broad-minded, expansive, faithful, and loving. I can also be pompous, patronizing, bossy, dogmatic, and intolerant.Often my faults can be as large in scale as my virtues. I used to be such an optimist, seeing the silver lining in everything. But something shifted as the years passed, the older I got I became increasingly pessimistic. I became an overly negative person with an excessive temper. I saw this shift as weakness, angry at myself for becoming soft and soft spoken. So I went into survival mode, quick temper, flaring at most everything. So much so that even your brother and sister were afraid of me. No one wants to know that their own children are scared of them. And in this discovery I began shutting down, shutting out most everything and everyone.  So I decided to shake things up...      My mom has said I am the one who likes to shake things up. So I took the snow globe that is life and shook it as hard as I could, until all the little pieces shook loose and I watched as they fell back to the bottom. This moment of weakness, this moment of no regrets and no consequences was exactly what my life needed.  I am still watching the little pieces of snow fall into place, but I am happier than I have ever been. As these little pieces fall into place, I find moments of weakness, moments of pure strength and will, moments of absolute madness, and then there are moments of pure bliss. All of them lead to one thing, an enlightened heart, an opened mind, and a free spirit. There have been a lot of tears over the last few months, there have been laughs, and silence. They are all rebuilding me. If shaking the proverbial snow globe has done anything for me, it has shown me that emotions do not make you weak, they make you human. I feel alive again, my heart is pumping and I am seeing the world with new eyes, with a heart that is slowly being pieced back together with a new found ability to communicate openly and honestly. It was a grand delusion to believe that I was ever weak. Never, and I mean NEVER, allow yourself to believe that you are weak because what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And I am stronger by the day. I love you sweet bean, Love, Mommy