When you lose your title

This is how I feel the last few years like I have no title. Let me explain

I have been a Mom since I was 17, that is a title you are a Mom, I have been a Mom since 1974. I was a young Mom a very young and inexperienced Mom. I made a lot of mistakes as a Mom but having my children and being there Mom has always been what gives my life purpose and my proudest accomplishment.

 Now that my kids have grown they feel they don't need a mother as much as they did so I sometimes feel like I have lost that title. I have alienated a few of my children and that loss is harder to bare then losing Brian. A few of them don't talk to me and they don't talk to each other. I have tried to fix things but nothing I do works. I found an online group of mothers who's children have disowned them and it is heart breaking that such a group exists. Even more heart breaking is that I now belong to that group. I don't want to belong to this group. 

I was a wife and now that I am a widow this is a title I don't want to have. Each time I lose a title I seem to lose a bit of myself and I feel like I don't know who I am anymore. 

I have been forced to leave a life behind and rebuild a new life. I am not a big fan of this new life I am currently living. I wake up most days and I don't recognize this life I am living.

I miss my children being part of my life everyday, I miss Brian and I miss Maggie.

Grieving the loss of someone who has died is heartbreaking and these last 5 years have been the hardest of my life. But grieving the loss of a child who is still alive but wants no part of you has come close to destroying me completely. It is not a loss I can accept and I don't know how to survive it. 

I have been alive 61 years and I have been a Mom for 44 of those years, I don't know how to give up that title and never will 

I am struggling to find where I belong now and what my purpose in life is, what is my title now

pray for me pray for my children 

hugs 

Tobey 

Here I am again, 2 years has it really been that long. I look at the picture of Brian and Maggie on my page and it still causes me so much pain. I miss the life we had, the dreams we had our plans for the future. I miss everything about our life together, but mostly I miss Brian. 

It has been 5 years since I lost Brian and everyone keeps telling me that it gets easier with time, I would like to know when that starts.

I get up everyday and I go to work and I keep putting one foot in front of the other and I try to live my life, but I still don't recognize the life I am living.

I finished college 2 years ago and started working fulltime in a men's shelter. The work I do can be very draining and stressful but it can also be very rewarding. the politics at work get to me somedays but I love the clients I work with. 

I graduated with honors from college at 59 years old while going through the most painful experience of my life I would say that takes strength. 

I could not have made it through the Social Service Worker course without this woman, her name is Mae and she pushed me to keep going whenever I felt like giving up 

My work picture, I work at a soup kitchen and men's shelter 

I am still living in my mobile home, the winters have been rough, northern Ontario can be brutal in the winter, but I can't afford to move anywhere else. I work afternoon shift which is a hard shift to work I get home late at night, and I am awake when everyone else is sleeping. It is hard to get together with people or join anything. The only benefit to working afternoon shift is I don't have to set my alarm. 

Mobile home in the summer, we have still have a foot of snow right now 

I would like to use this blog now as a way to express my feelings about being on my own and being widowed. I am struggling with this new life that was forced upon me. I miss my old life with Brian and Maggie and my upcycling of furniture and how happy I was. I don't know why that life was taken from me, I have suffered so much loss these last 5 years,  more then just Brian and Maggie, but that will keep for another time. 

I said I would never get another dog after Maggie, she was my baby, Brian used to call her our love child. But home was too quiet and too lonely with just me. so I rescued a cute lil boston terrier and renamed her Candy. Her birthday is Valentines Day so I thought Candy suited her. She is great company, has way too much energy for me, but I am trying to keep up. She had it rough before coming to me so her and I are trying to heal each other. 

Candy rocking her lil leopard coat waiting patiently to go for a walk. She hates having her photo taken, can you tell 

she is pretty hard on toys, but these two have not been destroyed yet 

I don't know if anyone will read this or if any of my old followers are still around, but I am still here still trying to figure things out one day at a time. I am going to try to post on a regular basis I think I need too, kind of like blog therapy.

let me know if anyone is still here