Dear Former Friend/Prayer Partner/Sunday School classmate:

Would you really have done this had you put any thought into it? Honestly. You haven’t called or visited me in three years. That’s evident because you didn’t know I moved. You only knew that I stopped attending your church. In fact, I’ve moved twice since then and you were none the wiser. I’m finding your behavior reprehensible because the last time you ran into me out in public you “worried about my relationship with the Lord“.

I didn’t realize that Jesus had been checking in with you and updating you on my status. Hmm. I’ll have think better about what I say in my private prayer time and instead just put it up on my Facebook status so that not just you, but everyone can be aware of where I am spiritually.

So, you ran into my son when he decided to visit our former church.

And you didn’t know about my divorce.

Or that I’d moved out.

Or that life, in general and specific, has changed dramatically for me.

Or that I’m still raising children.

That last one, former friend? That’s the one that riles me up.

You asked my teenage son about his parents’ divorce. You upset him. You set him off on a panic attack. You had the nerve to pump him for information and then ask him for my phone number.

That was two weeks ago.

You never called.

You horrid bitch, you. You repulsive human being. You have no idea what you did to my son, do you? You might if you had actually used my number that he gave you to call me. But you didn’t.

Is this really you now? If it is, then consider this your re-introduction to me.

This is the new me.

Ever so sincerely,

Kelly

I’ve just not been able to write as openly over the last two years and for that I’m sad. Not that I haven’t written at all, because I have. But I haven’t been able to share it in an open forum like this here humble little blog. But you know how it is. You start to write some things and share some personal stuff and people respond and say things like, “Thank you for writing that and being honest and saying what I haven’t been able to say” or sometimes they say, “Well, that was a load of shite” because they’re all British and shite and spell shit with an extra “e” and then you wonder how it is that people in England are reading you and then you go, “Holy crackerjack, Batman! I’m the shite because of the foreign readers on my blog!” and then, of course, you stop that crazy thought because you know that shit is spelled without an extra “e”. Am I righte?

In any case, I have to say a thousand thanks to my readers. Because you have understood and silently encouraged and written lovely emails meant to cheer me up for dealing with a broken marriage and a newfound previously-placed-for-adoption daughter and two new promotions at work that made blogging super difficult and moving into a new house and losing my grandmother and still trying VERY hard to be positive and honest in this writing space. I’ve not always wanted this to be the journal that it’s slowly becoming but I’ve learned that I don’t want to be in that club of greedy bloggers and wannabes and drama queens.

All that was to say thank you for understanding when I can’t write it all down. When I have to keep personal things personal and not puke out feelings that I have to sort through here. Thank you for sticking around and making me still love this place. A place where I can’t do certain things. All the things I cannot say. All the words that won’t come out right and will be misunderstood or used against me. All the general bullshit about how hard my job is to write about except in a generic sense to protect the people I work with and the students I service and the families I come in contact with.

Really. I mean it. Thank you.

This isn’t going to be a sad story. It just can’t be. But my only grandmother passed away last week. She was 91, lived a great long life, and there’s not a person in the world who could say a bad thing about her. After retiring from the school district for which she worked she took up golf, billiards, and started taking college classes. When she was taking a history class of South Dakota (where she lived most of her life) her professor asked her to not do the usual history assignment. Instead, he suggested, why don’t you write your own personal history of having lived in the Dakotas.

That assignment turned into a booklet that my aunt self-published and gave to all living relatives. Each of my own children has their own copy and now knows that their relatives came from Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, and Germany. Ever feisty, she proved to all of us that she was a trooper and that woman loved to laugh. She’s been my only granny my entire life. I’ve never known another grandparent. 

My mother has been dealing with the day to day of granny’s laundry, visits, etc… and it has fallen to her to finish the details. Just now, we both helped clean the last of her laundry. Things we don’t care to keep necessarily, but will be donated to others in need. 

In the emergency room where granny, Marguerite, took her last breath and forgot to take another, my mother had a priest come in to give her Last Rites. In the middle of it my mother’s cell phone rang and since it was the funeral home in Lemmon, South Dakota she felt that she best take it. She told me that the priest didn’t like her little joke that she made when she returned, but I just know in my heart that granny would have loved it.

“That was St. Peter. He was just making sure mom got there safely.”