January 3

Today was the day the Rothes went home to California, and the day Chris went back to work. Yikes that was a rough day. I was dreading Chris going back to work. First of all, he’s my rock, no better way to say it. As I have described before, I have been leaning heavily on him during my grieving. Not sure he’s really leaning on anybody as he’s not much of a leaner, but I do my very best to make sure he knows he can lean on me if he wants to. Also, I kinda had this sense that going back to work=moving on, and I didn’t want him to be on a different moving on path than me, more importantly, I didn’t want to feel like he was going to be “okay” sooner than I was while I continued to struggle. I absolutely knew for certain that I had no desire to go back at that point, but I knew I would miss him during the day, and I was starting to miss our friends and the good things about being at work.

So, because he had left for work around 6, as we usually do, he was not present for the Rothe goodbye, which was pretty much heartwrenching. Cameron didn’t want to leave and was very upset. It was especially sad when he said he wanted to say goodbye to Uncle Chris, who wasn’t home. Cameron said he didn’t want to fly back to California, he wanted to stay in Virginia, and all I can say is if you have ever heard Cameron’s tiny lilting voice and the way he draws out the last word in each sentence, you can imagine how sad this sounded coming from him while he was crying. Aaron also became very upset and didn’t want them to go. He cried and cried and cried and sat on the stairs and looked at me and said, “I’m very sad, Mommy.” My mom and dad took them to the airport, and after they all got in the car and drove away, Aaron and I stood in the garage waving, and Aaron just looked up at me with heartbreak all over his face. It was FREEZING, (as a matter of fact there were a few snow flurries that morning, the only snow during the whole winter break, which Kelly aptly categorized as a RIP-OFF) so we didn’t linger in the garage. We came upstairs, just the two of us home now, and got on the couch together and cried and held on to each other. Aaron was just so sad that his little buddy and Auntie and Uncle were leaving, and me, well, I was crying for all sorts of things. That’s just the way it is these days.

The only picture I took today was of these gorgeous flowers that I recently got from the lady who is substitute teaching for me during my absence. She is fantastic in every way, and she picked out PERFECT flowers. I loved the purple and orange together, and they lasted a really long time. I loved looking at them on my desk every day.