A couple of weeks ago as BF and I were walking the dogs I was like wow my birthday is just around the corner. Then I calculated my age (because we seem to forget after a certain point) and then the tears started. I don’t get emotional so I was really trying to hide it. I started this program a little over three years ago. This year I started slacking in my program. Still things felt good. No more anger, or trouble focusing and the anxiety it much better. Could things have been better – sure. But I felt better. I felt content. But I was also just existing. When I follow a much more strict program I no longer just exist – I live. I don’t take things for granted.

Well the moment I realized how old I was going to be it hit me that my mother would have given anything to be able to do half or even a quarter of what I can do today and here I sit simply existing because I feel content. It made me realize that I have taken so much for granted. When we think of our parents we think of someone older not someone who was once our age. What made the tears spill was when I looked at BF, who is so young, thinking by the time my mother was his age for ten years she had suffered, been sentenced to a wheelchair, been bedridden, had lived in a nursing home and eventually a group home because she need 24 hour care. And was gone by the time she was his age.

So this upcoming birthday is going to be a hard one for me but it has also given me that push to want Radiance again. I tasted it once or twice and my body wants it. I no longer what to simply exist, I want to live and not take things for granted anymore. That was the moment that I knew I needed to get my program back on track.

When we got back from our walk that night I just shut myself up in my bathroom and cried. I have only cried that hard a couple times in my adult life. Then I tried to take a shower but could only sit on the floor under the water and cry some more. It made me realize how unfair life can be. Every day I have is a day she was not given. Every choice or chance I am given is a choice and chance she was never given. My only way of dealing thing emotions like these is to write. So when I got out of the shower I grabbed the notebook and pen I keep in my nightstand and just started writing.

Birthdays are supposed to be a special one
Full of laughter and smiles and loads of fun
But this 38th is not joyful you see
For it seems to bring back a childhood memory

Either lying in bed or in her wheeled chair
Unable to feed herself or fix her own hair
Seven years she has suffered but never complained
Only 38 years old but sickened and pained

Robbing her of her precious life you see
And stealing my mother a way from me
MS has come along what a cruel theft
No one knows but she only has three years left.

Kari