my ghost limb

Hey baby,

Now I can tell you what it feels like. What it feels like is an amputation. Like a part of me was amputated and I have that ghost limb syndrome. And every time I realize that you’re not, in fact, there any more, that there’s just empty space – well, it comes as a surprising little shock, a mixture of pain and disgust, like a punch to the gut, over and over again. And it just keeps happening, catching me off guard.

I told you this would happen – I warned you that if you'd leave me I wouldn’t be able to handle it. And am I? People see me and I know they think I am. I’m working, im keeping the kids relatively well, they’re clean, fed and entertained. They’re in school. But im a different person now. Im a different mother. I’m a sad mom. And im a less patient mom. And im a more nervous mom. Even though others may not see it through closed doors, the kids do feel it. they see me cry a lot. And it seems like everything I do now, there’s another calculation. Another thought process...and waves of this sense of being alive, but just tentatively so, ive never felt before.

Like, I go to work now because I know I’m supposed to take my medicine or I see it as going to physiotherapy to learn to walk amongst people again, to keep functioning so I don’t lose it. So I’m at it every day and I don’t give up. And most of the time I'm almost like my old self again. im walkin around, smilin, meeting deadlines, making new friends even. But it’s pretty easy to disconnect also. I constantly think about how tomorrow I could wake up with some kind of severe, debilitating pain – just like that, with no warning, no time to plan and that’s it – from that day on it’s doctors and hospitals and no more time to do the things that were so taken for granted yesterday.

And that can happen – that will happen, at some point. So I keep asking myself, what do I want to do…what do I really want to do? Sometimes I feel like I want to pack them all up and move to an African farm and just give them the cinematic childhood I always dreamed of. But we both know I talk a big talk but am quite the chicken shit. This is exactly the kind of thing i would talk to you about and we'd act like we might actually do it for like 5 minutes. So let’s leave that aside for now.

Lia is growing fast. They always do when they’re very young. She’ll be two in a couple of weeks. And every day she says aba, aba…The other day she asked me if the gas attendant was aba. Tonight at dinner she asked me if Doron was her aba. I told her he is Yulie’s aba. Every day I tell her aba went to sleep. She understands so much! I thought she would quit asking by now, but she’s asking more. What am I going to tell her and when? Oh mirchook…