The moon and the north star

R is my rock at the moment. Solo parenting a teenager during a pandemic without K is harder than I ever could have imagined. Ended up crying and suicidal in the supermarket car park on Saturday afternoon (where else is there to go right now?), first to a friend and then to R. He held me for most of my acupuncture session yesterday, as I struggled to reach him because I was so shut down in shame and the only way I could believe I wasn’t bad was to nestle into him and feel him stroking my hair. He won’t go away and he loves me, but he is not K and it breaks me. I sent this to him earlier:

Every time I stupidly look at the news I just know I’ll never see K in-person again. Lockdown till summer at least, new variants and vaccine adjustments, no herd immunity unless everyone has Pfizer vaccine, it just goes on and on. I don’t know how to live with losing her so suddenly and unexpectedly long-term. It’s 10 months since I saw her and 5 months of being on a therapy break and it still feels so sudden. It still feels like there are all these open boxes left with her (metaphorically) and she has so much of my actual stuff there at her house too. Everywhere at home is things she’s given me or we’ve made together or I’ve taken to show her. Everything safe reminds me of her. It breaks my heart that I might not be able to go back ever to finish this work with her. I know I’ve come so far this past year but it still feels like part of me is missing without her. You are my North Star but K has been my moon, always there even when I can’t see her, keeping me safe and holding me even when she is far away, and now I think I have to learn to live without her forever and say my goodbyes alone, away from her, and it breaks me inside even thinking about it. I know there’s nothing you can say but this grief is so huge and untameable sometimes and most people don’t understand the depth of K and I’s relationship because they don’t understand what it is I’ve had to heal from.

It helps that he gets it and that he understands it is made all the harder by the place we had got to, her and I, in the last year of our in-person work. He said it is no wonder I’m struggling after cutting off a line of deep connection and growth at this stage. Most of the time I feel okay, but the grief still comes and engulfs me. She was meant to be here to help me with this time of parenting, when the legacy of narcissistic parenting and never knowing what is real makes me doubt myself to the point where I want to die and take Nina with me. R gives me reality check after reality check when I lose myself in Nina’s words and think I’m the worst parent ever, worse even than mine. But he is not K and I miss her more than I can bear right now, when there is no end in sight and the world is in such darkness.

She said she would be here and I wouldn’t be alone to cope with these horrible years of parenting. She said what we have cannot be broken, no matter what. But I never thought I’d have to find out so soon if that was true.