Last weekend I successfully navigated one of the most logistically and emotionally challenging weekends to date.
If I thought some of the challenges we have had to date have been hard, getting through ballet concert weekend and a family wedding was even trickier.
Like most things this year, the anticipation of the event has been anxiety-inducing.
The logistics of the weekend were ridiculous. 3 ballet concerts in Hamilton (Friday and Saturday night and Sunday afternoon) and a wedding in Deniliquin on the Saturday afternoon.
So I threw money at that problem - I employed a nanny for the weekend to sort the kids out and a pilot to fly me home on Sunday.
We had so many tears in the week leading up to the ballet concert - from me and the kids - knowing this would be the first ballet concert Pete wouldn’t see.
He has been at every dance concert our kids have been in since Isobel began as a 4-year-old ... so for the last 7 years in Hamilton and the 2 years prior to that, he has been there.
The kids all said, a number of times through their tears what they would miss most, it was simply him being there at the end of the concert, beaming, with wide open arms and a big bear hug and professions of how proud he was of them that they would miss.
When I said I’d try and give cuddles as big, they simply said “thanks Mum, we know... but it’s not the same.”
I knew that.
So on Friday three of the four took the stage and #2 sat with my Mum and I in the crowd and so incredibly proud of the dancers.
And I’d already cried because I had received so many messages of support to get though the night. People acknowledging the big void of not having Pete in the crowd.
And so we got through the concert.
Then at 8.30am the next morning Mum and I got in the car and drove 500km to get to a wedding which began at 4pm.
My cousin’s wedding is special because it’s likely to be the only cousin wedding I have. We don’t have a big family. My parents only have one sibling each.
We grew up next to these cousins. We spent our childhoods together. And as it turns out, this might well be the only one of them that gets married.
Pete was meant to be the MC at this wedding, but the couple had to find an alternate after Pete’s departure. They spoke some amazing words about him on the day. He was so missed at a family event.
They had asked me to do a reading. I couldn’t say no.
Because I wasn’t going to let my current grief get in the way of celebrating an amazing wedding, because it wasn’t about me and what happened to me - it’s about them as a couple and they deserved to have a wedding reading that was for them, read properly and with all the best wishes for a long and happy marriage.
I cried on the way to the wedding after reading the piece I had to read out loud to my Mum in the car because it just reiterated what I’d lost.
I had been given the responsibility of choosing the reading and I’d already let the bride know I wasn’t going to be able to read some of the options. All those ones about growing old together ... I’m the walking, talking example of how sometimes that doesn’t work out.
But just because I had chosen it, didn’t make it any easier to read.
I was teetering on the edge of control at the wedding, but I figured I just had to hold it together and get through the reading. There were some voice quivers but it was done.
Then I started crying because the thing immediately following my reading was the exchange of vows.
They promised to love, honour and cherish one another. For richer for poorer. In sickness and in health. Till death do they part.
Listening to it, I just couldn’t stop crying. I tried very hard to. I had my brother and a friend on either side trying to console me. And, I suspect, hold it together themselves.
Because they were there when Pete and I said those things to one another 14 years ago. And I didn’t ever think for one second that less than 14 years after saying them, death would have parted us.
So to deal with all the tears after the reading and talking to people at the wedding - many of who I hadn’t seen since Pete died - I drank a lot of bubbles.
At a rough guess, it might have been the equivalent of my own body weight.
On Sunday morning I remembered why I should listen to my body when it suggested I might have had enough wine about three glasses before I stopped consuming it.
The logistics of this weekend were so ridiculous that at lunchtime on Sunday, when the problem of getting from the wedding 500km home without a car, tired and hungover the day after in time to pick up the kids from their final ballet concert... I flew.
I’m quite sure the pilot spent most of the time rolling their eyes at my inability to use the headset microphone and state of physical health.
But it all worked. And I survived. And I’m
not broken or broke. And all the crying on the weekend with friends and family has made me feel a whole lot better.
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