Yesterday as we drove back from dropping Kayla off at school I used the term I hate more than almost anything “The new normal”. The problem with someone like me, someone who never gives up, is we sometimes fight against reality. Kayla is in college. Shayna is in heaven. Ty and I are the only two in the house. We have to face that. Today is the first day of the new normal, just to two us again for the first time in nearly 19 years. OMG, this is scary.
I start the day with a 2.75 mile hike with a good friend. That is followed up with a 2.75 mile run. Then, time for my first really good cry of the day. I usually have a good cry after my run and today is no exception. Ty and I don’t have much on the calendar these days. We both need to stay occupied, she more than me. She does some cleaning. We decide to clear out the freezer in the upstairs fridge. It’s time. We have no idea what is even in there. Going through it we find two bags of corn dogs (Shayna), two bags of pizza rolls (Shayna) and Shayna’s henna among other things. Throwing out each item is like another paper cut, the death of 1,000 cuts. Shayna won’t be here to eat the pizza rolls, won’t be here to use her henna, won’t be here… Each item I toss is like another little goodbye.
We decide to go to Trader Joe’s to pick up some wine for our friends who are coming over tonight. Also, we need to find out where we are going to shop. Shopping at Costco was a stretch with four people in the house. With just three, it was probably not the best idea. With two… well, the trips to Costco are going to be going down. Trader Joe’s has reasonable sizes of food. We take a good look around doing some strategic planning. We need to clear out at least the full freezer or the full size refrigerator in the basement. We need to stop buying food like we’re a family of 8 about to go into a famine. Time to get lean and mean.
We come home and throw together a quick dinner. We prepare for our friends to come over for drinks and dessert. These are people we don’t know well, but who have amazingly supportive during the grief. And they live fairly close. We love to entertain and used to have small dinner parties often before the girls. For some reason in the last many years it’s been only big parties. We are looking forward to meeting these new friends. We have an amazing time with them and we have some amazing stories to tell; which I will tell in a other post. It’s a fantastic ending to what has been a very trying day. We made it through Day 1 of the “new normal” though.
