Monday, March 28, 2011

Another Hurdle Jumped

An unexpected outcome of my wonderful trip to see the Foo Fighters was that we (I) had to face a bit of a 'hurdle' in my grief 'journey'.

As you know, Sam died while staying over at his Nanna (Anthony's mum)'s house. So as you can imagine, it's been pretty hard for me to let Oliver out of my sight, let alone let him sleep over anywhere (I still get up at least once per night to check on him).

He has stayed at my parent's place two or three times (they also spent each of those nights with one eye open!), but that's about it.

Of course Oliver is now at that age when kids start to have sleep overs. When his friends first started asking, even he was hesitant. We got around that by asking his friends to stay here instead. And they had great times when they did.

So last Thursday, even though we planned to go home after the show, we knew we'd get back too late to pick Oliver up from anywhere (we ended up getting home around 2am). So we decided to have him sleep over somewhere.

He ended up sleeping at his Nanna's place. This was a hard decision for me to make; not because I blame her for what happened to Sam, but because there was that tiny, very irrational fear about it happening again. You might even call it a phobia. I know it probably sounds very strange to you, but it was something I was having a lot of trouble with!

Well they had a great time together, and Oliver's very keen to do it again, so of course my fears were unfounded, but the fact that I let it happen it shows how far I have come in facing some of those demons that surfaced in late December 2009.

3 comments:

  1. I can totally understand your feelings about this, Mel.
    The last thing you want to do after you lose a child is to have your other child be in exactly the same situation. It takes a whole lot of guts and trust.
    I've been the same with letting my kids go in cars with other people, as that's how we lost Olivia. It took the kids (Bailey especially) a long time to be ok with having someone other than my DH and I driving them anywhere, but even when THEY were ready to do it, I wasn't sure if I was. Getting past that first time was SO hard, but then again, so is the 2nd time and the 3rd time and the 4th time... so well done to you!! :-)

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  2. A MASSIVE step Mel. xoxo Laura

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  3. A step that was big to you guys, but I'm sure also important to his nanna?
    Well done and HUGS!
    Jo

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