April sucks. The only good things about this month for me are my daughter's birthday and the start of the NHL's second season. Other than that, there are few positives to this month in my eyes. But rather than focus on how awful I tend to feel this time of year, I've decided to try and thing about this in a different way. (Note the word "try" cuz it ain't easy for me to find the good here). I've killed myself over what I could've done differently, how I could've changed the outcome, etc. and it's done nothing for me. They say if you still think that way more than six months after a loss you're not healing properly. I tacked another six months onto that since I had to recover physically from my accident before I dealt with any emotional stuff. In hindsight that may have been the wrong decision but dealing with it all at once was too overwhelming. The hardest thing I have ever had to do was learn to live without my best friend. I don't romanticize what we had, I remember all the bad stuff too. But so much of who I was going to be was tied up in our relationship. We had plans, we had direction and we had dreams. And then, literally overnight, it was all gone. And figuring out who I was (and who I could be) without all that was terrifying. And all I could think of was, 'How could it just be over? The end. Move on now.'.
Even though I didn't understand it at all, I did move on (in some ways) and a year and change later I met the mother of my child. She was in the middle of a nasty divorce, I was wallowing in my grief, we both had a savior complex. It was a perfect storm of broken people. Things moved fast and before you know it, she's officially divorced and we're making baby plans. Her thought process being, 'I'm not getting any younger and he's a decent guy', while my thinking was, 'What the hell? Might was well have a kid, she'd be a great mother'. Obviously way less than ideal conditions to bring a baby into. Fortunately for all involved, I had a brief moment of clarity shortly after we started trying that led to the end of our time together. But if not for the events of April '02, we probably never would've met, never would've tangled years later and never would've had our beautiful baby girl. And I can't imagine life without her.
If there is anything else good to come out of all that bad, it is that it made me a good father. Not that I think I wouldn't have been good at this parenting biz if not for the negative stuff. But I am much more appreciative of life in general and of the chance to raise a child. I ain't sayin' it's always easy or fun or pretty but a toddler on their worst behaved day is nothing compared to where I've been. And maybe I am more patient because I now know not to sweat the small stuff. We're talking maybe a 5 on a patience scale of 1-100, but that's up from the -50 I used to be on that same scale. So the end of that chapter of my life was traumatic and it sucked and April will likely always suck for me. But the beginning of the next chapter brought me to my daughter. Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
