Stranger Things.

Ted and I recently finished watching the entire series of The Sopranos and tonight completed Red Oaks.  Both I highly recommend.  After dinner we weren’t sure what to watch so we both decided on Stranger Things.  Neither of us had a good understanding of what it was, just that we’ve seen Facebook posts raving about it and friends telling us about it.

I won’t lie – I watched about five minutes before my favorite LuLaRoe consultant started her weekly Facebook Live and I put my headphones on, settled into our couch and mostly watched her while occasionally glancing at the television.

After she got off Facebook, I tuned back into Stranger Things.  A little boy, Will, had gone missing.  His mother, sensitively aware of his absence begins to communicate with him through the lights in her home.  She goes as far to hang Christmas lights inside her home and paint the alphabet on a wall so he can speak to her.  (spoiler alert, but I don’t give a damn) As soon as she’s got her wall finished, someone, presumably Will, tells her to run.  Simultaneously, the police find Will’s body, dead.  As the police tell Will’s mother, she’s sobbing uncontrollably and trying to tell them that he can’t be dead, because she’s speaking to him.

There’s no doubt; she looks insane.  The police officer tries to tell her what she’s experiencing is grief and she refuses to believe him.

I started crying, sometime when Will’s mother was painting the alphabet on her wall and I didn’t stop until Ted turned off the television and silently hugged me.

All I could think about was her and the disposition of her heart.  I understood her.  I envied her.  How often I’ve felt as crazy as she looked and haven’t shared with anyone.  I understood the depths of her love to go as far as to hang Christmas lights all over her house in an attempt to communicate with him.  If someone told me, hell, any loss Mom, that they could communicate with their missing or dead child, all the Christmas lights in the world would be sold out.

Grief is hard this way.  When it’s uncontrollable and so involuntary.  I needed to write tonight.  My breathing didn’t slow until I opened my laptop with my back pressed into the wall in my bedroom.

As a loss mother, there are no strange things.  The strangest thing is losing your child.  You’re never fully whole again.  Somehow, time does build a bridge over the holes in your heart; but sometimes you fall in.  And it’s okay.

We grieve because we love.

And I love Sam.

*As an end note, I don’t think I’ll keep watching with Ted unless someone emails me overnight to tell me Will returns to his Mother, unharmed and has been off in a land of sunflowers and butterflies.  Something tells me that’s not what happens.