Before tragedy struck…

It’s done. I’ve been waiting to exhale for a long long time but now I can finally put it up on a shelf where it belongs and breathe a big fat old sigh of relief, while high-fiving myself. I’ve been on a long and winding road of love, of loss, of grief and of finding love again. I’ve laid bare my inner most feelings on The Day That Destroyed My Life. I’ve poured out the things that were inside my head and put them all down in front of me – the bad, the terrible and the heartbreaking. I’ve spent seven long years riding a journey through grief that I’ve often wanted to get off. It’s been cathartic and at times down right bloody annoying. Not to mention the pain that hurts my heart every time I relive that day.

I’ve read it, re-read it and re-read it again. I’ve lived memories and felt goosebumps. I’ve chopped and changed and cried and laughed. But now I can truly say I’ve finished. I hope it does him justice. I hope it helps someone else who ever has the misfortune to walk in my shoes. I hope my son grows up and one day reads it for himself, learning of how we made it through together. Holding hands. Mother and son.

Love n’hugs, Lady MamaGxox

Here’s a little synopsis…

The Sweetheart Widow

We’d only been in Australia three years. We moved over in January 2004, packed up our son, the dog and all our belongings and shipped them from Auckland to the Gold Coast.

My husband was running a large earth-moving machinery company on the outskirts of Brisbane and motor racing in the weekends. I used to be a magazine editor but had given that up when I gave birth to our little boy. Ours was a strong marriage built of stone – we’d been together since we were 16.

I didn’t go to Bathurst that weekend. Our son was two and getting too fidgety to be kept in the confines of a pit garage so we went up to Noosa on the Sunshine Coast instead. When the phone rang that October Friday two years later, I thought it might have been to invite us to a weekend barbeque or a play date with the kids. It wasn’t. It was a call that made my whole world stop.

It’s taken seven long years for this story to take flight and there’s been a lot of heartache, love and happiness peppered throughout the days, weeks and months that have slowly made up that time. Being a widow isn’t something you get to choose. There’s no gate where you take a ticket or exit left. Especially not when you’re a mum. I’ll be forced to make decisions I don’t want to make. I’ll have to turn his life support off. I’ll donate his organs. And put the pieces of our life back together without him.

People have said I’m strong, brave and full of courage. I’m all but none but of these. I’m just a girl whose story started out like something out of a movie and then went terribly horribly wrong. I was thirty years old and left on my own to raise our little boy who will never know his dad even though he’s exactly like him in every way.

Never in my wildest dreams could I have expected to have a child, lose a husband and find a new one all in the space of a decade but this is a tale of love and survival…because you can’t have one without the other.