red balloons

Hello and happy Sunday!

I realize that I completely missed posting last week. I wish that I could say there was something that kept me too busy and that there was a solid reason for it. There were absolutely things going on- we had just wrapped up our annual summer escape to my home in Minnesota- weeks of time at the lake in reasonable temps and humidity levels and quality time spent with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins that we don’t get to see very often. 

We started the 20-hour drive back to Georgia on Thursday and finally rolled into the driveway last Saturday in the late afternoon. On top of all the typical returning-from-long-vacation chores (i.e., adjusting temps in the house, cuddling two cats and a dog that missed us very much, taking care of garbage cans, lawn care, and restocking the kitchen), I had approximately 36 hours to do all the laundry and then label and pack clothes and lacrosse gear for two of the boys to leave for their first ever sleep-away camp on Monday. 

But I don’t know that I can blame my lack of a post on that. 

On our way back into the Atlanta area, I dropped the boys off to spend the rest of the weekend with their dad- so they were taken care of. I am a fairly organized person, and I did all the laundry before we left Minnesota, so the clothes that needed to be washed were only from the three days of our drive (it was still laundry for five people, and when I don’t do at least two loads daily, I fall behind pretty quickly- but still, it could have been much worse). On Sunday, knowing I needed to focus on getting boys ready for camp, and because she had missed seeing her during our weeks-long vacation, I dropped Kylie off with her Gram to spend some quality time with her- so she was taken care of as well. I had enough food in the pantry/freezer to avoid the grocery store until I absolutely had to go on Monday evening (it doesn’t matter how little food we have at home- I absolutely hate going grocery shopping- and ordering online and picking it up at the store has burned me one too many times- even that drives me nuts at this point). The animals were absolutely needy, but not so much that I didn’t have time to sit down and try to write something- anything- to add to our story. 

But here we are another whole week later, and I still don’t have a good grasp on what I want to say next. I feel like this struggle is the same that I have been in since I was at the hospital and found out Todd hadn’t survived. 

I just don’t have any answer for “What comes next?”

I have spent the past week trying to focus on what I told myself this blog would be about- trying to look for the red balloons in my life following such a difficult loss. While there is more to the story regarding how his celebration of life came together and how many times I looked around during that first year after he died and felt so incredibly blessed by a connection that I wouldn’t have had without Todd in my life, for this week, because I’m just coming back from such a very long road trip, I thought I would focus on driving directions and the wild ways I felt Todd was showing up in the first few months after his death.

Let me start with this: my senior year of high school, I was voted as the “Best Driver” in my class. This comes as a shock to my children often. At the time I thought it was an honor, but looking back I have to wonder if I was just the most cautious/slow driver that people knew? I also felt like it was maybe because I lived so far out in the country (10 minutes from town), that I was always the one offering to drive and pick everyone else up to go wherever it was we were going- so no one else ever had the opportunity to drive. But whatever the reason for the honor, I accepted the title (and never in a million years would I think it would be something I would be highlighting about myself 20-something years later…).  

I am also someone who just loves road trips. I know 20 hours on the road sounds like a lot, but the trip we just came home from was honestly so much fun. I was able to spend quality time with the kids, without anyone fighting (for the most part- there were a few tense moments where they couldn’t agree on the temp setting for the air conditioning and there was no consensus about who was allowed to sing along to Hamilton and who was not- but they were able to work those out amongst themselves). I was able to learn so much about each personality when I gave them control over the music playlist for a certain amount of time. (Jack introduced me to some really good Spanish music that he had to translate for me. Kylie will do a Disney sing-along hour any time, anywhere. Alex listens to sports hype music all day, every day. And Mason just loves him some Eminem. And the shock in their faces when this Mom knew every word to a Metallica song was absolutely priceless.) Also, snacks are essential to keep them happy.

As someone who loves road trips, it’s always been difficult to also be someone who is directionally challenged. As in- I cannot understand directions such as “Head west on highway 25” or “You want to go south on county road 37.” Those words, north, south, east and west, mean absolutely nothing to me. I need a solid, concrete “Turn right when you see the white church.” (This worked really well for me when my parents bought a cabin in northern Minnesota and the only directions that really worked to find it were “When you see mile marker 41, put on your turn signal and slow down- then turn right.”)

So the evolution of our current GPS systems and mapping apps has been an absolute lifesaver for me. I remember when I was young, we had to deal with the giant maps that could never be folded back into their nice little rectangles or atlas books where you highlighted your trip and had to flip page-by-page to see the full route, if it was a long enough road trip. I remember when one of the things I had to do to prepare for a road trip when the boys were little was look up the driving directions online and print them out to bring in the car with us. The fact that I can now be halfway across the country and type in my home address and instantly have three different routes to choose from is one advantage of technology that I fully embrace. 

Quick side story- it took me some time to fully embrace this technology. I remember clearly- it was 2011, Labor Day weekend. We were heading to a beach house with friends. It was a 5-hour drive with a 7 month old, a 2 year old and a 6 year old. We left at 1 p.m. I did not print out the directions. We were using my husband’s phone for directions. We got to the middle-of-nowhere Florida. He lost cell service and we lost our route. Hours later, it was 10 p.m., pitch black on the back roads, and we hit a gravel road with a giant sign that said “No Trespassing. Danger. Testing in Progress.” At that moment I vowed to never leave home without printed directions again. We made it off the gravel road, thankful that we didn’t run into any government alien testing sites directly, and finally made it to the beach condo two hours later.

Technology has thankfully come leaps and bounds from that time, and now, especially since I do NOT have a reliable printer (even after COVID- all those assignments the school needed to have printed out just about killed me), getting directions to a specific location is not something that I worry about until I am in the car, backed out of the driveway and at the end of our street. I trust my phone and the apps that I have installed to get me to where I need to be.

In the days and weeks after Todd died, I read a lot of articles about how our loved ones who are gone might try to communicate with us. I referenced this in my original “red balloons” blog- looking for that signal to come through in the next song on the radio. While I don’t know that I fully believe that anyone is communicating from the afterlife, there were two very specific incidents with my map apps that had me convinced that Todd was in control of my phone.

The first happened while we were driving home from our trip to Chattanooga to watch Todd’s friend race in his honor, the race that he was supposed to be participating in, the race that he was training for on the day he died. It was a difficult day for me, as I described in my last post. The kids were being pretty good, but had pushed a lot of buttons all day long. I broke down watching the finish line and was more than ready to climb straight into the car and get home, so I could crawl into bed and work through my feelings from the weekend. As we approached the city of Atlanta on our way home, my map app told me to exit the freeway. I assumed there was an accident ahead and it was having me avoid the delay from the accident. However, the instructions that I followed led us directly to the hospital that I had gone to with Todd for his second opinion regarding his heart condition. It was the hospital where we had an appointment set for the week after Todd died in order to get a heart monitor because he knew something wasn’t feeling quite right. 

Y’all- I grew up in Minnesota, lived in Memphis for a beat and moved directly to our little southern suburb of Atlanta. I am not at all familiar with the area north of the city where this hospital lies. It is not a route that my phone would have thought was normal for me to take. There was no slow down on the freeway that day, and the route took us directly back to the freeway after we had circled the hospital. On a day where I was feeling heavy from the loss, at the end of a weekend where I had faced so many reminders of the amazing moments in our relationship, I don’t know why I had to do a drive-by of this particular hospital.  

The second incident happened three short weeks later. I was in Nashville with my youngest two boys. They were playing on a summer lacrosse travel team, and we were there for a tournament. It was actually a beautiful day for lacrosse- a little hot, but nothing we couldn’t handle. I had been a little cheap and instead of paying for the full price hotel that the rest of the team was staying at in downtown Nashville, I stayed at a different place that was MUCH cheaper with a few of the other parents/teammates. The team was meeting up at a popular barbecue joint for dinner. I asked the other parents from our hotel if I could follow them to the restaurant- I know that technology has come a long way but I still manage to get lost when I am in a place I don’t know well and especially in downtown areas. 

Although they agreed to lead me, I ended up leaving before them, because when I typed in the name of the restaurant, it showed it was only a few minutes away and I figured I could handle that drive. And it was only a few minutes away, and I did handle that drive- BUT- that was not the restaurant our team was eating at and we were clearly in the wrong place. So I texted another friend to send me her actual location, typed it into my map app, and off we went. Off we went on the most roundabout, avoid-the-freeway, take-every-side-street route there could possibly be. As we turned into neighborhood after neighborhood, I was getting so frustrated. I had looked at the route- it had been much more straightforward than all of these turns. And suddenly, there I was at a stop sign, facing a T in the road, and directly in front of me was the restaurant Todd and I had eaten at when he brought me with him to Nashville for a quick business trip. 

Now, again, y’all- I am not real familiar with Nashville. Although I had been there more often than I had been to that hospital in Atlanta- once on that spring break trip back in college where I made all the plans all the time (reference my beach trip post for details), once with my sister when I lived in Memphis and we snuck away for a girls weekend and had the time of our lives- complete with getting a ride back to our hotel from the bars in a fire truck with lights and sirens on (a whole other story!) and once when I went with Todd. He was busy in meetings while we were there, and I worked from the hotel, but in the mornings we went out for really great breakfast and in the evenings, he found amazing places like this restaurant for us to try. We did not ever drive to this particular restaurant though- we took an UBER- so there was no history of it in my map app. 

There was no reason that my GPS should lead me to this place. It was on the opposite side of town from my hotel, the barbecue joint we had been at, AND the barbecue restaurant we were trying to get to. I took it as a sign that Todd was letting me know he was there with me, and he wanted me to remember the good times we had there together. 

From that point on, I actually stopped using that particular map app and Google maps has become my best friend, because she actually tells me very specifically, “At the second stoplight, turn left.” and that is the level of directions that I require in order to find my way. 

Looking back at these two very specific incidents- one that brought back some really incredible memories of our time together with the restaurant in Nashville, as well as a sense of peace that the only way I was routed to receive that reminder was because Todd was with me in that moment, and the other that took me to a place that only reminded me of more heartbreak on a day where I was already struggling with heavy emotions- I realize that not every moment of connection and reminder is going to be good and peaceful. 

And I think that is completely okay. Because if I’m being completely honest and transparent in the story of our time together- it didn’t end well. I don’t mean that I have any regrets about living the story and that it wasn’t absolutely magical, but at the end of the day, Todd isn’t here, and that’s painful and difficult and not fair and tragic. There is no way to make that truth any different than what it is. 

But even as I struggle, with those moments/red balloons of connection that are more painful than others and with the questions of what comes next, I also know that there are other moments/red balloons that will bring peace and reminders of the incredible person that Todd was, the incredible moments that I was lucky to share with him, and- eventually- the way the rest of my story will unfold knowing that I have not only Todd but also God giving me directions on where to go (just not through my GPS anymore- I do not build in any time for re-routes when I am making plans to be somewhere- seriously).