8 months…

All this time I’ve been waiting for my stepfather to release his anger at me – the anger I know he holds for me putting him in the nursing home; the anger I know he holds for believing my mother died of negligence; the anger he holds because of the loss of his independence.

I’ve been waiting for him to unleash it all on me, and today I realized…I’m the one who’s angry.

Furious, truth be told.

I never got to say goodbye to my mother.

If not for my husband rushing to her bedside when I couldn’t get there, she would have died alone. I am so furious at that.

So furious.

I’m furious she spent her life in what most would believe was a poverty state. Never having any money for anything other than the bare essentials; never doing what she wanted with her life instead of always having to find a job she could physically and mentally perform when she was so damn exhausted it was a wonder she could stand upright most of the time.

She bought clothes and shoes in the local Goodwill – shoes that were always the wrong size for her. Her foot measured at an 8 but she bought whatever she could afford, many times, squeezing into a 7. And she wondered why her feet always hurt.

I hate the fact she only saw her great-grandson once and that she’ll never meet her great-granddaughter.

I could scream at the top of my lungs about how unfair life was to her, how people took advantage of her – even those who claimed to love her, myself included. I could smash something against a wall and shatter it with the amount of fury inside me for how her own mother mistreated her for her entire life.

Who am I kidding? What I want to smash is my grandmother.

I’m so damn angry she never got to see Ireland – her dream.

I’m so damn angry she never knew how much I truly loved her – loved her – despite our tortured our relationship was at times.

And I’m so, so mad I never told her the extent of my love.

All this time I’ve been the one sitting on a mountain of anger, waiting for it to unleash.

And it finally has…