New normal?

My fingernails are long again. This is truly amazing--I bit them from childhood (as far back as I can remember) until I was 23. I stopped when I was training to be a teacher and a woman in my class told me her daughters were picking up the habit from her. After my daughter died, I started biting them again. As much as I wanted to, I couldn't stop. It's really the only bad habit I have--I've never smoked, drank excessively, overeaten, etc. I managed to start exercising again, cook, sleep well, and so on, but I just couldn't stop biting my nails. Most of the time I wasn't even aware I was doing it. I tend to bite them when I watch TV, or drive, and my mind is preoccupied.

Suddenly the other day I noticed my nails are long again. I mean REALLY long, as in, I'm having trouble typing.

I also noticed it's May 18, three days after my birthday and 3 days before the 3rd anniversary of my daughter's death.

How can both be true? How is it that I'm not dreading it this year? I've been busy with a new baby. And May is now the month between my daughter and son's birthdays, not just the month I lost my eldest. I do find myself thinking about her more often than I have the past few months but there isn't the despair I felt the past two years. I honestly can't explain it. I feel like I should feel horrible, almost feel guilty that I don't.

I do believe that we are meant to survive, to be able to live. I remember the pastor who performed my daughter's service saying that the memorial was for the living, for us to remember her and give us hope in the face of something so bad it was almost impossible to imagine life after it. All I can think is that this is the point where I've again started living, not just surviving. The first two years, there are so many things I barely remember. I know I nursed my daughter after her sister was gone, and I remember my tears falling on her. But it doesn't feel like months and months of nursing (she never would take a bottle), it seems like one day I was nursing her and the next she was maybe 18 months old. There's a huge gap in my life where I was trying every day to just get up and get going. I don't think I do that now.

And ugh, again, it's both a good thing and a bad thing. Three years, really? It only took 3 years to feel better after her death? But did I want to have flashbacks and break down crying longer than that? Oh, I'm not saying that never happens, only that I can at least say it doesn't happen often or regularly. At first it happened every day, then maybe every other day. That's not the case anymore. And as someone told me I would, I do feel as though it means I'm forgetting her. But I'm not, I'm actually forgetting her death and trying to remember her life. Honestly, even that's tough. I'd like to tell other parents you'll never forget every moment of your child's life, but humans just aren't capable of that type of memory. I do remember her, what she looked like, phrases she spoke, the sound of her laugh. But remembering her is more like watching a movie. And I'm so relieved to say that even memories of the day she died are more movie-like now than real life.

When I started to feel bad for not wanting to remember her death, I think of something else another bereaved parent told me. What would she want? Would she want me to remember her the way she was that day? Probably not. Would she want me to cry every day, while taking care of her brother and sister? Probably not. I'm trying to live my life the way she would want. And I guess maybe she wouldn't want me to bite my nails.