Rowan is starting to feel it

Right around the six-month mark past Aimee's death, I started to feel like I'd turned a bit of a corner, like things were finally starting to improve. Overall, I was feeling less of a weight of grief on me all the time, and more like I could start facing my future.

But for whatever progress I have now made, it seems a bit like a terrible baton has been passed from me to Rowan. She's starting to struggle.

Given how young she is and the special relationship between mother and child, I have no doubt that Rowan will deal with her mom's death, in some way, for the rest of her life. But these first six months were, at least on the surface, somewhat easy. Her moments of grief, after the first couple of weeks, were pretty few and far between. That has changed dramatically in the last week.

Rowan's grief is obviously much closer to the surface now. She has begun to overreact to small things in a way she's never done before. Not with anger, but with sadness. At small frustrations or incidents, she'll burst into tears and pull herself into a ball. She won't talk about why she's upset or what she wants me to do to fix it.

Lucky for me, it occurred to me pretty quickly what was really going on. For now, I'm meeting her sudden onset crying with quiet consolation, hugs, stroking her hair, and kissing the top of her head (she likes that). I also scheduled her grief counselor, who she hasn't seen in months, to come back this weekend.

I don't know if my own state of mind will stay somewhat calm for a while, or if my own pain will come roaring back from the background and overwhelm me again. I suspect that I'll still have many days ahead of me where I'm drowning in my own waves of grief. But at least at this moment, when Rowan clearly needs me even more than normal, I'm so grateful to be in a little better place emotionally to help her through this.