The Widowhood │ Nighttime Reflections

I was 27 years old when I met my husband.

I was 37 years old when I was burying him.

Three kids, two houses, all of Europe, most of the East coast and a whirlwind of life later, I was alone again.

I had met him on a blind date. A coworker of mine had insisted that I meet him.

We went out to dinner, got coffee and grabbed a movie. And that was it, we were together from that point forward.

I had spent the six years previous to meeting him getting my career together and graduate school completed and dating emotionally unavailable men because I was really still in love with my ex-boyfriend. Though, at the time I would never have admitted that. And then I met my husband, and I thought THIS WAS WHY it all had to play out like it did and wasn’t I glad that it did, because it meant I had found my other half.

I had only ever wanted to get married once and I wanted it to be with the right person. He was the right person for me.

Only God had other plans and now I am sitting up late when I should be asleep, going over my life in my head and wondering what do I do with my life next?

The first six months were almost easy in that I knew it meant that I had to get the house and my life together to maintain my kids’ lives. And I did that. However, now I think about me. What does life have in store for me?

Had you asked me that last summer I would have bubbled over about my book deal and having my last baby.

I am turning 38 this summer and I put the book deal on hold to focus on kids and unless I meet someone with the next couple of years, my daughter will be my last baby. I am okay with that I guess…I just wish I got to have that moment most women have where they choose that they are done and are an active part of letting go of that part of their life. For me, it was chosen for me unless I meet someone who wants kids relatively soon. Just like it was chosen for me that my marriage has ended and I am a widow after only having been married for five almost six years.

Maybe this is me finding my anger in my grief?

I should just crawl back into bed and cry to the Kacey Musgraves version of I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You…if you need a good cry yourself, turn that puppy on. Gets my glasses foggy every time.

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The Widowhood │ Six Months In…

Life comes at you pretty quickly. I thought that I had mine figured out for the moment…I had the house I wanted to grow old in with the husband I wanted to grow old with and three amazing kids. I was getting up for a wine festival…my first thing to do kid free in years and I came downstairs to find my husband in full blown cardiac arrest on our deck.

And in that instance, I would never be the same again. We would never be the same again.

It’s been over six months since I lost the love of my life. And for the most part, life has found it’s calm again. My main focus has always been our home and our children. In that respect, I have existed almost in a bubble of their life and needs. It has only been recently that I have wanted to de-bubble somewhat.

Eating when you’re grieving I think it the strangest thing. I know that I have to because of my kids and because I am still breastfeeding our youngest, but since he died nothing tastes the same anymore. Nothing is the same. On the nights that it gets really bad I often will make just a side. I call it grief sides and it’s manageable to eat a bowl of stuffing or Texas toast on the super hard nights though even then not enjoyable as you would think.

Doing anything beyond what I had to do has been hard. I don’t read books or paint unless it’s related to getting the house in order. I find myself zoning out to energy healers on YouTube after my kids go to sleep until I finally fall asleep.

Because the anxiety of being a widow is something else. I worry about being the sole provider for my family. I worry about my kids now growing up in a single parent household. I worry about what is happening to my husband’s body. And then very recently, I started to think about what my life is going to start looking like moving forward.

Will I be alone for the rest of my life? Will I find love again? Will I get to have more children? Why did this happen to us? Why did this happen to me?

I was never lucky in the love department. I had two big loves in my life–one I left because I was so in love with him and it was clear he was just going to play games and then the other, died randomly on a bright fall morning taking our dogs outside. For years, I thought I went through all that came before my husband so that I could meet my husband…the night that I met him I came home, called my mom and told her I had met the man I was going to marry. That’s how *right* it all felt with him from the moment I met him.

And I guess the point was that we would come together, have a really good marriage and have three amazing kids…but I just thought we would also get to see our kids grow up together as we grew old, watching our bodies fall apart and laughing and dancing our way through it all.

I guess I just wonder what is next…will I raise my kids and travel the world looking at cool art and cultures by myself? Will I meet someone again?

I just don’t know, but I do know, I am having such an urge to find myself in all of this. I lost myself to marriage and motherhood for a long time and now I guess I have time to reflect on it all and am realizing that there is more out of life that I want and somehow I just have to find the courage and the energy to move passed the exhaustion of grief and being a single mom to find those pieces of myself again and nourish them.

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The Widowhood │ You’re Going to Cry Over the Weirdest Shit

The first time I realized that grieving the love of my life would mean crying over the weirdest shit was when I was in the midst of planning his funeral. I had to get clothes together to bury him in and that meant, I would have to do a load of his laundry, so he had clean underwear.

This would be the last time I would be washing his underwear for him.

I was emotionally unraveled at that point. There was the active role I played in his death: finding him, trying to save him, the 911 call, the police, the paramedics and so on. Then, I had already had to deal with people I could go with never having to see again in my life, I had to write his obituary which was a day long saga filled with many tears and sobs trying to get it like I knew he would want it to be, and then came the drama of not having a plot to bury him in until hours before his funeral. I got myself through it all though.

I would have loved in my bathroom never had painted tiles or spray paint over all of that wallpaper.

It was the underwear though that sent me into sobs on our laundry room floor.

However, the next morning my daughter and I went to the funeral home and delivered an outfit I knew he would want along with clean underwear and socks. And on the day, he was buried, he looked very much like he did in life with everything I knew he would have wanted with him.

I have been doing alright since. Some days are so hard and other days it feels okay again. Christmas was really good, but the days that followed were very hard. Then, so much of the house decided to fall apart: the chimney, the fence, and our bathroom all decided in one way or the other to just fall apart.

Thankfully, I have been able to deal with most of it. Tomorrow begins what I am sure will be a saga with the bathroom. However, it was once again something weird like a bathroom that sent me into tears on the floor. So much of Phil’s health problems revolved around that bathroom. I would often be scared that it would be the bathroom that I would find him in. However, it was not in the end.

Oh did I cry though as I cleaned out our bathroom today because by tomorrow it will look nothing like our bathroom anymore. I should be thankful for that and I am, because it was the one room of our house I absolutely hated. It was beat up, painted over tile that renters went to town in. They even spray painted over the wallpaper that had been in there. It was just a terrible room that no matter how much I cleaned it, always felt dirty and old and the paint was just peeling off of every tile. I was able to go through his things, paint our bedroom and make space for myself…but this dumb bathroom was going to send me into sobs on the tile floor…

Because it is something else that is moving me on from the space I shared with my husband. Our married couple space will be completely different from the one that we shared.

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Into the Widowhood │ Keeping with the Bittersweet

By next week it will already be a month since my husband died. It still feels raw and gutting. There is also some relief knowing that he is free from all that he was going through. It is also traumatizing to me when I think of that morning and everything I went through. He didn’t die in his sleep, but I woke up to the chaos of what was unfolding. I think that is why the nights are so full of anxiety for me after I put the kids to sleep– it’s the anxiety of what was to come that morning that I had no idea about.

Phil had made us dinner the night before and he got us coke slurpees because my stomach hurt. I yelled at him about the baby because she was teething and driving me insane with breast feeding. And then the morning came, and our entire lives just unraveled in moments that felt like days.

Since then, everything has changed. Our home. Our lives. Even my job…today was actually my first day at my new job and it felt wonderful to be able to be at work again. It broke up my day and brought me around people. I felt the magic of a new beginning and that felt wonderful.

I am also taking in all the bittersweet moments with our kids, like every time I hear how wonderful our boys are doing in school or when I was watching them dance together in the dining room. Logan would whip Rory around like no one’s business, but when Violet asked for a turn, he became the sweet gentle protector he has always been.

I think this is how you survive grief and the longing for your partner. And also visiting them and talking to them. My mom asked me the other day how many times I have been back to the grave.

I told her we were up to four times, each time a little bit longer than the last. I also made sure that the cemetery corrected his misspelled name. They had it fixed in a day. I am supposed to buy a headstone next…how strange this all is.

And then I thought maybe I would be Black Widow for Halloween. Grief is weird.

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The Hart Home│I Am a Widow Now

I am 37 years old.

And I am a widow.

If you had asked me a month ago what I thought this year would look like I would have told you about the several college classes I was teaching, my book deal, the trip to Disney World that my husband had pushed to book for Christmas, my new job and maybe even the idea of the fourth and final baby we were going to try to have.

Life is altogether different now. My husband is gone. My book deal is on hold. I am on leave from college teaching, and I have no idea when I will be taking the kids to Disney World again. I am looking forward to my new job. I also am both sad and angry that Phil and I will not have any more children together and I too am most likely done having kids as I do not see myself remarrying or being with someone again.

I had a really good marriage to someone who I truly loved and who truly loved me. I just wish we had more time together. This winter we would have been together for 10 years, and our sixth wedding anniversary would have been next month. And I am thankful that if we had to end this way that we at least got to have a family and find our house before because if I had been left totally alone, I don’t know how I would even be getting up every morning. It still freaks me out that I had to buy myself a grave to make sure that when it is my time, I can be buried next to him. How is this even my life?

One moment you think you have your life totally figured out and the next, everything changes in the blink of a Saturday morning. And then several days later you’re balling your eyes out writing and rewriting your husband’s obituary.

Dr. Katherine Kuzma-Beck Hart1 Comment

BOOK REVIEW│The Many Lives of Mama Love by Lara Love Hardin

Motherhood in the suburbs is an adventure unto itself. Social systems are constructed on your children’s achievements, your helpfulness in your community and your popularity among your fellow soccer moms. It can be a boring existence and it can be one that is easily shattered when you step out of the Stepford Wives Club.

For Lara Love Hardin, her step out comes when her million dollar home on a quiet cul-de-sac is met by the police who are there to arrest her and uncover what she has been doing behind the Stepford Wives façade. Hardin has been stealing her neighbor’s credit cards to fund her heroin addiction and now she faces being charged with 32 felonies and a lengthy jail sentence as she goes from soccer mom to inmate S32179.

Hardin quickly discovers that much like the intricacies of suburban soccer mom life, prison life also offers it’s own social system where candy is currency and tampon boxes make furniture. Also, there is the sad realization that not even prison can quell the adolescent behaviors that permeate through mom social life. Hardin quickly learns what it takes to climb the prison social ladder and becomes “the shot caller.”

In a memoir of falling from soccer mom social status to numbered prisoner, Hardin shows that even rock bottom doesn’t mean it is the end of your life. After her stint in prison, she goes on to become a ghost writer, writing her way through healing and redemption in a memoir that has you laughing, crying and cursing your way through as Hardin shows you that the hardest part of all is forgiving yourself. Powerfully raw–this memoir made me struggle through her journey with her, as a mother myself, I found it hard to sympathize with her and her return to drug use despite the damage it was doing to her young children. However, what kept me reading and loving her writing and her journey was that she told it with humor and humility and ultimately by having her darkest secrets discovered she was able to find herself, find forgiveness and build a new life.

Book Information

The Many Lives of Mama Love by Lara Love Hardin will be released on August 1, 2023 from Simon and Schuster with ISBN 9781982197667. This review correspond to an advanced electronic galley that was supplied by the publisher in exchange for this review.

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Book Review│A Perfect Vintage by Chelsea Fagan

Lea Mortimer specializes in restoring French Chateaus into boutique hotels. She relishes in the fact that she is a single, untethered woman who excels at her job and works well with the often aristocratic families that she often finds herself working for.

Only this summer is shaping up to be a little different for Lea. Sure, she still has a hotel to open…on time…but she has also invited her best friend, Stephanie, who is struggling through her own divorce and her daughter to accompany her to the Loire Valley. It was her friend’s one request when she called her on a rainy day to tell her that she had, in fact finally left her husband. Only Lea wasn’t exactly ready for that one request. Their presence shakes up Lea’s sophisticated world and threatens to make her miss her mark on her hotel opening and on landing the prestigious award that was just within her grasp. Even more shocking is the romance she soon finds herself in with the son of the estate’s owner that she is working to open as a hotel.

What flows is a secret romance that Lea and her handsome love interest are struggling to keep a secret, a lot of delicious French wine and a chateau that is about to experience its own rebirth. There is nothing to not like about this fun, summertime novel– the tasteful romance, the beautiful scenery and the friendships kept me reading even when I had other responsibilities to tend to. It has been sometime since I was able to lose an afternoon to a book and not feel too guilty. Fagan transported to my own time spent in gorgeous French chateaus drinking too much Beaujolais and falling in love. It also didn’t hurt that Lea’s friend, Stephanie, was figuring out her own life in none other than Morristown, New Jersey. From one Jersey girl with a love of France to another perhaps fictional one…I was hooked.

Overall, a delightful and airy debut novel from Chelsea Fagan. I hope she sticks with this genre, I would like to read more from her.

Book Information

A Perfect Vintage by Chelsea Fagan is set to be released on June 6, 2023 from Orsay Books with ISBN 9781662938627. This review corresponds to an advanced electronic galley that was supplied by the publisher in exchange for this review.

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The Hart Home │Life Got Away from Me

There was a time where I was reading and reviewing books every other day here and I LOVED it.

Paris, 2007.

Then, I got pregnant again and over the summer we welcomed our first daughter, Violet. She came fast and fiercely into this world and totally shook up our house after two boys. They just love her and I know even after I am gone, she will always have two older brothers watching her back.

And then I went back to work even though I reached the end of wanting to teach full-time. Never thought it happened, but I would have made a deal with the devil himself if it meant I could be home.

And THEN, I finished writing my novel that I have worked on and off with for years. I just could never get it right and then suddenly it poured out of me in a couple of weeks.

And THENNN, I got offered a publishing contract and now I am in the middle of contract negotiations, trying to hire a publicist and sitting back looking at how my life blew up again.

And THEENNNN, I was offered all of these college-level writing courses to teach which I was so excited to take, but also made me realize that I wasn’t done with full-time teaching completely, but I was just done teaching middle school all day. It’s exhausting.

So I am in the midst of focusing on the part of career that gives me joy and releasing my first novel in seven years. While keeping tiny humans alive and eventually working my way back towards sharing all of the books I love on here.

I am alive. And busy. And grateful.

Hope all is well with you!

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BOOK REVIEW│ATTRIBUTION BY LINDA MOORE

The early 2000’s was a great time for art history books. Of course there was Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code but you also had Tracey Chevalier writing Girl with a Pearl Earring and several other art historical novels. I couldn’t put those books down and in many ways, they helped to further my passion for art history and complete my undergraduate degree in it. I was immersed in their worlds almost immediately and the luscious of the art history periods they were covering just drove me further into the story.

When I first picked up Linda Moore’s Attribution, I was immediately transported into her story the same way I had been in the early 2000’s with other art history novels. Moore starts off her tale by showcasing the misogyny that can plague art history departments if you allow it to. I remember it well as an undergraduate– male professors always loved to tell you you didn’t have what it took, but you overcome it. Moore’s Catherine Adamson is struggling through a similar departmental struggle with her dissertation chair who never is happy with where she is going and inwardly she fears being let out of her graduate program which is why she doesn’t argue with him when her chair sends her down into the basement of the department to catalog any and all works that she finds.

While there, Catherine stumbles across a forgotten room and a stashed away canvas that by the pigment alone tells her is much more valuable than its current surroundings. At first, Catherine is unsure of what to do– leave it? Share the find with her chauvinistic professor? Find a way to catalog it? Catherine is not given much time to decide as her discovery is followed rather quickly by an unnerving meeting with her chair that leaves her rattled enough to forget the painting. Only then, she’s suddenly outside with the painting and unable to get back because the building has gone into lockdown…something very valuable has been stolen!

At first Catherine thinks of the painting, but how would anyone know it was missing since it was uncovered in a secret room, buried in a long forgotten chest? Circumstances and chance quickly push Catherine into the heart of the mystery as she finds herself on a plane to Madrid instead of one home to Michigan for Christmas.

In the vein of Katherine Neville’s The Eight, Moore quickly engulfs us in the mysteries of the past, of women who struggled long ago and of Catherine’s own journey towards her future. Her plot is rich in art world references and lush prose that intrigues you to keep reading. It is an art history fiction that leaves you thinking as Moore teaches us the importance of truth and honesty, even if it was forgotten to the past.

Book Information

Attribution by Linda Moore was published in October 2022 by She Writes Press under ISBN 978-1-64742-253-0. This review corresponds to a paper galley that was supplied by the publisher in exchange for this review.

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An Open Letter to My School Board and Superintendent

Dear Board of Education & Superintendent; 

      I am writing to you today as an experienced city educator, a mom and as someone who holds a PhD in education. I have worked in the area for 12 years. I also teach at a college that services a large portion of our graduates.  

      Our students enter schools behind their suburban peers and often graduate behind them as well. When you add the shutdowns, the year of virtual school and now, the continuation of masking and COVID protocols that prevent me and my colleagues from performing many needed intervention strategies, we are setting our students up to fail even more. I have taught 8th grade for the last nine years. This year, my reading scores are showing the lowest growth if there is any at all. Socially and emotionally, most of my students present more like 5th graders—the last year that they had in school that was normal for them. They are struggling in ways I haven’t seen before.  

      I was shocked to hear you announce that we were going to be continuing with these measures, especially when Mercer County is listed in green—which purports no need to wear a mask. As the body of research grows in terms of how covid protocols, including masking, have affected students and driven learning loss while the pandemic went on, there are already studies that show the impact on student literacy and the impact on their reading abilities and effects on their education: 

There is also growing research on how masking has affected younger students in their language skill sets and have caused speech and language delays in pre-school students—many of which do not know a world without the pandemic: 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8595128/

  • Study on nonverbal communication and children: 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8383324/

  • Study on cognitive decline, speech and language delays in children 0-5 due to COVID restrictions (including masking): 

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34401887/

While we had to learn what COVID was and what the best ways to fight the virus would be, we sacrificed in many other areas, including our children. However, we are now at a time where we know how to prevent and treat. We are also in a much different position than we were two years ago, and it is time to start addressing how to begin supporting our student’s growth forward following three school years of disruption, loss of services and the side effects of masking.  

      Respectfully, I request that you please think over your decision to continue this mandate next week. Many of my 8th graders were looking forward to taking off their masks, some even exclaimed they were ready to burn them or cut them up—never wanting to see them again. They are hungry for a normal school life…one where they can see their friends and teacher’s faces. 

Thank you for your time and consideration.  

Sincerely,  
Dr. Katherine Kuzma-Beck Hart, PhD

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