Superman Sam: Not-Me

I haven't shaved my head in two years. I've forgotten how it feels...

I have an image of myself, a picture in my head.
And when I walk by a mirror, I'm a bit shocked. What's wrong with me? Who is that?

"Are you yourself again?"
I think that people look at me and they can forget. You can forget that I am not now and never will be the person that I was before Sam died.

For the most part, I am the person you know. The person who laughs and tells jokes and (even if my children disagree) is very, very funny. The person who bakes scads of hamantaschen and tells stories and plays Uno.

But it's always, always there. I am never ever going to be myself again.

I guess I'm a new me.

I realized that a lot has happened in two years. New people, new faces, new friends, new acquaintances. People who didn't really know the me that was me. The me that would never have dreamed of shaving her head. The me with four healthy kids, the me who didn't really know that it was so easy to go from me to not-me in just the blink of an eye.

Yael shaved too. And she's dealing with the in-between-ness of tween-ness. So she cried a little before school today, worried that someone would say something hurtful about her shorn head.

Before bed, we talked.
"How did it go?" I asked. "Not bad," she said. "We did talk about my hair a LOT."

"That's good," I told her. "It's one of the reasons we shave. Not just to raise money - even though that is important. But to get people to ask us about our funny hairdos. And we can tell them about raising money for St Baldrick's and about Sammy."

She wanted to shave. And she didn't want to shave. And now that she's done it, she's proud, she's good, she's really good. But she's sad. And so am I. Because right now neither one of us can hide behind the pretend-me-that-isn't-quite-me.

I'll never be (quite) myself again.

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future,

particularly the one you'll never have.”

(Kierkegaard)