it's been a week

It's been the longest hardest week of my life.
If you had told me last week that I would spend a week at home with my boys whilst my husband was abroad sitting shiva for his father I would never have believed you. If anyone had said I would go on holiday with my boys whilst he was sitting shiva I would have thought you were out of your mind. If anyone had told me about the number of tears I would shed in a week, the distances I would drive with my eyes filling with tears, the guilt, the pain, the longing to be with my husband I would never have believed that I could have all of that going on inside and still somehow function and hopefully give our sons a good summer, but it  seems that I have got through this week.

I feel that this week I have failed in most things. I haven't been the mother my kids needed all the time and  I haven't been able to be there for my husband. There was no right choice for this week and I will have to live with  the choices I made.

The strongest emotional feeling I have left at the moment is defiantly the feeling of not being there for my husband, I almost feel I'm being ripped apart inside. The depth of this is something I've never felt before. Not knowing what he is really feeling and not being able to just sit with him. He's never the best at long phone conversations and this week was obviously never going to be a good one for talking on the phone, it's to easy to disguise what you really want on the phone - was that the quivery voice of crying caught before it came out or just a crackle on the line? I know I've tried hiding it plenty of times and I'm not sure how well I've done it. I know that the few times I have let it out on the phone to him I've felt bad that I'm giving him my pain when he has enough of his own. I told him tonight that I just want to hug him. I desperately want to hold him and let him know that I'm there and will be. But I'm terrified that when I get to see him, whenever that is that I'm just going to collapse and that's the last thing I feel I can do or should do to him now.

Yes I am grieving for my father in law but the tears I am shedding are for my husband and for his shattered world.