I look at my little boys.  I want to give them everything I have.  I want to always be there for them. Even though I know that’s impossible and ridiculous, I try. It’ll be three years in just a few months that their father, my husband and lover will have been gone.  I continue to feel the loss. 

As time continues to pass, there is a multifaceted aspect of losing a lover that weighs on me.  It’s the thing no one really talks about or asks me about.  I perceive many around me who wonder or think about it, but no one ever asks.  It’s the lover part. 

No one says, ‘hey how’s it been losing your sexual partner?’  ‘How do you adjust to losing that intimacy and all that goes with it.  Are you dating?  Do you want to?  What is your plan around that?’

Well… no one asks because they probably don’t think it’s their business. Understandable.  I find myself feeling more and more lonely.  I think about dating and I’ve tried it, yet I don’t see how it could fit into my life.  It feels like I’d have to choose. 

The boys are always around, always needing me. When I’m gone, they feel it and I feel it too.  How can I leave them even for a time, to be with someone I don’t know. When it’s just to try to get to know them, just to find out I don’t want to know them.  

Or if I do want to know them, then what?  I leave the boys to see how much I really do want to know them?  Then what would be?  I wouldn't be lonely anymore?  Maybe. If that’s the case, then how do I integrate a new person into the lives of my children?  My life?  

All we know is the life we had with dad, and then the life we got without dad.  We don’t know anything different from what we had and what we lost. Now how do we change all that?  I just don’t know.  But the sadness I feel at being alone feels unquenchable.  

The trepidation I feel by looking at adding anything to the life I have now feels overwhelming.  I have hope. Yet, the reality in contrast to that hope is very opposite.  It feels too hard. When there is not hope though, I’ve found that’s when I sink into desperation.  

And who do I talk to to navigate all this?  The answer?  Well, no one. I have no one.  It’s not that I don’t have people.  I do.  I have my boys, I have my family. I have friends, and they are all wonderful.  I alone have all these things in my life and decisions to make.

It’s just me.  It’s too much at times and it feels far more taxing than any one person could do alone and yet here I am still attempting the impossible.  The loneliness hurts and it just keeps hurting. That hurt seems to keep getting deeper and I know that I don’t want to be alone, but I am.  

I want to have companionship, but I don’t know where to find it.  I want to give my sweet boys a father, but I lost theirs.  So I pray to find a dad for my kids and it’s a prayer that I remember saying all those years before I had children.  Now, I  find myself saying it again.

This time with the kids here I pray. It seems odd to me that somehow I thought I had a prayer that was answered and it didn’t turn out quite the way I thought it should.  I know I am happy as a person and happy as a single person and yet; I know and I remember what it’s like to be with someone.

Love that is shared with someone doesn’t change that there are still challenges there in that shared life. Yet, without that love and without those challenges come different challenges anyway, lonely ones.  These challenges I know I don’t want to keep facing alone.