leaving stuff behind eg. grief, loss

Approaching the camino walk, I  am reading & ruminating on what it is that I would like to leave behind. Of course losing dad, then mum, & in between my marriage, as poor as it was. I am realising though that I had little time and little space to properly grieve these events. After dad passed I became a part time carer as well as continuing home educator & house keeper with an increasingly antagonistic oppositional partner who did everything to make our live difficult. Ultimately, she left & within literally days, I had to start up a business to put food on the table & pay bills. 

A handful of years later I was juggling a court case, that risked putting us out of home, with Mia running to & from college. Then mum passed suddenly, but I was just on the new role as foster carer to a child whose behaviours I found both challenging & upsetting to witness. 

A recent podcast introduced the idea of grief as creating emotional rawness & accumulating. That is, that each subsequent stress piles up. Each event creates greater  pressure to cope while you become increasingly debilitated. You can get to a point where literally a straw can break your back. 

So, here I am having never properly processed the sudden losses of my parents, the sense of betrayal & complicated loss by a partner & serious confoundment of having care of a seriously damaged kid. Add to this, my changing parenting responsibilities towards my two children, now young adults, & bighting aloneness, & its no wonder I feel a bit shit. 

There is some stuff I need to process, some I need to jetison, as I go forward into my senior years.