Hammer: More Than A Year After My Children’s Father Died, We’re Still In Transition

I shook my head and strained to turn my mind back to a flat, gray wall. The wall of the room I had shared with my husband, Jake, until weeks earlier. The room he dressed in one Saturday morning and grabbed a backpack full of spare inner tubes and power gels he never used. The room he left for a bike ride he never came back from.

It was our sad, gray room where I stood, newly widowed, the mother of a toddler, eight months pregnant. The room that was— by God—going to have a striped corner for our brand-new baby.

They say not to take on anything major within 6 months of a traumatic event. I used to chuckle when I heard this. “Well, I’m going to push a baby out of me and raise ’em by myself, but sure, I won’t get bangs or anything, I guess.”

I figured changing our master bedroom was safe enough. Something brighter, something new. I wasn’t much of a nursery designer, even with my first child who got no more than a corner either. But I couldn’t see bringing a new baby home to this stark, minimalist memory of a bedroom.

From: More Than A Year After My Children’s Father Died, We’re Still In Transition