Poorly Prepared and in the Twilight Zone

I can’t imagine life a year from now.  I can’t imagine life a month from now.  Hell, I can barely imagine life a day from now.  Our house is under contract for sale.  We are supposed to be given a closing date by the beginning of August so that sometime in August we will be living somewhere else.  Somewhere Gabbie will never be. 

D says that he can’t live his life looking backward at things that have happened.  I understand this notion.  But I don’t think I look backwards.  It’s more of living by looking forward to a future that is unimaginable.  How can I imagine a life without my baby?  How can I imagine a future without a child that I had?  If she had been born alive and breathing and growing and someone had taken her from me I’d have raged like a mother lion.  Don’t take my child and expect me not to fight!  But, there is no one to fight.  I get to fight my confounded mind, and time, and grief, and exhaustion.  I get to pit what my body KNOWS as reality--- I had a child... and what my mind believes--- she should be here still, against reality--- she’s gone forever and I still have to imagine the future.  I live each day in a sort of unstable bubble of acceptance that swirls with disbelief.  It is not that I don’t believe she’s gone, I absolutely do; with every muscle, tendon, vein, artery, organ, cell, chromosome, thread of spirit, to the deepest depths of my soul, I know she’s gone.  The phrase, “She’d want you to move on,” is like a foreign language.  She’d want me to move on?  I think she’d much rather BE HERE.  And move on?  To an unimaginable future without her on a date we haven’t yet planned, to a new house we haven’t picked, in a neighborhood we don’t know, to have a future without her.  Ha… it sounds like some fictional tale of the sorts of Tim Burton.

I know we were going to sell the house anyway.  That is inconsequential because all of the reasons for selling (and there are MANY) remain the same except one: we no longer need more room.  But the matter at hand is that all the changes that I had planned on facing anyway are now compounded with the major change that I cannot UNchange.  I used to think I dealt satisfactorily with change.  Used to… good phrase (there’s my old sarcasm!).  Now I don’t know if I deal with change at all.  I can’t tell.  Am I just watching things change around me with my hands thrown up in the air in complete self-effacement, taking all this as a humbling lesson in life? Or am I raging against what Fate, Destiny, God, the world (whoever decided to deal this torture) is trying to accomplish around me like an irate child throwing a hissy fit because I didn’t get my way?

I try to mentally and emotionally prepare myself for facing the world each day.  I feel like at any moment it will maul me to an unrecognizable mass if it decides that it doesn’t want me to get too settled into what I THINK will happen.   Yesterday’s episode from the Twilight Zone at the dentists’ office is an excellent example that totally threw me.  I walked into the office accompanied by a small yellowish-white butterfly (a forlorn sweetness… hi Baby Girl).  And then the Twilight Zone started.  Now I wish I’d at least been forewarned by the tell-tale music.  But instead it started with every recently-post-pregnant woman’s situational “when are you due” crap from a well-meaning but totally naïve stranger.  (You do know that you never ask a woman that right?!  Not EVER!)  The woman behind the desk asked me if the heat was getting to me.  When I responded to more than one prompt of this with… “Um no it’s not too hot,” (trying to give her a get out jail free card) she suddenly must have realized her error, and back-pedaled with, “I remember even after I was pregnant how hot I always felt.”  Then she saw my chart and said, “When did you have the baby?”  I responded with “I just had her two months ago”… and before I could add a single word onto the phrase she’d already called through the office to the dentist , the technicians and receptionists, “SHE HAD THE BABY!”  The next hour was spent with congratulatory remarks that had already gotten way out of hand.  Not one asked me about the baby, they just reminisced about their own, or what number in their family line they were, until I was getting up from the chair when the dentist (a man! The only man present in fact!) finally asked how she was and how my delivery went.  By then, I couldn’t tell them.  I couldn’t watch every face in the office fall, or hear apologies, or be asked for an explanation.  I couldn’t make them feel like crap when, on any other day of perhaps their whole life, with any other woman, their enthusiasm for a new baby would be accepted, appreciated, and even expected.  So I said, “fine.”  It was anything but “fine”; I felt anything but fine.  I made it out of the office without a tear.  I walked back to the truck without a tear followed by a small light yellowish-white butterfly (Thank you Sweet Baby).  I got in the truck and suddenly I could see nothing through my tears except that butterfly.  I heaved deep gulping breaths of sobbing pain.  I felt as though I lied.  She was not fine.  It was not fine.  I was not fine.  The world WAS NOT FINE!  It had been both easy and painful to just say fine.  It was easy because I didn’t have to watch the shattering effects of it, and painful because I somehow felt as though I had lied to them, to her, to me.  Most days I want to scream from the windows of my house “Stop making so much noise, I’m grieving here,” or yell from my car to jerky drivers, “move out of my way I’m sad because I don’t have my baby and don’t want to have to deal with you stupid ass and your stupid stick people family stickers right now,”  but instead of telling them I lied.  Now I will either have to face them for real when the Twilight Zone is not so wayward and confess if it’s brought up again, or just switch dentists entirely to somewhere where they don’t know me, which is a much more inviting idea although totally unrealistic.  But at least it’d be an imaginable part of an unknown future.  How nice in a way, it would be to just avoid.  But when have I ever, and I do mean EVER avoided something?  With my chin held high and my sarcasm as a shield I have, through my whole life, never avoided.  I might be non-confrontational, but I don’t avoid. 

This blog here, it makes me not avoid.  Avoidance, does nothing to make long-term life easier.  Avoidance means someday I will have to face it.  I cannot hide from the truth.   I’d love to avoid the hard days forever.  I wish I could avoid the truth like it’s not the truth at all.  I HATE with my whole being the “firsts” of a Gabbie-less, a baby-loss, an unimaginable future.  I cannot run, dip, weave, or duck from this Gabbie-less future.  I just hope that, even with my mental preparation, the world is not always as cruel as this Twilight Zone.  I apparently don’t know how to prepare for the Twilight Zone which is perhaps why I cannot imagine this Gabbie-less future, because many days, in regard to this, at least, I am stuck in a perpetual Twilight Zone.   And that leads me back to the quandary of deciding how to adjust to change.  Do I go with the me whose hands are thrown up in the air like the Carrie Underwood song giving up control to an unseen worker of the universe or the me who is fighting against the onslaught of unjust treatment of having to live an unimaginable future in a world that is deciding my life for me?  Who will win I wonder?  One seems weak and the other bitchy.  I like neither.  I wonder if I can find a happy medium.