My M.C. Escher world

Tomorrow will be three months gone, three months gone and counting.  Three months gone means that exactly three months have gone by since I got to hold my baby.  It also means in exactly 9 months, the time it takes to make a beautiful and perfect baby, I will see the anniversary of birthing, loving and losing my perfect still baby.  She WAS perfect, except for one thing: at 38 weeks gestation she didn't breathe. Tomorrow is three months gone, 9 months to the one year anniversary, but tomorrow is also the three year anniversary of being married to the man who makes holding on, being strong, working through, and being okay, not an option but a necessity.  Three years is no time really, and yet I have trouble picturing a week, a month or a year. We are at a different place now in "us." It's a better place in the realm of absurd, true. It's a closer, latched on, clinging to each other kind, scared to lose everything kind of place. Most days I am a shell shocked person resuming and piecing back together a semblance of life, but normalcy is gone now. Things are so much harder to make sense of. How do I enjoy three years of being married to my heart when my soul had a hole burned in it exactly three months ago to the day? He deserves a day like we would have had, had none of this happened. He deserves a day of relaxed fun, dinner, drinks, carefree laughter, and bright smiles. But it did happen, she is gone and I don't know how to make sense of a world that is much more like an M.C. Escher drawing than real life.

M.C. Esher’s artwork is exactly how I feel every day.  Gabbie’s death has turned me sideways, upways, downwards. I’ve been spun in circles and now I’m waiting for the world to stop swirling. I feel like everything sort of looks the same as did before but now I know it’s not.  There is a parallel universe that you can fall into at anytime.  Nothing is how I thought, in this world babies aren’t born they are made angels.  In this world even the most expected events have a secret agenda.  At any time the world can spin and suddenly you’re trudging up the stairs instead of effortlessly strolling down them.  I want to warn every pregnant woman that their baby inside could die without a real explanation.  I want to grab onto them and shake them and with crazy hair flying, whisper, “Don’t take it for granted that your baby will live!  Love them, love them, love them, but be careful.”  I want to pop that clueless bubble of blissful ignorance and shake them until their teeth rattle and their eyes fly open to make them believe me.  No one is immune to baby-loss.  No one is sure to be blissfully happy with a tiny mewling blend of perfection.  It’s like the people who drive drunk and think it won’t happen to me.  It can happen.  It can happen to anyone.  At any time you can suddenly be serenely strolling along when your world flips upside down and your baby is gone and you find yourself holding hands with the only man you ever loved enough to fight through the soul burning death of an angel for. 

 Maybe this is no way to celebrate a wedding anniversary, but it's the only way I can think of to show him how much I love him.  I will continue to fight to find some of that blissful happiness we once had but with more wisdom to not take it for granted because he deserves that happiness.  I love you Derek.