Holidays, exhaustion and Self-depreciation

I decorated for fall.  The holidays are coming (I say that with a grimace in my heart and a slight frown.)  I preferred being stuck in the spring.  At least then there were no holidays coming to notice. But a year is passing with or without me, and the holidays are on the way. I know I have to make them pleasant and fun for the girls.  It feels like work this year.  I put up some fall garland, lights and candles.  I put pumpkins in the girls’ bathroom: three jack-o-lantern votive candle holders.  According the girls, they are the two of them, and Gabbie.  They know that she is here.  She is a part of everything they do.  Today, D went to lunch with Gracie.  When they heard a baby cry, she asked if it was Gabbie.  Gabbie never cried.  We, however do for her, almost daily.  The comment made D notice her absence.  It’s hard for both of us.  He doesn’t comment often, but I know it’s true. 

I think I’ll buy a special candle, and light it just for her.  I won’t make a big deal about, but when the thought of her is really with me, I’ll light it just for her.  As for the Christmas tree (I’d like to scrap it altogether, but the not-so-jolly fat man needs to put the Christmas presents for two girlies who had a rough year somewhere), I think I’ll buy an ornament for Gabbie.  Something so she is with us.  I don’t know.  How does a mother honor her dead baby for that baby’s living sisters and daddy when Christmas should be a joyous time?  Christmas: a day to celebrate the birth of a quite notorious baby. My baby might not be notorious but she deserves to be with us during the holidays as much as He does.  I’m sorry if I’m not very faith driven tonight. 

I know what I do feel like though; I feel like a blubbery blimp.  The worst part about the weight is I KNOW it wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t had Gabbie.  And though I don’t HAVE Gabbie, I do have fat.  Fatty fat fat.  I’m self-depreciating right now and I don’t care what you think.  Every time I exercise a little sneaky nagging voice reminds me why I’m working so hard.  “Gotta work off the baby fat.”  “Gotta feel good about yourself again.”  “The fat isn’t going to go away on its own.” “You don’t want people to ask you if you’re pregnant do you?”  That stupid voice is pretty harsh inside my head.  But the sad part of me just wants to sleep.  Sleeping doesn’t promote skinniness and I feel huge and fat and sorry for myself.  Whatever even Superman had Kryptonite and I am not a superhero.  It’s Friday after an incredibly long week, and the day after the six month angel-versary of losing my baby and I feel fat and hideous and *sigh… I need sleep.  Maybe that will make life seem less haggard, and me less jaded at myself.  It doesn’t help that I’ve been sick the last few days.  I’ve been so exhausted I even needed to nap on my lunch today and then again when I got home.  Maybe it’s the medicine, the vertigo virus or maybe I’m just tired of… of living sad… forever sad and missing her and, like I said grief takes stamina that I currently lack today.  It’s hard to imagine that for the rest of my life a piece of the pie of my life will be missing.  Even if I added a new baby and that baby lived, my pie would get bigger but a “Gabbie” piece will forever be missing.  I will always have a broken heart.  No matter how many children I have or how much mending, gluing, and taping that could be done to my heart, it will always be broken. 

                Now that I’m even sick of my pathetic nature…. I have to find a dress that I can squeeze my fat self into for a wedding tomorrow.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll have a skinny day.  There’s always tomorrow. For most people, except for stillborn babies.   (And for once I typed a blog without a tear.  Maybe I’m even too tired to cry. But I did cry earlier... just because.) 

Capacities, flesh wounds and a 6 month angel-versaries

Is it getting better?  Is it getting better?  Some days my answer is yes, other days my answer is no.   I want it to be better, it takes stamina to grieve.  It takes stamina to cry forever.  My husband wanted to watch a show the other day that was about a full-size person and a little person going in to have a sonogram in which they’d be able to tell if the baby would be small.  He asked me if it was okay I said yes but I’m glad he changed the channel.  My best friend invited me her baby shower, not to be insensitive but because I’m her best friend and she’d want me there if I could make it.  I don’t know if I can make it.  I mean, I might be able to make it through the shower, but I don’t know about the rest of the day.  She said she understands and I know she does.  I just wish it weren’t even an issue.  But it is.  My good friend at work posted a picture of her new baby nephew.  I cried.  I want a new baby too.  All I could do was post "<3".  I had no words.  What words are there?  I could congratulate.  I could and I want to, but I can’t find the words.  It takes stamina to see references to babies everywhere when they all remind me of a baby that I never got to bring home.  I still have all of her things, in the closet and in storage.  I don’t know what to do with them, I can't throw them away or sell them, maybe someday we’ll try again, when the world provides me the opportunity to, I guess.  Maybe.

In 2 days Gabbie would have been 6 months.  In 2 days I’ll be half way through a year of grieving.  In 2 days I will have no more insight than I do now.  I will have found no less heartache.  It will always be there.  I see it in the posts online, I see it in the posts in the private group where strangers and friends poor out their stories of heartache and sadness.  I see it in every grief website and every grief study.  The heartache will always be there; I will always think of her and miss her.  How does life balance those 38 weeks of knowing she was there, the 6 months of feeling her move within me, and the few hours I was given to hold her with a lifetime of sadness and countless tears at the thought of her? The love I had for her outweighs time.  In that love I have found a beauty so brilliant that it’s painful, and so sad that it’s awe inspiring.  If we each could love so much in our lives we would know the meaning of heaven for just a moment, and hell forever when it is stolen from us.  Some may know physical torture, some may know physical pain, but there is no pain like the soulful torture of the mother that will never hold her child again.  And sometimes I wish I could un-know because ignorance truly was bliss.  But to un-know would mean to never understand the capacity I have for love; to un-know would mean I am not made the wiser for the capacity I have to be hurt.  I had once thought I could not hurt more; parents divorced at 6 years old, taken advantage of at 17, divorced when I was 23.  I was wrong.  Those were minor scratches, flesh wounds if you will, some slightly deeper than others; learning experiences each, but soul strengthening.  Those have only given me a scale to which I can measure the pain of now.  I have lived through those, I’ll live through this, but this pain is like none I’ve experienced.  It is marring, deep, life altering, personality and outlook changing.  It is a paradox of sorts: It is like she is piercing light that flashed before my eyes and has produced a dark orb with rings of light around it that floats about my vision; everywhere I focus she is there, when I glance from the corner of my eye, she is quick to follow and yet she is not really there at all. She is everywhere, the light that blinds me and the orb that follows my vision.

Happy 6 month angel-versary sweet baby Gabbie.  Thank you for showing me the capacity I have to love. 

Where do babies go when they die? and...

Where do babies go when they die?

Do they blow away upon the wind, a whispered hush?

 Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Where do babies go when they die?

Do they wander among us, ethereally,

a spirit guide, a ghost of time?

Where do babies go when they die?

Do they swirl around us, the fluttering sigh

Of the trembled wanderings of a butterfly?

Oh sweet baby why did you die?

Life could have made you anything, anything at all.

Oh sweet baby why did you die

Why did you choose to be a butterfly?

The flag project is hung, and people can see it in the mall.  I have had a multitude of hugs and thanks and commendations on my strength of character.  I’m not sure I deserve them.  I did it for her.  It’s selfish.  I did it because I wanted to be close her.  One of the girls at work mentioned a flag that she saw a picture of that moved her.  I knew the name of the baby on the one she’d described.  It’s as though each of those beautiful flags is mine.  I’ve held them, and photographed them (some many times until I took one I was happy with) and trimmed them up, cleaned them and loved each one.  I’ve thrown myself into the project with the force of an addict going through with-drawl, or like a starving man at a small portion of food. 

Then, Monday, I had a meltdown.  Perhaps it was because I was tired, or because I was just somehow ill prepared for life that day, but I cried all the way to work until my eyes were red and puffy.  My students hugged me and told me they were sad that I was sad, but that they understood.  At the end of this year I will have been their teacher for three years, so many of them are so sweet.  I will miss them when I don’t have them anymore.  How does one not get attached after three years?  All the way to the ceremony that evening at Acacia park I’d cried, With my hand on the box of flags, I’d felt as though I was driving with angels, and I think I was.  In the chapel, basked in candlelight for angel babies, I bowed my head and wept.  It was not fair that I should be there and yet I was, and with so many others who shouldn’t be there either and were.  Then, as if to say, we see you and we know, as the ceremony came to an end, and everyone blew out their candles the flags that had been hung on the wall behind the pulpit fell to the floor.  Nearly the whole chain of flags fell without warning just as the speaker got to the opposite end of the chapel, and there was a collective shocked sigh from the people in attendance.  I gathered the flags after, talking with some of the amazing people I’d met since I’d started this whole project.  But I still feel as though I don’t deserve the recognition, nor the gratitude. 

Then came Tuesday, and in three hours, a wonderful cousin, two women from WNYPBN and I had the cases together at the mall.  Just as I finished cleaning up the first case and turned from it, I was nearly knocked windless by a powerful feeling of déjà vu.  My heart raced.  I don’t know what déjà vu is, but if it’s because I’d actually been there before in some other life, then why do I find myself there again?  I can’t have ever been there before, so unless somehow I had seen the future before why would I experience it?  Since the flags are up and locked in a case, I feel somehow quiet inside.  Hurt still, but quiet. I wonder what that means.  My motive was to love her and be close to her, in holding these flags, and loving these babies, babies that are with her in heaven, have I then done anything to be thanked for?  I’ve only loved these angel babies and held their stories in my hand and heart to love her harder and closer.  Is that deserving of your gratitude and honoring, I’m just not so sure. 

Frozen in time, as the seasons change, where are all my signs?

Sunday, the flags flew.  They were beautiful.  I cried seeing them hanging in the breeze.  One flag I’ve talked about before threw me for a loop.  Gabriella Grace.  Her sweet face on that flag, and oh those names.  Gabbie, like my Gabbie.  Grace like my Gracie.  And then out of the same fabric her flag was sewn.  I met her grandmother, and grandfather.  I thought the names themselves were strange.  But when they introduced themselves to me, and hugged me and thanked me for what I’ve done, which really isn’t above and beyond nor deserving of a hug, they saw my sister’s flags and asked me who the Szefler flags were from.  I told them my sister had lost three pregnancies and one of which was twins.  It turns out they were Szeflers, and a relative of those baby angels’ father.  So months ago, when I was looking for answers as to how and why I didn’t know she was slowly falling asleep forever within me I thought that I somehow had missed signs: my friend had lost one of her twins; my students all used to tell me not to reach up that they were told it can cause bad things to happen to the fetus but I’d ignored them; that my former extended in-laws had posted on facebook about losing a baby whose name was Gabriella I had thought how sad it was to see my baby’s name in an obituary.  That Gabriella, the one of the obituary, was THE Gabriella of the flag that got me weeping in my car at the post office, THE Gabriella that is a sort of distant relation.   I know I can’t have known the signs, or even have guessed at them.  I, at one point, thought I totally missed the warnings set before me out of ignorance.  But who would have thought? 

I cried on my way to work today.  I don’t know why, except to say that I felt her loss deeply.  I ignore it a lot mostly because I’m busy.  I chase away the “why” questions knowing that there are no answers, much as I would try to ignore an errant child who constantly questions the reasons for a request to behave.  The weather changing makes me sad. 

The leaves changing colors and blowing across the street fly like butterflies in a flittering and fluttering manner, erratically skittering by, but again they are not butterflies.  They made me think of butterflies dying, a thought that made my throat tighten.  Isn’t enough that my Gabbie is gone, but I need to think of butterflies leaving too?  So I researched butterflies, with all the time I don’t have.  I knew of the monarchs that fly to warmer parts each fall, but not all butterflies leave or die, at least not just because there’s winter.  Some sleep all winter, as butterflies, as an egg, as caterpillars, as pupa and then in the spring they’ll awake to fly again.  One website even claimed, that occasionally, on a bright, warm, sunny, winter day a butterfly, such as the Dark Cloaked Mourning Butterfly, may confuse the weather with a spring day and come out of hibernation to fly heavily in the sunlight.   I wish I could see a butterfly in the midst of a winter warm streak.

The change in weather makes me sad.  It means holidays are coming, and snow will bluster outside, and butterflies will sleep.  Even the leaves won’t rush by pretending to be butterflies, instead they will be wet and heavy with snow.  I take one day at time mostly, so I haven’t allowed myself to consider the holidays yet; I hate the thought of them.  To pretend they enthuse me for the girls will be hard enough, to lie to myself that I’m looking forward to them would just be stupid.  I am not looking forward to them, to winter, and I think the butterflies have all already gone to sleep.  At least the fall gives me pretend butterflies.  I miss my Gabbie.   Everyday, all day, with every breath.  Forever. 

I have two minds: the one that goes on about my day, about my life, waking up each morning, working, making dinner, being a mother to my girls, being a friend to my friends, being a teacher, and wife and sister and daughter; and then there is the one that is stuck in spring, holding a baby who was born still, remembering her sweet face frozen in time, holding my breath waiting for her to breathe, looking for butterflies, and wondering silently what I ever did and knowing that there is no answer for that question because I did nothing, and trying to make peace.