Farewell November

Tomorrow is the last day of the second last month of the shittiest year of my entire life. Tomorrow I have a medium/ clairvoyant/psychic coming to give me a reading. Tomorrow I hope she comes through somehow, though I am not banking on it. I took off tomorrow because sky doesn't have school, so instead of crying in the car by myself like I've done every day for months now I will have to find a way to hide It. Tomorrow I will miss her no less than I do today or than I did 6 months ago. Some days I still wish I never had to leave my bed. Some days I wish I could go back and start the year over again. I'd be so much more careful. I read some posts today about women running marathons and doing p90x while very pregnant (and I'd apologize in advance if the comments were yours but, well, I'm just not sorry for referencing you total naïvety) and the only thing I can think is, "seriously? You run a marathon at 9 months pregnant and come home with a beautiful baby and I can't even do normal stuff like wake up in the morning with mine." The total ridiculous unfairness of it is mind numbing.
So I bid the month of November farewell. The only reason I will be sad to see you go is because I am then another month from holding my Gabbie.

Throwing up festivities

Shopping for Christmas presents and the stubborn thought in my head that keeps making an appearance in a rather obtrusive kind of way, but I insistently push away is, "I'd have been buying baby presents this year too." 

Do you know how hard it is to wander through a store where there's so much festive spirit it's nearly thrown up in red and green, jingle bells and lights all over the store, and to have thoughts like this? I love Christmas usually however, this aspect of it this year sucks and makes my insides feel empty.

Blessings

A day to give thanks for the things we have: Thanksgiving.  Seems pretty simple right? Except to everyone who's ever lost anyone.

I am thankful for a job that I really do love that puts food on the table, helps pay the bills and puts a roof over the heads of the people who mean the most to me. But I am most thankful for my husband who has never stopped loving me, my girls for having patience in me and strength of character when I do not, my family and friends for showing me what support really looks like, and for Gabbie for teaching me selfless love.   

So I sit down today with family with a torn heart.  This would have been Gabbie's first family holiday.  While simultaneously looking around at all those blessings that make me happy and thankful I am deeply hurt that I've been denied another blessing.  And you might think that I should be thankful to have known her for what I did, or to think about the things about her that make me thankful.  The overriding factor is she is not here to hold and I am deeply sad.  Those are miniscule moments in a lifetime that she gave me  of thankfulness are also the very moments that have given me the most pain.

There are mornings still that I cry on my way to work. There are nights in the past month that I've put her bear on my pillow to touch while I fall asleep.  Many moments I have considered a counselor but pride keeps me from going because I feel like I should be stronger than that and I don't want to pay someone to listen to me when I have so many who will listen without money.  The thing about that is I don't want to paint my sadness on others so I tend not to share much anymore. 

So please, just consider for a moment while you say your thanks that many people have lost some very important reasons to be thankful and the empty chairs around the table and missing faces to kiss are painfully evident this holiday season.  I may have an angel but I'd prefer to have a Gabbie. 

So this Thanksgiving... Thank you for listening, supporting and loving. Thank you for your prayers and thoughts.  And thank you for looking about you today and loving the faces you see, hugging the ones that you can, and being thankful for the things that matter.  (I write this while hugging the 2 year old little monkey laying on Daddy's pillow next to me watching Mickey). 

An epiphany

I had an epiphany today. 

Wandering around our place cleaning and organizing my anxiety mounted.  Why, I wondered.  Why would I have anxiety with no place to be and no place to go?  My kids are here, arguing of course, but here nonetheless and no worse for wear, so no worries with them.  My husband is out in the woods hunting, but only with a bow, so there’s no real danger in that.  So, why the crazy rise in anxiety? 

With each bill, mail or item of note I’ve found in my cleanings, my anxiety rises.  What if I missed some date?  What if this bill wasn’t paid and needed to be paid by me?  What if I’ve messed up somehow?  What if I’ve missed some important deadline?  I know, I know, so what right?  But so what IS what.  What if somehow I’m even more at fault even by accident?  Tears roll.  Stupid stupid tears.  It’s not my fault. 

I don’t want it to be my fault.  I don’t want to be the one who makes more mistakes, who no matter how I try or what I do I can’t be right.  I try to be ON and then I make a mistake (like all people do) and I feel like I have even less control.   So I was thinking… and this is where the epiphany comes.  I keep having anxiety about being wrong, making an error, a mistake and no matter how small that error may be, it is as though it’s even more evidence that I am not good at life.  Not life, but… things.  I don’t want to be wrong in a way that affects others.  I don’t want to be wrong in a way that is more than just an error of facts.  And why should that matter when everyone is wrong sometimes?  Because somewhere inside me I feel as though, it is my body’s fault that Gabbie did not live.  And if I cannot even trust this vessel that I reside in to do what it was made to do correctly, then how can I trust myself to be effective, correct, on, good at stuff?  I know it seems like they should be unrelated.  How does one prove the other?  It doesn’t, but that’s where the anxiety comes from.  I am afraid that this life will prove to me that all the things I thought I was decent at, made for, was once capable of doing well, could be proud of myself for being able to do, are actually the things that I’m awful at.  I am afraid that my errors will cause hardships for others and will prove that I am no good at being reliable.  I always tried to be reliable, someone everyone could count on.  Yet Gabbie’s death somehow, in my head somewhere, provided some sort of hard evidence, or proof, that I can’t count on myself, and that neither can others. I thought that makes me sad.

I know what you are going to say.  “It is not your fault.” “You couldn’t have known.”  I know. I know these things… and yet, it was my body that failed me.  Failed her.  My body produces too much fluid.  Because of the fluid, there was too much room for her to move.  It was my body that failed us no matter how I tried. 

Please don’t concern yourself with this.  It is just a realization of the reasoning behind my anxiety.  I have found its root.  Now I have to come to terms with it.  Somehow. 

“Don’t be silly,” says a voice in my head, “it’s not something you did.”

“I know it’s not something I did,” another responds, “It’s something I couldn’t do.” 

Infinite beauty in sorrow

I have decided that a blog is a build-up of emotions.  When it just gets too much to keep in anymore and the dam breaks, out it pours.  Every emotion, thought, perception, and stress comes ripping out of me, streaks down my face, slowly gouging fine creases, and pours itself in sunken draining woes through the sopping words and intense grammar on the page.  Damn, if I dealt with heartache and stress through comedic relief I’d be a millionaire in standup comedy by now.  But instead, I write down the complex stressors that have become my life in a finite script on some mythical, technological web for the world to know the sorrows that consume me. 

On the surface, the stressors would mirror anyone else’s.  And they do mirror everyone else’s.  The weight, the daily stress of life and work and family, these are the same as others’. But beneath the surface lurks a deep, heavy sadness with infinite beauty.  I may have high cholesterol now, as my doctor apparently tells me.  I may indeed have high triglycerides because I have extra body fat that I didn’t have before.  But I have these ailments because I made a beautiful baby, a baby that I carried within me for 9 months, and now, through the rest of life I will carry still.  There in is the burden.  It is not the extra fat around my hips, or on my waist line.  It is not the jeans that will not fit, nor the fats inside me that are not healthy, although, yes these are obstacles.  But no, these are not the burdens that weigh on me.  It is the weight of that child, that sweet baby who has left her soul inside me.  It is the weight of that soul that I must carry forever.  Her memory lives within me, for I am all she had ever known.  The memory of her movements still resides within me, in the soft straining of the muscles that are no longer taught.  She may have passed up to heaven, but the weight of the remnants of memories and hopes and dreams are heavy; they are a weight that will be carried through time only determinable by fate.  As with all weights, the more you carry it the more accustomed to it you become.  It is not that the weight gets lighter; it just becomes easier to bear out of practice.  Similar to a first-time mother becoming accustomed to carrying a baby around on her hip while she goes about her daily routine of cleaning and chore, the weight will become manageable for practice, but it is a weight that I cannot put down and don’t know if I’d want to if I could. 

                The beauty in the sadness stems from the amount of love I had for this tiny little girl I never really got to meet, though I knew her to my core.  If a sadness can be this deep, this intense, it can only be born from a love equally intense.  Each tear I cry is shed to lighten the load of carrying such a heavily burdened sorrow born from love.  It takes so many tears to equal the balance of sorrow so heavy that millions of woefully laden tears, a lifetime of them, will be shed like ballast.  They need to be shed to make room for the weight of a burden as heavy as love, hopes, and dreams unfulfilled by a stillborn baby.   It is only love so beautiful and infinite that can cause this sadness that burdens a heart with the weight of another soul for a lifetime.

A nightmare, a psychic and a baby shower... no joke

I had a nightmare last night.  This one was about Gracie.  We had moved to a new place.  The place looked sort of like an old church but not the congregational pulpit area but more of like the communal area.  We didn’t have much furniture.  It was like we had just moved in.  For a few nights in a row, Gracie seemed to disappear to somewhere and return late in the night.  This Gracie in my dream was still only 2 and a half.  When I asked her where she went she said “with them.”  I wanted to know who “them” referred to.  She didn’t have an answer.  All Gracie could tell me is that whoever it was, they wanted her to follow them and so she did.  But she would come back and not be able to explain where she’d been.  At one point, when I was frantic with worry, because no matter how closely I watched her she still would leave, I rushed outside with a flashlight just as she returned and I screamed into the night, “Who are you? What do you want from her?”  But there was no answer and I woke up with my heart racing. 

It was the kind of dream that sticks with you throughout the day, the kind of dream that you remember in vivid detail.  I have to wonder if others have dreams like I dream, and what these dreams could mean if anything.  What darkness must be in my subconscious for me to dream such rattling dreams, that they shape my day into darkness. 

Speaking of darkness, I don’t cry as much as I used to, which I guess is a victory.  However, I feel a darkness inside, a deep sadness that stays with me no matter how I go about my day, no matter what I do. 

I went to a psychic.  She had some interesting things to say.  When she brought up my astrological chart, the first words from her mouth were, “Whoa sweetie, you have a lot going on here.”  She went on about the kind of person I am first.  Then she pointed out that I felt a deep loss in June, that the loss was something that shook me to my soul and rocked the people around me.  She said that the loss likely occurred before June but that it really hit home in June, and then again in September.  She said that I will never forget this year but that I will never have another like it.  It was a once in 84 years kind of years. She claimed that though I was suffering still from this loss, it was also a year of rebirth and that things would slowly get easier because we would start over. She had me shuffle her tarot cards and each card she pulled was a death card.  She said that this loss must be the kind of loss that is not ordinary; it was not someone old who passed, or someone you would expect to lose.  She knew we moved and said that it was a good thing for us.  She said other things, but, perhaps one of the most important things is that she claimed that if D and I would try again in late August of next year that we would most likely have a better outcome.  I am hopeful and terrified. 

I also went to my first post-Gabbie baby shower.  There was more anxiety leading up to it than at the actual event, although I could not stay to watch the opening of presents.  I did actually buy her a gift of baby clothes that I picked out, and did not settle on a gift card.  However, I could not stand and read baby shower cards in the store so instead picked a blank one.  The baby shower was for my best friend; she was the only other person besides my mom and the pastor who stayed with us to meet Gabbie and hold her.  I would go to the ends of the earth for this woman.  Perhaps I should have gone shopping for her on a previous day, but in all it was not bad.  The anxiety came from not wanting to draw attention to me at an event that was for her and I was so afraid I’d not be able to hold it together.  But I did, mostly, except when I first saw her.  Her family has been an extension of my family since we were kids.  I am thankful she is my friend and lucky to have her. This is one more hurdle, another “first” that I overcame.  How many more firsts are there?  Sometimes the hurdles seem so high I wonder if I can fly.  I will be there in the hospital to meet the sweet baby boy when he finally, with all of God's grace, sees the other side.  I am terrified for her.  Absolutely and utterly terrified.  I can only pray with all my heart that it turns out okay.

 I wonder if the stress of the day didn’t bring on the nightmare. I wonder if the nightmares are the way for my body to release some of the sad darkness in me.  The are definitely not a joke.  They cause me to wake with racing heart, sometimes whimpering, sometimes crying out, and often with tears rolling down my face.  The nightmares, like the sorrow, stay with me for so long, like a very heavy package I cannot set down.  I am tired from carrying them with me.