Two years ago after the arrival and departure of Gabbie I remember very little about the hospital and the physical pain except the heartache because at that time the grief was a physical heart-skipping-beats kind of agony. I could not tell you who visited us there except for a small few including some family and a friend who also suffered a loss like ours. I had had a c-section with Gabbie also. I don't remember anything about it aside from what happened in the hospital.
Two weeks after I delivered her beautiful body, we said goodbye officially. I stood for hours at her funeral and hugged and cried with so many. I stood for hours split from hip to hip with deep pink around the mostly unhealed incision, perhaps with my stitches still in. I'd even gone shopping with my sister to get a dress that was appropriate to wear. I did it without thinking about the incision, without thinking about the pain or perhaps even noticing it. This time I couldn't even get out of bed two weeks later much less walk through a store and I definitely couldn't stand for hours wrapping my arms around anything but myself and my own physical pain. I see the me of two years ago in my memory and I realize that the darkness that consumed me then was so complete it made me blind to everything inside me.
The point of comparison is almost apples to oranges. My heartache washed everything else away. Where as then I struggled to get out of bed because the darkness of grief, like night, was all around me and blinded me to everything else, this time the darkness is only within. I can see the outside. I just can't seem to get there.
I went to the dentist yesterday. The same one I had gone to just after Gabbie was born. Then the women in the office made a big deal about me having her without ever asking how it went. I had lied then at the end of the appointment and said she was fine after sitting quiet too weak to set them straight while they told their beautiful stories of their healthy babies. I was emotionally scarred from it. I have not returned in two years and now I probably need a root canal. The dentist scolded me for not taking care of my teeth because he presumed it was out of laziness that I had not returned more often. I did not explain the real reason though I wish I had or could. It was his staff and their sincere naive and blind pleasure in my delivery that made me not return. That is not easy to explain nor understand. And then when I finally was up to going back in I'd been pregnant and couldn't get X-rays to have a thurough check. But I'm there now and that should count for something however people presume too much and now again I don't want to go back because I've been made to feel small. Perhaps this is where I should note.... Doctors, if someone comes to you after an extended absence or even a forever absence seeking help, don't scold them for not coming in sooner, instead be gracious that they are there. You'll only make them wish they never came.
So my point about the dentist is that when I could have returned to get X-rays between pregnancies the pain of a tooth was so far from my mind that, like the physical pain of a c-section, I could not feel it in the darkness just after Gabbie. It is another example of the strength of grief. Now I see and feel enough to at least attempt to take care of me physically. That is a stride, it is evidence in the stages of healing my heart.
But now, two years removed from that pain that I could not feel, it is the most recent point of comparison. The only thing I remember about then was the self loathing at the perceived reason for losing her: my own body. My body created the water that allowed her room to move. My body did not tell me she was leaving. I was not aware she needed saving nor was I mentally aware enough to do the things that might have saved her. And yes I'm back to this... I still have levels of that self loathing for a body I feel failed her and me. I am more accepting of the fact that I had no control but acceptance is not forgiveness. A part of me had hoped, I think, that this c-section would redeem my faith in my own body, that somehow this recovery would make up for the things my heart (not my rational mind) perceives as fatal flaws. But I've again been disappointed. My body is falling terribly short of whatever standard I had unwittingly and unfairly set for myself. I am again disappointed by my physical capabilities or lack thereof. I am struggling through a recovery that is more "there", more harsh, more complicated than the most recent comparison. It is as though now I am hurting enough for two surgeries because I never physically felt the last one. And I feel I am not handling it well and I am now ashamed that I have handled it all with such a lack of grace.
In all the world I am my own worst critic. I have so little control over what my body does. I'm a soul inside a vessel set to sea; sometimes I can steer it and other times I have to go where the tide takes me. What I do have is my reaction to it and I have even fallen sadly short of the standard I've been striving for. I'm trying to redirect the thoughts of disappointment in myself and my experience to something more positive and self affirming. It's is not easy but I risk the darkness in me becoming darker if I don't. I have good qualities. I need to focus on them more. At least now I have stepped from the darkness enough to know I need to find better ways to take care of, love, and forgive myself for whatever wrongs against my soul I have imagined.
