Waiting to exhale

My bad season starts all the way at the end of November. It's the feeling of walking towards the edge. Not all the way to it yet, but certainly towards. December 31st is our N years and 11 months day. It's been tough so far, for N=0 and N=1, to reconcile New Year's Eve, a big, huge deal for those who hail from the Old Country, with the inescapable understanding that the event being celebrated takes us smack into the longest, coldest anniversary month. Januaries themselves have so far been difficult. Not every day, but many. Most? And when that's over, there is still, just over the February hump, the due date anniversary.

Two years ago today was the Tuesday after. After the due date, due date that is the day after his sister's birthday. Monkey was born on her due date, which is why, I think, even though A has his own birth day, I am unable to let go of the due date. Two years ago today was also the Tuesday after Monkey's 5th birthday party. For which I'd gone entirely overboard. The present she wanted most of all-- her baby brother to be born right on her birthday,-- wasn't going to happen. So it's only logical that I went into overdrive for this party, yes? And it was a good party, don't get me wrong. Hell, it was a great party. And in the end I was exhausted, overwhelmed by tiredness, but also (DUH!) by grief.

And yet, there was not much room for me to cocoon-- my house was teeming with relatives. They've come to celebrate the birthday and to mark the due date. They've done both, and it was good. But, at times, it was also too much. Too much noise, too much talk, too much space, physical and head both, occupied.

Two years later, and the season had been hard, again. Heh-- not so much had as has. The season is still hard, and still going on. I think I expected it to be easier. Not easy, just easier. And, I realize now, I expected it to end already. What, too much to ask?

It's not that I think things should be easy by now, an it's not that I expect a magic wand to be waived the day after an anniversary, freeing us for another year. It's more that I think of these seasons as release valves, allowing us to feel and release whatever hard things need to be felt. This year, though, I think I have been too crowded to exercise the valve, my mom here for a visit on the anniversary, and now both my parents for this year's iteration of Monkey's birthday followed by the due date anniversary. The time in between eaten up by work and more work and some garden variety colds.

My parents left Tuesday morning, and that afternoon, after I dropped Monkey off at gymnastics, I headed for the cemetery. I haven't been since A's birthday, when the snow was covering the ground, knee-deep. I hadn't planned to go. But my plans changed midday, and suddenly I was the designated gymnastics driver, and the place being not five miles from the cemetery, I had to go. Had you been magically transported into my car at that very moment to magically ask me what it was I was hoping to find where I was going, I am not sure I would be able to tell you. I have been blocked, crowded, boxed in. Maybe it was the open space and the early spring air I was seeking, pleasantly cool, with just a hint of the warm that is to come in the months ahead. Maybe I was hoping to cry buckets and leave cleansed. Maybe. I don't even know that I can say that. I was suffocating. I needed a change, some kind of change.

Monkey's birthday weekend was an exercise in just enough-- just enough barely controlled chaos to give the girl a great celebration without losing my ever-loving mind. Monday, the due date anniversary, was a ridiculously busy work day, loaded up with holy crap, how did I miss this-- Purim is tonight?!?!?! And parents. Whom I love dearly, and who are really usually better than most. But what I needed was room, and instead they hovered.

Did you know that I was supposed to post on Monday? I asked for the date on our cozy little GITW scheduling calendar. I thought I would have things to say. Something profound perhaps, about the birthday and the due date, the sweet and the bitter. Something. What I had, just then, and for two more days after, was a whole lot of nothing.

I am a bit better now. But only just better. Getting my house back to myself (and the usual suspects residing therein) has helped. But the week has continued in the busy, though no longer impossible, mode. The weekend in front of me is busy again, with the things that need doing in the here and now. Deliverables, so to speak. And so I continue to leaf through the calendar, forward, looking for less, looking for days not already overcommitted, not promised to too many tasks.

I am looking for the time I can spend with myself, and with A. Because this is what this is really about-- he is being crowded out. I allow him to be crowded out. I never did cry at the cemetery this Tuesday. I felt the weight, played with it, shifted it around. But it didn't come out. I guess it's not ready to come out. Yet.

What are your seasons? If you've gone through a few now, how have they been for you? Do you ever feel too crowded? How do you find, create, or protect the time and space you need?

birthday blues

I’ve been struggling to the point of physical sickness this week, obsessing about what should have been. Imagining balloons and cake and hours of smiling video. Sadie would have been one yesterday. It was frankly one the hardest days I’ve had so far.

Everything that’s been mercifully floating around the periphery lately crashed in on me over the last few days. I was back at her bedside. Pacing the waiting room in the PICU. Saying goodbye.

.:.

I’ve been trying with great difficulty to find something hopeful to say here as I’m typically not one to be dark or melancholy. But it occurred to me that this is exactly the place where I will be understood if my armour does slip momentarily. Even the most resilient grow weary on occasion. And truth be told, I’m just really goddamn tired.

I’d like a free pass that says I can shut the world out for a time in order to selfishly tend to myself. Be it sleeping away a day or reading a book in one sitting or walking central London in silence, I earned it when I suffered this loss, didn’t I? My pass would read, ‘Get out of my face and just understand. I’ll be back when I’m ready. I promise.’

Of course it doesn’t work that way. God knows disappearing or shutting out the world completely would try the patience of even our most perservering family and friends. But to drop all pretense on my random dismal days, with friends and colleagues and strangers in the street bearing witness, doesn’t really jive either.

I feel the only thing to do is go back to polishing my metal. Ride out days like this causing as little collateral damage as possible. Look for the next bright one. Wonder if anyone realizes how I'm cursing pretty much everything in my path until it comes.

.::.

My deepest desire, aside from having her here with us, has been to be assured that she knew how deeply she was loved. That she changed my life distinctly and forever for the better. That my heart aches always in her absence. That she knows I would love nothing more than to pull her into my arms and sing, "Happy birthday, Baby," softly in her ear.

.::.

How do you deal with dark days? Are you better on your own, or does it help to be surrounded by people?

7 x 7 january 2009: The Medusas on Seasons, Holidays, -versaries

 

Used to be I loved trying to catch the turn -- and between autumn and winter, that's no small feat.  Somewhere between the leaves falling and the sky darkening lay a change in my mindset.  I loved scarves, the smell of fires, and fluffy robes.  I joyfully brought the evergreen into my home, baked, and wrapped the presents just so.  I gleefully sacked out with beer and chips for 12 hours of football.  And after presenting myself with a new calendar, I continued to revel in the frost, sledding, ice skating.  Watching cardinals and jays snipe in the frost-covered trees. Eating comfort food.  Poo-poo'ing my way through Valentine's Day, but certainly using the excuse to make something chocolate for dessert.  And after using the excuse of my birthday in the waning hours of winter to try out a new cake recipe, I'd start to look for the next turn:  the first crocus, the emergent bud, the lone daffodil.

I hate the turn now.  The darkness descends so early, I think of nothing but sleep all day long.  The trees look ugly and naked, it seems as if it only rains ice, sideways.  Decorating is exhausting, my favorite sweaters no longer fit.  Melted cheese is no longer comforting, but a nutritional staple.  And after the bowl games are recorded, I know damn well what comes next, what awaits me in the dead center of winter:  February.  A week of remembering and trying to forget.  Followed by a hollowed-out sense of misery, as the salt and last remaining patches of snow turn dirty on the street corners.  Winter is cold and brutal and hard, the holidays empty.  

All because Maddy died when she did.

Lost in my winter shuffle is another turn, that of a New Year. Lucy's right, you know -- why the Happy?  It's a new year, certainly, but "new" is rather neutral, is it not?  A "new experience,"  or "a new normal" doesn't mean it's a happy one, as we all well know. And for that matter, why does a Holiday or a Birthday need to be Happy?  Maybe this is just my cynicism regarding New Year's, lost in the morass of the winter blues.  My year now rotates on another axis entirely.

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Join us for a Winter/Holiday/New Year's 7x7, won't you? Here are the questions:

1 | Welcome to 2009. What have you left behind in the year just past? What do you hope to find in the year to come?

2 | We've just come through the season in which our culture touts cheer and peace and family togetherness rather relentlessly. How did your child's death impact your experience of the "holiday" season, personally or culturally?

3 | If you celebrate in any way through December, are there ways you include or acknowledge your lost baby/babies?

4 | Through the year are there any holidays, seasons, or parts of what were once cherished rituals that have changed for you because of your child's death?

5 | Do you do anything to remember your baby/babies' birth and/or death day? Or will you?

6 | Is there anything about the winter season (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere right now) that lifts your spirits? Is there anything that especially brings them down?

7 | During your hardest times, how have you found your way forward?

Read our answers, and then we'd love to read yours.  If you have a blog, share the link to your answers in the comments here, and link back to us here on your blog -- if you don't have a blog, please answer in the comments directly. (Comments turned off at the end of this post; please go to 7x7 page.)

Your answers may not be naively happy, iced in royal frosting, and curled up in cashmere, but perhaps there is relief, or hope, or simply a comforting shared sense of despair in knowing how the holidays and special events in life pass for others.

eight short words

Three years ago.

It was three years ago today I left the hospital for the first time after nearly three weeks of bedrest.  I'd been airlifted in during winter's last April gasp, but in my hermetic isolation in ye olde Craftmatic, the ground had transformed into a mushy carpet, spongy with sprigs of green poking through it.  I felt like Rip Van Winkle, utterly out of time.

We drove out of the city, to the old tower on its outskirts, the one I'd climbed as a child every time we visited.  My legs were weak and I walked gingerly.  I was not in pain, per se...just timid, afraid I would break.  The tower was closed, too old, too dangerous to be left open for tourists any longer.  I stood in front of it, staring, as if I looked long and hard enough I might catch a glimpse of a younger me, might disappear with her into a different time, any other time than this.

She did not materialize, that former self.  And I realized, viscerally, that she never would again...that there was no going back.  I had stepped off the side of my own flat earth.

I turned in the rain, then, and tested my footing on the slippery bank of overgrowth there that leads up and then down, eventually, to the harbour.  I climbed a little, until I was alone on a low ridge, looking down through the brush on tiny sailboats, seabirds.  And when I was sure I was far enough away that no one could hear me, I spoke into the wind, and spoke his name for the first time in the thirty-six hours since he'd died.

i had a son.  his name was Finn.

It was only a whisper, spoken to raindrops.  But I knew it might be a very long time before I had the courage to say those words aloud again, to risk exposing the gaping wound I had suddenly become, to risk being that crazy lady talking about her dead baby.  I knew too that I needed, desperately, to mark him on the world, to tell someone of my joy and my pride in him, of my sorrow, to tell that he had been here. 

My tears mixed with the rain and those eight words echoed.
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It was only in the year and more after his death that those echoes found expression anywhere, for me.  On my blog, I began to carve out a space in which I could say his name, lay out sides of my parenting experience that I had no way to speak in polite company.  I felt exposed, but freed, too.  And in finding ways to incorporate Finn's story into my own narratives of myself as parent, I slowly became, once more, a version of whole.

Of the six of us here, I am the furthest out on this road of grieving and healing, the one whose loss is the furthest removed in time.  I am the one whose firstborn died, who went home both a mother and not a mother.  I was utterly changed by the eleven hours of my son's life, but the disconnect between the internal sea change of becoming a parent and the external lack of anything to show for it...that sparked its own particular grief and isolation.  I am the only one, yet, who has had another child born since my loss, and perhaps the only one who has had another loss in the interim.  I am proof of survival. And I am grateful to be in the company of these woman here, sister Medusas and friends, all of us with our stories.  

My name is Bonnie.  I had a son.  His name was Finn. 

Welcome.