journey

This blog, and my life, is not just about a journey through grief.  It is about the journey of a mother and a daughter.

It started Tuesday, February 19th 2013 at about 10:20 in the morning, when I took the first positive pregnancy test I have ever taken.

I fell in love.

In the following weeks I was convinced I was having a boy, I just knew it.  Around the end of May we found out I was wrong, it was our beautiful daughter in there.

She grew.  She moved.  There were things I could tell she loved and things she hated.  She hated being hot, and things being too tight.  She loved jazz music.

I did all I could to help her grow.  Read all the books.  Ate the good things.  Avoided the bad.  Carried her, read to her, sang to her, played with her.

Thirty-nine weeks and four days was as long as her journey on Earth could be.  And my journey on Earth since her death has been well, a nightmare.  I was devastated, I was destroyed by her death.

But no matter what, she is--on Earth, beyond it, no matter where that little soul went to when she left us in that hospital room--she is still my daughter.  And our journey as mother and daughter continues.  Death cannot take that from us.

I watched a video the other day that said "You were made from love, to be loved, to spread love."  And that she was.  She spreads love everyday.  She teaches me things everyday.  I write to her, talk to her, sing to her, blow her a thousand kisses e.v.e.r.y.d.a.y.

This is not the journey I planned for us, it's certainly not the one I wanted.  But it is where we are.  And if God came down from the heavens today and said, "I'll give you a living baby right now, one her age, one you can have on Earth, but it won't be her and she won't be your daughter anymore" I would tell him immediately to leave.  I wouldn't choose any child but her.  And if her life was meant to be short and my life was meant to be missing her, so be it.  I'll be on this journey, as long as it is with her.



"You were chosen to be their mother.  Yes--chosen.  And no one could parent them better in life or death than you do."

from this, by Angela Miller

feelings are just visitors, let them come and go

An excerpt from this article by Loni H.E.:

"Losing my daughter was the most horrific, earth shattering loss of my life.  I wanted the world to stop.  I wanted everyone to know how much it hurt.  As time went on and people moved on I found myself enraged at times.  How could anyone pretend things were okay?  How could anyone be okay when my daughter was dead?

As I processed my grief I came to the realization that I was wasting energy trying to make others understand my pain.  I realized that it's a pain they could never comprehend.  Trying to make them understand was like trying to describe the color purple to someone who had never seen it.  Impossible."

If I need to cry I will.

If I need to be sad, I will.

If I need to be fucking angry, I will.

If I need to scream, I will.

If I need to laugh, I will.

If I am feeling hopeful, I will be full of hope for a while.

And sometimes full of love.

Whatever happens through this grief journey, if I need to face it or feel it I will.  The last five months have been harder than I could have ever thought possible to get through.  And I don't think I have even faced the worst of grief, or gotten to the lowest point.  The pain in unexplainable, and I don't have to try to explain it, or try to make anyone understand it.  It does not matter what anyone else thinks, it is a journey, and I have to get through every obstacle and every horrifying feeling.  I have to allow myself to go through it, and try not to be hard on myself, even if no one else understands.

reflections

We had to take the blinds down in our kitchen.  They were up in front of our sliding glass door that goes to our patio.  We had to take them down because our newest puppy kept chewing them up.  I got tired of it and just took them down.

Now when it's dark outside I walk into the kitchen and see my reflection in the glass door.  And there is no hiding from it.  My whole reflection, from head to toe.

For a long time I couldn't look at myself in the mirror.  It will be five months this Saturday that I have walked the earth without my beautiful daughter, and now it is getting a little easier to see my reflection.  But for most of the past few months I couldn't.  I would make a face in the mirror, like scrunching up my nose, to avoid seeing my actual face.  To avoid seeing that person who failed to bring my child crying into this world.  I failed, and I have not really been able to look at myself since.

I used to look at my face in the mirror when I was pregnant and wonder if I looked like a mom yet.  Wonder how I would look carrying her around and pushing her in her stroller with little pink flowers all over it.

I am still her mother.

But a grieving mother is never what I expected to see looking back at me.  It is just a completely different person from who I used to be.

My hair, still short after donating it in memory of her.  I always hated my hair short, it was the longer the better.  Now I couldn't care less.  I am about 10-15 pounds smaller than I was pre-pregnancy, and honestly I would rather weigh 500 pounds and have her.  But I weigh somewhere around 110 I guess.  And I'm still missing the 8 pounds and 1 ounce that was taken from me last October.

My face is the biggest change to me.  Not only because I have given up on makeup, but before she died I knew nothing of loss.  I really knew very little about sadness and certainly nothing about tragedy.  I had a very blessed life.  But my face doesn't reflect innocence and peace anymore.  It is not the same face.

And now the glass door in the kitchen is a reminder of how much has changed, as I stare at a person I really don't recognize looking back at me.  But I know I am still in the middle of this storm.  I know the pain isn't always so sharp, and maybe that reflection will continue to get easier to look at.  And she'll get stronger because of that perfect child.


"Once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before.  If you can live through that you can live through anything.  You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.  You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror.  I can take the next thing that comes along'."


from, You Learn by Living by the lovely Eleanor Roosevelt

discouraged

Here's the thing, my heart is still broken.  

I'm not sure if people expect that life can go back to normal.  But it can't.  There is no normal anymore, and I am just a very broken version that maybe somewhat resembles the person I used to be.

I hear things like I'm "handling things well" a lot.  I don't know why because it's not accurate, but I suppose it's good that it seems like I'm keeping it together.  In reality I'm a complete and total mess and I just want to scream all day and I honest to God don't care about a single thing that isn't my daughter.  Not. A. Single. Thing.

I also don't think about anything else.  Ever.  I miss her literally every second.  I replay the day she was born and died over and over and over and over again all day.  I think about what I should be doing right now.  I am back at work, which is completely bittersweet.  Because yes it is healthier that I'm there because being alone all day dwelling isn't healthy so being there all day (still dwelling, but being around people and having to at least focus a tiny bit on what I'm doing) I suppose is a lot healthier.  But the truth is that what I should be doing is spending all day with my gorgeous daughter being the stay at home mom I planned on being while John was deployed.  So being back at work is good, but is bad too because this is not the way it was supposed to happen.

And oh my God if one more person tells me I can just "have more kids" my brain will explode because I know people mean well but you can't replace a child like you can an ice cream cone.  I can have 27 more kids it won't change the fact that my daughter is dead.  And right now I don't want any other kid but her so even if we do have more it will be oh so many years from now before we are ready for that.  

I am incredibly discouraged.  I am still really in shock that the world keeps turning without her.  How can everything just keep going, how does life go on, how does the sun even rise without her precious soul on this earth?  I just can't believe I keep waking up everyday and it keeps being my reality that she is gone.  And living without her is truly horrible.  I mean honestly, really awful.

I am shocked that things keep moving on around me.  That while babies die people take pictures of their dinner and post them on facebook like that is just the most important thing anyone could talk about.  And it SHOULD be the most important thing anyone could talk about, that should be the way the world is.  Those pictures of simple things need to be posted because life should be that simple.  But it just isn't always and I can't bring myself to care about simple things.

I am discouraged that the world hasn't stopped yet, and I think I just need a serious break from the internet, from everything, until I can appreciate simple things again.  Until I can appreciate anything again.

So I will take a break.  And I will focus on healing.  Cause I can't do anything positive for her if I can never see the light.  And there will come a day when there will be something simple I'll care about.  And a day when I'll feel okay about being okay again.  

"I sit motionless, draw inside, 

duck my head

while the world goes hurtling past.

While all the objects of my universe orbit-

sickening circles-

while everything else keeps going.

I thought it was you who had stopped, but I have."

from "Still." by Anne Morris (found in to linger on hot coals)