Unbalanced Life

Can't sleep lately at night. Although I can sleep all day, it seems. Strange unbalanced life.

M. and I stayed up (again) talking last night until almost dawn. He was fired on May 5 (don't panic... it's not a bad thing... his old job was horrible and only fired him because he'd already found something else...) and had last week off entirely. This week and next, he's working a short schedule at the new job, so we have more time together. It's been such a relief, and so very needed. I think he's recovering from the anxious atmosphere of his previous employer. He has so much more life and energy. I have my husband back.

Today was our final postpartum visit with our midwife, which was a much needed few hours of conversation about life and birth and death. Lots of laughter and tears and even a bit of closure, I think. She says she would be happy to do our next birth... assuming we have one. I have been thinking a lot about that possibility lately, impatiently waiting for my cycles to return. M. and I have talked about it, and we probably will try again. I said, before William was born, that it felt as if someone were missing from our family. Now, someone really is... 

Today was also my fifteen-year-old son's choir concert. B. had a solo, and it was the first one we've been able to make it to this year (M's schedule and the distance between our house and my ex's really precluded it.) He was amazing - I was impressed. And I found myself wiping away tears (again... I do that a lot lately) because seeing him doing something he loves moved me so much. I don't think there is anything quite as satisfying as watching your child doing something they truly love and are passionate about. Made me happy for him, and sad for William, who will won't be here to find that thing, whatever it might have been, that made him light up that way.

I suppose everything will be measured this way now. Graduations, new jobs, marriages... lost teeth, school plays, puberty... I will celebrate with my living children and still be thinking about my dead one.

The older kids' stepmom stopped me and expressed her condolences about William. It's funny, but sometimes in these situations, I feel like I'm comforting them, not the other way around. 

I'm so tired. Maybe I can sleep tonight. I can understand the inclination to start taking medication - Ambien, valium, whatever works - just to sleep, to ease the anxiety, to numb the pain.

Sometimes I read over these posts and think I sound so melodramatic. God, I even get sick of hearing myself go on about it. I would give anything to feel something else besides sad, angry or depressed.

Frozen

We had a frost last night.

The kids woke up and thought it snowed. :)

Luckily, I'd checked the weather last night and knew it was coming. I had M. run outside at midnight and cover all the tiny little shoots coming up in William's garden. They're growing like crazy, but they're still tiny, just babies really, and would have died overnight in the frost.

I went out this morning to uncover them and burst into tears.

It's been six weeks since he died and I haven't cried like that since the beginning - huge body-wracking sobs. I wanted to dig into the earth, crawl into a hole, bury myself under the weight of the world and die... oh blessed relief from this constant pain. 

I should be worrying about and covering my baby at night to keep him warm. I should be watching my baby growing, changing every day. 

Instead, I get to cover a garden at night to keep it warm. I get tend to a garden instead of my son, watch it grow and change instead of watching my son's day to day development.

The garden is growing and my son is dead, frozen in time, exactly the same, a baby in my memory forever. It's not what I wanted. This isn't what I wanted at all. My baby is gone, and I get to make a memorial garden. It's not much of a consolation. But what else can I do? I can't turn back the clock, I can't change anything, I can't undo his death. I want to. God knows I want to. My whole body has been screaming, "I want a do-over!" since the moment I found out he was gone.

But if I can't have my son, I guess I'm supposed to be content with growing flowers in the dirt in his memory.

Maybe I can keep them alive. 

That would be something.

Wee Hours

M. and I met online back when AOL charged by the hour. Luckily for our bank accounts, we were local to each other, and quickly switched to phone conversations. And those often lasted long into the wee hours of the morning in those falling-in-love days. 

Last night was reminiscent of one of those, a sweet surprise.

M. and I started talking when we got into bed and didn't stop until the birds were starting to sing outside our window. It's been over ten years now since those first phone conversations, and I love the man I married more now than I ever thought possible.

But those ten years have been filled with a lot of ups and downs - especially the last six or so. We've had a great deal of trials thrown our way in those years, and William is the last (but certainly not the least) in a long line of tragedies and calamities that have come along in the past decade.

I've had people comment on how strong our marriage is, how amazing that we're still together. I know couples who would have fallen apart or turned on each other instead of to each other in our circumstances.  I'm grateful for what we have, believe me. We each have plenty of faults, but somehow we manage, even in the midst of pain, to keep loving each other.

But there are times I forget how blessed I am. There have been times when I was ready to give up. There have been times when M. was, too. There have been times we've been mean, or distant, or indifferent to each other. There are times, sometimes long stretches of time, when we take each other for granted.

Last night wasn't any of those.

Last night we connected, spooned in the darkness and talking into the first light of morning, in a way we haven't in a long, long time. We reminisced, we waxed nostalgic, we laughed. For the most part, our conversation wasn't about William...but it was because of him.

What a gift, in the midst of the pain of our baby's death, to be open to such love. 

Thank you, William. 
I love you.

Steps

I don't leave the house. 

I rarely get out of bed before noon. 

There was a time when I took somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 steps a day. I know, because I have a step counter I used to put in my pocket just to give me an idea how active I was being... but I haven't used it since William died.

This week, I found it and put it in my pocket, just for chucks and giggles.

Do you know how many steps I averaged a day this week?

600

That's not a typo. That's six hundred, not six thousand.

It doesn't just feel like everything has stopped... it really has. I'm not going anywhere, I'm not doing anything. It's three in the afternoon on a Saturday, I haven't showered or eaten, and I'm still in a dark room sitting on my bed doing basically nothing.

I thought I knew what depression looked like before this happened.

I had no idea.

Sacrifice

The bills are rolling in.

First there was the bill from the ultrasound. The dead baby ultrasound. Then there was the pathology bill. The one for the examination of the placenta of the dead baby. Yesterday it was the bill from the obstetrician. For the delivery of the dead baby. Everyone wants payment for services rendered. And I truly can't imagine anything I'd resent paying for more than any of the above.

Oh, well, there was my son's cremation. Fifty dollars to cremate a five pound baby. I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 to cremate my father. M. stared at the $50 bill and then asked, sarcastically, "What? Do they charge by the pound?"

The injustices don't seem to end.

I recently discovered that, although we were required to fill out all the paperwork for William's death certificate, he will not be issued a birth certificate. According to the government, he was never born. He never lived. All those kicks and rolls and hiccups inside of me... what? Never happened? I imagined them? I imagined him?

Apparently, it's a pro-choice/pro-life issue. If a state issued a birth certificate for a 39-week-old "fetus" - they might have to issue a "birth" certificate for a 10-week-old one. You can imagine the disaster of an argument that might make, I'm sure.

So William has to pay for someone else's political argument. He is their sacrifice. Sweet, perfect baby, most certainly "alive" only twelve hours before his birth, perhaps twenty-four. 

So instead of being issued a birth certificate, I had to pay for two - a stillbirth certificate (the state's consolation - I'm lucky to live in a place that offers one as most don't) and a death certificate.

The list of horrors we've had to pay for over the last six weeks, the cost of my son's death,  just keep mounting.

And I'd give every damned penny I have or will ever have again, just to have him back.

Yellow Day

A good day.

Beautiful, bright. 

A full breath day. 

Most days since William died it feels like I can't take a full breath. Everything is shallow, fragile. Mostly, it feels like I have to move carefully or things will just fall apart.

Today was a long drive, loud radio, singing at the top of our lungs day. M. and I held hands and laughed and talked about silly things. Jack Johnson on the Ipod. Upside Down: 

I want to turn the whole thing upside down
I'll find the things they say just can't be found
I'll share this love I find with everyone
We'll sing and dance to Mother Nature's songs
I don't want this feeling to go away 

We played "yellow" - a car game where you keep track of all the yellow cars you see on the trip - every yellow car is one point. School busses and construction vehicles are exempt. Yellow motorcycles are two points. Yellow slugbugs (VW beetles) are three points. Yellow Mustangs and Chargers aren't extra points but they make M's eyes light up anyway.

A yellow day. 

A mellow, yellow day.

And when Cats in the Cradle came on the radio, I was quick to change the station this time. (It did... I'm not making that up. It really did come on the radio... ;) 

It was the first time I'd made the conscious choice since William died not to be sad. 

I said "no" to sad today. 

It showed up in that moment, but I gave it quick once-over and sent it back out the door. 

Not today.

Today I want to breathe and be something other than blue.

Yellow. 

A million points for yellow today. 

A million points plus infinity.

The Land of Milk and Tears

I heard a baby's heartbeat for the first time since William died.

I thought my own heart would stop.

There we were, sitting and waiting for the OB to come in, and in the next room, there it was, a sudden racehorse gallop... It didn't last long. Twenty seconds, maybe thirty. I froze. I felt like someone had plunged me into ice water. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't move. The nurse came in a moment later and I blinked it away.

Last night I dreamed of that sound, like a drumbeat calling me. I was searching in the darkness, and every breath I took felt as if I'd swallowed glass. Then the sound stopped. It just stopped, and I stood there, paralyzed, unable anymore to follow the sound of his beating heart.

There was just the silence, a stillness beyond measure, and I stood alone, unable to go on. Frozen. Directionless. Lost.

I was crying when I woke up - already crying, my pillow wet.

It was that instant, when we looked for his heartbeat and found only silence, that will forever mark the moment in time I fell, tumbled, was pushed into this land of the lost. Mothers wander here, calling for their babies. The land of milk and tears. We search in vain for the sound of our child's beating heart as a guide. But they are gone from us, silent, behind the veil, no longer in the place where hearts beat and lungs draw breath. They were born into silence, into this world but not of it, their time here spent only as an empty vessel, a tiny boat sailing onward toward infinity.

Like my dream, I cannot follow, but I cannot move forward yet without my heart, the heart that was William, the heart that was supposed to go around my whole life beating outside of my body in his.

I am stuck, frozen in this liminal space, unable to follow the sound of his silent heart and unwilling to leave this place I knew him last.

For me, now, this place is all there is.

This is where I live now.

The land of the lost.

The land of milk and tears.