curiosity killed the cat

By nature, I am an extremely curious person. I love to ask questions, I love to know your story, I love looking at pictures and getting a glimpse into people’s lives. I think that’s why I took to face.book so quickly a few years ago when I joined up.  At that time, only a few of my friends were on it and it was much quieter. These days, it has taken on a life of it’s own. Everyone is on it and giving the play by play of what used to be the mundane and ordinary parts of our lives.

But at my age, almost everyone I know is married with a family.  This year, though, it seemed like there were more babies being born then ever before. Or maybe it’s because everyone is sharing all about it in detail. When I was pregnant, it was fun. I loved sharing my updates, my excitement, connecting with old friends who were also pregnant. But now, wow, being in this situation – it’s like a daily form of torture.

A lot of us here in babylost land have ditched our memberships. It is just too hard to see all those baby & pregnancy pictures. Not me, oh no, I stayed the course. I figured- you all were here when I was pregnant supporting me, you’ll all stay with me when I go through this nightmare as well. And you know what? I was right. I have heard from countless friends these last 9 1/2 months since Silas died. Many sharing their own horrific stories, others just offering up their love and thoughts. It’s been overwhelming. This is the good stuff though. The stuff that keeps me going. The emails, the words of encouragement, the love.

The other side of this is the baby & pregnancy pix. It  just tears me up. Little by little I find myself hiding friends from my news feed, because I really don’t want to know what you and your new little baby are up to. But I kind of do. I need to take that peek, to see what I’m missing.  I look at the pictures, I read your comments, I torture myself with what I don’t have. Then I cry and feel sorry for myself and punish myself for looking in the first place. It’s an ugly cycle that I can’t get out of. Luckily all I have to do is click hide and *poof* you’re out of my life for now.

2 great friends of ours just had their babies this past week. I want to know everything and nothing at the same time. I am torn. I want to make sure everything went okay because I love them, but then I cry because I know that I can’t get past my own unhappiness to be happy for them. I want to so badly. I want to go hold their babies and give them every ounce of love I can find in me. But I can’t. So, because of that, my curious nature gets the best of me, and I have to look first before I hide.

Why must I torture myself? I am not able to shut it all away. We work at the farmer’s market every week, where new parents parade their new babies around like show dogs. I put on my blinders and pretend they aren’t even there. I guess it’s easy enough to pretend when there is no connection in the first place. With friends though, it’s harder.

I still cry when I see my good friend’s 4 month old. I still can’t allow her to exist in my brain, even though I know she does. It’s just too hard and they understand.

Some days I feel okay. I wake up and think about how okay I am, and wonder how that is even possible. Then a week of new babies being born takes me down that ugly spiral where I feel like I can’t and don’t want to crawl back up.

To all of this, I know there are no answers. Maybe it’s because I’ve stopped asking questions.

Salt & Sand & Sunlight in the Wound

It was a gorgeous day at the beach yesterday, but the sting of sunlight on my skin had nothing on the pain within.

Kids screamed and shouted, they cried and laughed and argued and ran.  Babies were tightly wrapped and shaded against the sun and exasperated parents tried to relax as their brood ran circles around them.

Lu and I sat quietly, a team of two, each of us seemingly absorbed in a book.

My eyes were on the page but my attention was scattered like the sunlight bouncing off the rippling waters.

This impromptu trip to the shore was too easy.  Just tossed a few things in the bags, grabbed the chairs and hit the road.  No squealing toddler to wrestle into diapers.  No seven extra bags to maintain said creature in the harsh environs of sun and sand.

Eventually the unrelenting heat sent me to the water’s edge where I strolled in up to my knees.  The frigid water was refreshing, but the salt and cold made my feet and ankles sting.  I know that sting well.

Though I have managed to find many moments of happiness and pleasure in the last months, those moments never appear without an internal snap of pain and anguish.  There is still no way to avoid it, and I don’t know that I would if I could.  I try so hard not to linger on the what-ifs and should-bes, but the blatant void of his absence is simply too powerful.

It was a beautiful day at the beach with my wife, but there was no protection from the burn of our loss.

There never is.

Inertial

I want to grab ahold of the World, turn it upside down and shake everything loose.  I want the sad, depressing, difficult parts to fall away, to vanish into the ether, so that when I turn it all right side up again, all we’ve got left are the good pieces.  The thing is, I’m not even sure if I could figure out which was which.

I can’t get my arms around the World, either, and I’m not strong enough to lift it.  Besides, the vigorous shake I would give it would do nothing more than rattle everything around.  Probably break a few things in the process.  Nice things like summer days would end up cloudy and muddied.  And I’ve had enough of the rain to last for a good long while.  Best for me to just sit here, nearly motionless, my only action the turn of the page of the newspaper I hide behind like a shield.

Ensconed by the fences of our yard I choose to enjoy the warm air and sunlight.  With an almost-imperceptible effort that is oh-so-familiar to me now, I decide that today’s beauty will not cut me to pieces.  It is a choice, though.  It is all too easy to let the grief and despair dominate.

This doesn’t get easier.  It’s not better today than it was any yesterday.  In some ways it is even worse, because now there’s been all this time to think about what happened, and to more fully realize how deep losing him goes.

He is gone but we are still here waiting for him.  And everyone we know is looking back at us from their bright and lively futures.  I don’t feel that sense of future.  It is all just one long, brutal Now that started the moment we lost him.  Because that cannot and will not ever change it is difficult to feel that anything has changed at all.

Now I am exactly montionless, because even reading has stopped.  Only my thoughts remain moving as I twist around and around how today the World is the same because Silas is not here.  Tears flow down my cheeks but I don’t wipe them away.  There are still so many more to come and I have no where to go.

stuck

I have had these images of myself with my feet stuck in cement, and everyone else is just flying past me. Their lives are moving forward, baby after baby being born.  And here I am, stuck. While I know I’ve moved forward in these last 9 months in so many other ways,  I am still not a mom to a living child. As a teacher, I have always taken care of other people’s children. I have always imagined what it would be like to finally have children of my own. I almost did.

When we decided it was time to start our family, we were still in SF. The timing never seemed to work, and then we decided to move east. At that point, we figured we’d wait until we were settled in a new town in a new apt. As soon as that time finally came, we got pregnant pretty quickly. It happened so fast and so unexpectedly. Our bodies really were connected with our minds.

Here I am, years later from when we first decided we were ready, and we’re back to square one. It’s so frustrating and so upsetting. I am realizing that in all this, I am scared to death that it will never happen. I am terrified that I will never get to be a mom. One by one, all the babylost mom’s out there are getting pregnant again. Then here I sit, waiting, stuck, a life on hold. It’s almost unbearable at times.

I have the angel on one shoulder whispering in my ear in the most hopeful of voices “of course you will get pregnant again, don’t be silly.” I have the devil shouting at me  “don’t set yourself up for disappointment again, look what happened to you already.” and the battle continues. Do I fill myself up with hope that it will happen to me? Or do I put away all thoughts of what will & could be and accept what is now.

I don’t want to accept it. I imagine my Silas with me, 9 months old, almost every single day. It’s my daily torture. It’s this constant longing for what isn’t here and what will never be. Then I fill my thoughts with hope for a new life growing inside of me. But that is not happening, and at this point, is hard to really believe that it will. I want to believe it, oh so badly, but that devil forces me back to reality.

Balance is necessary and important.  Finding it with the opposing thoughts on my shoulders is a challenge. Luckily I have lots of love around me, pulling me up from the cement and moving me in the direction I need to go.

Come Out Come Out Wherever You Are

Falling rain splatters.

Puddles ripple and streams run

as I dodge grief, wet.

Ahimsa

In Sanskrit, Ahimsa means non-harming-  in thought, words or deeds of oneself or others. My awareness of Ahimsa began back in my first teacher training years ago. It is one of yamas (restraints) which makes up Pantanjali’s 8 limbs.  The other limbs that are more familiar would be the asanas (poses), breathing (pranayama) and meditation (dyana). It had never struck me until now, to think of it in terms of myself. I usually thought of it in terms of the non-harming or non-violence of others.

These days, my thoughts are all about the self-blame, guilt, anger, unhappiness and the awful body image. I have focused my being not on healing myself, or taking care of me, but on being angry with who I’ve become since Silas has died. I judge myself in thoughts of resentment. I can barely look at my stomach and the extra skin that just does not want to disappear. I blame myself for the choices that were made and for my body failing. When I find myself sitting at my computer, unable to get work done, I feel defeated. Not yet pregnant? well, of course that’s my fault, stress is wreaking havoc on my reproductive system.  Sometimes I even think that if I leave those thoughts behind, I’ll be leaving my little Silas behind too.

With all the work I’m doing on myself, the EMDR therapy, the yoga, the writing, hanging with friends, getting massages, I still manage to find time to beat myself up. It’s like double the work of just dealing with the grief and that is why I am so exhausted all the time.

Last week in yoga class, my teacher spoke about Ahimsa. It hit such a nerve with me, and I came to a very powerful realization on my mat. I will never fully heal unless I stop these violent and harmful thoughts about myself. I work on this in therapy, I talk about it with Chris and with friends who will listen. I know I am the only one with the power to stop this endless chatter going on in my brain. But it is hard. It is so damn hard to quit. It has become part of the routine of my life. I need to retrain my brain from working in this manner.

The thing is, it is not just about being sad that Silas died, that my baby, who I carried inside me for more then 9 months, is not here with us. The rippling effect of our baby’s death has caused me to suppress the parts of myself where I used to find joy. I hate that I can’t see friends babies, or pregnant friends or even talk about pregnancy or babies. This is something I LOVED. I can’t do it. I have had to tuck that away, which fills me with such enormous pain, I almost can’t handle it. Not only did I lose my baby, but I lost a hundred other things on top of it.  All that stuff has just piled up and piled up in my brain, and I can’t stop it from happening.

I am working on it though. I am letting go of resentments and working on being nice to myself. Just giving myself a break from all the thoughts that keep my jaw clenched and make my brain hurt everyday is really important. It’s hard though. But it’s what I have to do if I want to keep moving forward.

From Our Side, on Glow In the Woods

Hey all.  I have a new post up over a Glow in the Woods.  If you are having a good day and feeling like getting sad, go over and have a read.

The Refuge of Sleep and The Vultures of Dawn

Does everyone’s internal dialogue contain so many voices and perspectives? Is everyone awash in conflicting thoughts and impulses?  Or is it just us, the Utterly Fucked?  It’s that feeling where I want to go and do something, a hike, a few hours at the bookstore, a nice walk around the ‘hood, something I know will be good and right, and instead I can make myself do… nothing.  Sit.  Read the paper.  Nap. Have another beer.

Sometimes I decide today is going to be a good day and then slam the door on the way out and cry in the car, pounding on the steering wheel all the way to work.

Other times I realize I can’t take any of it anymore and then I don’t have to.  I end up blithely drifting through the day, smiling at the elusive sun and puddled earth.  We are getting so much rain these days I’m afraid Silas’ tree is going to need swimming lessons.

Most days the cascading terror of my-life-gone-horribly-wrong churns me awake before the dawn, but often by nightfall I’m laughing with Lu or friends, surrounded by so much love I almost start to feel lucky.

I used to feel lucky all the time.  I used to think I was one of the happiest people out there, despite the often intense sense of anger I have always felt at the occasional injustices of the World.

My World is entirely Unjust these days.  Happiness is elusive, too.

I used to sleep well.  I can still fall asleep in fifteen seconds flat and I nap as though I have a special super power for napping.  But I cannot remember a time when I have had a full night of sleep.  Pre-dawn is the worst.  There’s no refuge there besides more sleep, and there’s just way too much to think about.

The Path of Worry is a deep groove.  I slip in before I know it, and finding my way out is an ordeal.  Sometimes it’s easier to just lay down amid the worn rocks and sharp pebbles and watch the vultures circle above.  I try to pick out the silhouette of hawks amid the scavengers.  I’m amazed by the endless sky and steep sides to this gully and I wonder, every morning I wonder, how the fuck are we going to get out of here?

Can’t climb the walls.  Can’t disintegrate into the Earth.  Backwards is disaster and so that only leaves forward.  But sometimes I cannot move one single step.  Then, sleep is the only refuge, but always I wake up wide and worn out and can’t believe it’s another day without Silas.

All of them are.  From That Day until the end of my forever, it is all without my son.  I feel my bones getting wobbly and sick at the thought of that.  I feel my soul shrivel and hide.  My mind sends me images of bright, shiny objects to distract me from the catastrophic disgustingness of a thought like that.  It used to shatter me, now I just sigh and rub my eyes and wonder what I’ll do next to get by, hang on, let go or act out, depending on what I can muster for the moment.

You’d be fooled, though, just reading this.  These words are the gymnastics I do in my mind day after day, moment after moment.  In person I’m nothing like this.  Most of the time I’m calm and pleasant.  If you just met me today you might never know my son died in September and that I am still in the very taloned grasp of crushing grief.

That’s why I’ve been thinking about changing my name.  ”Imissilas” has a great ring to it, and that way whenever I met someone new they would know what I was all about.  And that way, when my friends called out to me, they would know what I was thinking about anyway.  With that name I could unify myself.  Instead of being my name and missing my son, I could just be both all the time.

I don’t know how to do this.  I don’t know how to live this life, to experience this pain, to heal, to hang on.  So I’m just making it up as I go and letting the confusing contradictions of every single day and moment, of my soul and heart, of my fear and love and confusion, all of it, I’m allowing it to wake me up when it must and lay me flat when I can’t stand and crush the tears out of me when the pressure grows too strong.

Drained I find a way to pick myself up again and trudge forward, head tucked against the torrent, slowly winding my way through this shadowed, vultured valley.  Silas’ heart beats in my chest.  His soul fills everything within my skin.

Love to Carly

Please send over as much love and thoughts as you can to our friends Brad and Christa and their little Carly. She’s been in a lot of pain this week and they haven’t quite figured it out.  As you can imagine, it has been an incredibly tough journey for them. Lots of love and no-pain vibes heading your way little one!

Caught Between Two Worlds

I’ve been finding myself caught in the middle of 2 different worlds. The one that is the blogging babylost community and my other life. The life that allows me to fakely go forward and pretend like nothing ever happened. Where someone asks me how I’m doing and I say good. The one that allows me to socialize with friends, teach yoga to kids, manage a business, go food shopping, and just live my life.

Then I sit at my computer, and get lost in the blogs, and realize how sad my world really is. How devastating my life is and how fake most of my daily life is.  I find emotions that I didn’t know were there. I make realizations I hadn’t yet come to on my own. I commiserate, I identify and I cry.  I love my babylost mama friends. I take those much needed breaks from them, but then I devour their words all at once. The breaks are healthy, but something is missing from my life when I’m not immersed in them. They are the ones who understand wholeheartedly and completely. But it is a dark dark place when I go there, and I can’t always go there.

Really the only time I can be in a happy medium place is home with Chris, when we’re chillin’ on the couch with our kitties, watching t.v., eating dinner, just being real with each other.  Don’t get me wrong, I do have friends and family members who allow me to be real, to express how I’m really feeling at any given moment, who let me talk and cry and just listen wholeheartedly. But that too is also emotionally draining. I don’t want to be the person that no one wants to be around because I’m always sad, or who wants to talk about Silas or getting pregnant or how unhappy I really am. That scares me. So most of the time I have to be ok.

I feel emotionally drained, almost all the time. From having to put on a happy face.  From having to cry and be devastated. From having to figure out how to be in this medium middle world more often. When I can be real, happy one moment, sad the next or even just complacent and there is no one to judge. Chris doesn’t judge of course, he’s right there with me.

We spent last week doing something we love the most. The thing that brought us together in the first place. Our favorite band, Phish, got back together and played a string of shows on the East Coast. We got to hang with all of our friends who came in from all over. We drank, danced, laughed, cried and sold lots of coffee. It was a phenomenal week.  There wasn’t much down time in between, and we spent a few days working, in between shows. We thought selling Bean & Leaf at the shows would be perfect, that way we can make some money, introduce B&L to a wider audience, and not have to socialize too much. That part gets tough. It worked out pretty great most of the time, we were super busy, people loved the coffee, and I was able to look out and see all of our friends around us.

I had many emotional breakdowns through the course of the week. It was fine. But again, I don’t want to be that person no one wants around because they’re not sure how i’ll be. I make people uncomfortable, I know that. I bumped into an old friend who I hadn’t seen in years. He’s a friend of mine on facebook, but we really haven’t spoken at all. He said to me “didn’t you have a baby or something?”  uh oh, was all I could think. I took a deep breath and tried to tell him. He did the old looking down at his feet, backing away move, all the while saying “I’m sorry I asked, It’s ok, you don’t have to tell me.”  But of course I did. If I had a healthy happy baby, I would tell you all about it. But since it was tragic, he didn’t want to hear it.  This, my friends, is where it gets complicated.

This medium middle world place, I can say whatever I want, anytime. I can laugh hysterically watching The Office, then minutes later mention how much I want Silas and hate our life and just be insanely and utterly sad.

I don’t blame anyone for any of this. This is all me, trying to work it all out, to figure out how to be in these changed, devastating new worlds I find myself in.