Not ready for spring

Winter has reasserted it's grip on our city this weekend. It has snowed the last couple days, the wind is blowing and the temperatures are about to plunge back to sub -25°C again. Even with all the cold and snow, I can't deny that spring is coming. It's light outside when D and I crawl out of bed at 7:30 am and it's still light outside when D.G. comes from work and even after we eat supper. The angle of the sunlight shining into the livingroom has changed and it even feels warmer. (from the relative safety of the couch) There is no doubt that spring is coming and I dread it. I should be happy to see the end of another cold, dark winter, but instead I want it to stay cold and dark. The arrival of spring feels like another slap in the face from the universe. Nothing has changed inside me since the winter started. I am still sad, depressed, angry, anti-social and not pregnant. (No wait, something has changed, I am more bitter than I was at the beginning of winter. ) Nothing should be allowed to change outside yet.

Feb 23

Not too much to report for the last few days, but the headaches are back today so I must need to unload something. The problem with ttc while grieving for me is having to put the grieving on hold during the trying part otherwise there is no way any trying would happen. So I have force myself to avoid all the sad/upsetting thoughts. That also means that I have not written any letters or emails to people I am pissed off at either.

My birthday was okay (other than the slight freakout of the last post). It was a very quiet day as we turned off the ringers on all the phones. It definitely the right thing to do as every message that was left was a totally normal birthday message. No acknowledgment of the fact that I am far from happy. D.G., D and I spent a quiet day hanging out at home (it was freaking freezing outside even for a hardened Canadian) that was not all that different from a regular Sunday except D.G. took over the cooking duties in honor of my birthday. They baked me cupcakes which were yummy and bought me more time to be lazy by myself. (thank goodness for cake mixes or my kitchen would still be a mess 4 days later.) D.G. took me out for a decidedly grownup supper. The food was amazing,as it should have been for those prices but since it was my birthday supper, I tried not to think about it. I wish the restaurant had been a bit quieter, but it probably would have been fine for someone who wasn't aiming to become a hermit.

Thanks for the birthday wishes from all my readers, I know that you all have a different definition of "happy" birthday than the rest of the world.

Seriously

I was planning to not read my blog today, or even touch my computer for that matter, but I am weak and I couldn't manage to have a nap while D was napping so I got bored and opened up my laptop. (That is a terrible sentence but it's my birthday and I'll write long rambling senteces if I want to.) I opened my email and there in my inbox is a message from HER (yes, the her of the last 2 posts who I am so mad at.) And it's a "we should really chat and catch up on things" email. Oh I'd like to catch her up on a few things. I hope venting will be enough to get this crap out of my head so it doesn't consume my thoughts for the rest of the day. I was prepared to ignore the phone call from my mother-in-law who I still haven't' spoken to since she was here in October, but I didn't need to get a birthday email from HER.

Perfectly reasonable procrastination

Now I will go back to putting off dealing with the anger, at least for a couple more days. I think I have a valid reason. Tomorrow is my birthday which I have been dreading for the last month because I don't want to have to listen to people saying "Happy Birthday" when I am so far from happy and since I have far too much politeness bread into me I can't yell at people about how I really feel when they they say it. Tomorrow also happens to be 6 weeks until the 1 year anniversary of Reid's death so I will have enough things to be upset about without trying to deal with the anger.

D thinks it wonderful that it's mommy's birthday so I will have to suck things up for her sake to a certain extent. I think she mostly just realizes that a birthday in the house means cake/cupcakes for her and I can get behind the dessert part of my birthday even if I want to pretend that it's just a regular day. D.G. is taking me out of supper so I have to find a way to make myself "nice restaurant" presentable. At least restaurant tables can be counted on to hide the c-section belly that I will never get rid of unless someone starts handing out free tummy tucks to DBM's. (I have to hope the lighting is ridiculously dim so that no one will see the gray hairs that I have not had cut or coloured in the last 11 months. )

Starting to work on my issues

I am have so much anger locked up inside me. I have shoved the anger down so many times, but it keeps coming back up to the surface but I don't know how to deal with it. Most of the anger is directed towards people in my life who I feel have let me down in the last 10 months. Most of these people live far away from me so I don't have to worry about running into them at the grocery store, but it makes even harder to figure out how to deal with all this anger. You can't call people up and start yelling at them (because really I want to yell and scream) bcause they can just hang up on you, but I need to start dealing with these feelings before they consume me. I've tried to just let things go and basically just write these people off as not worth my time but that's not working.

I've decided that I need to do something about the "friend" who named her son Reed in November first. (All the details are here in case you haven't memorized all my posts.) Okay, that sounds like I'm going to hire a hit man. I'm angry but not quite that angry. My plan is write a short but not sweet letter saying that I'd appreciate if she took me off her Christmas card list (yes we got a Christmas card including a family picture and a baby announcement) because I'd rather not add to the stress/sadness of Christmas by reading about how her Reed is growing up, (cause he's alive) and doing all the things that my Reid will never do (cause he's dead). There may also be something about how insensitive it is to send said baby announcement to the parents of a dead baby with nearly the same name but I have yet to figure wording that conveys how I really feel.

Getting this off my chest is healthy, right? I just can't imagine that just writing the letter and not sending it is going to be enough to help me feel better. And I just can't imagine that my feelings about getting annual updates about her Reed (and her other 3 boys, yes she managed to have 4 kids in just over 6 years so she's also ridiculously fertile on top of everything else) will change so I can't see regretting sending this letter. I guess I just have to decide whether I send the pictures from the Christmas card back to her or toss them in the trash here. What would you do?

Today's drivel - Feb 16

This weekend my brother (the one who has never even mentioned Reid or his death to me) and SIL finally called and invited us to my niece's christening at the end of March. I knew about it a month ago, but second hand from my mom and aunt. I was actually hoping they wouldn't call so I could pitch a giant immature fit about not being invited when my parents came to town for the christening. (The christening is being held in the city we live next to because SIL's family all lives here.) I know it would be pointless to throw a massive tantrum over this and nothing would change anyways, but that's how I feel these days. Fantasies about screaming and crying and telling of my family are competing for head space with fantasies about getting a BFP. (The live baby fantasies have been shelved for fear they will never become reality.)

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The headaches and stomach cramps have not stopped, but now D.G. has them too it appears that it is a bug. He's a huge baby when he's sick but at least he'll stop bugging me that I need to go the doctor. Seriously what is a doctor going to do for headaches and stomach cramps besides say they are likely symptoms of stress/depressions and suggest an AD? I just have to find a way to get us both feeling better in time for this month's "fertile window". Its our last chance to get pregnant (and know that we are pregnant) before Reid's 1 year anniversary and as unsexy as I feel now, I can't imagine that I will feel any better at the end of March.

Getting things out of my head

This is going to be a long rambling post. My body is revolting, staging some kind of uprising, although I really don't know who it thinks is going to put in power if it kicks me out. (There are no opposition parties in here, not like in the middle east countries where the dictators of 30+ years are being ousted.) I can't find a physical reason for my symptoms so there must be a mental one. The only psychological change has been my inability to communicate/vent my feelings in any way for the last few weeks, so I guess I need to force myself to do that if I am going to feel better.

....

Seriously, I am going to have to start hanging out on-line with the "I" people of the ALI world. There's a constant stream of pregnancy announcements and pregnancy posts in my reading list and I am starting to wish that blogger had a "hide" button like the evil FB. (I just realized I can do this in Go.ogle Re.ader so I going to have to switch to using that.) I am eaten up with bitterness that people who are older than me or have health problems or whose babies died just a few months ago are able to get pregnant and I can't. (It's not that I don't want them to be pregnant, I just don't understand why I can't be too.) The stuck feelings are just being amplified. I need to get back to spewing out my feelings (I can't really call this writing) on a regular basis. Supporting all your blogs has become so important to me, but I haven't been able to write a decent comment in weeks so that's probably a sign that I need to save reading all the ones with babies on the way or here already for days when I am feeling strong.

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Last Wednesday, I was taking D to her swimming lesson, my new weekly exercise in self torture where D splashes happily in the pool with her teacher and I am forced to watch all the moms with their 6 months to 1 year old babies in the baby class next door. (I was thinking about avoiding moms with kids D's age AND babies when I picked the early morning class, never considering that the moms with just 1 baby would be crawling all over the place.) Anyway, we were driving to the pool and stopped at the lights right by the pool, when I noticed the light was taking forever to change. I watched the walk signals and they changed from "walk" to "don't walk" but then instead of the traffic light turning red and ours going green, the walk symbol came back on. This happened about 3 times before I gave up and turned right, them made a u-turn to get going the right way to the pool, but not before it occurred to me that the malfunctioning lights were a pretty good metaphor for my life right now.

I am waiting at the lights and thinking that when the light turns green (I get a BFP), I'll be able to start moving forward, to try to talk to people again, to not feel personally attacked by every baby announcement. And every month, I think I am about to get that green light (the "don't walk" symbol for the street I want to cross starts flashing) and I get my hopes up and start thinking about what I can do once I'm on the other side of the street and about how things will start to change. But the my light doesn't change to green, it stays red and nothing changes for me. I just sit there waiting and waiting, watching other people go zooming past me, getting more and more bitter.

Now the problem with this metaphor is the right turn to bypass the light. What is my right turn? How do I move forward without a new pregnancy/baby to give me hope for the future and strength to try to go back into the world? I have no idea what my right turn is and I don't know how to find it. Clearly it's not going to find me, so what do I do now?

Early Birthday Presents

Back in December, I won a giveaway from Jess at Too Beautiful for Earth. I won an ornament of my choice from her memorial art collection and this is what arrived on Thursday:


I wanted something for D to have in her room and I think it turned out great. (D likes it too.) Jess also tucked in some extras and while I like the little sign and the earrings, this just melts my heart.


D loves having a "Baby Reid" bracelet like mommy.

Thank you so much Jess for sending me some sunshine in the mail. I think of them as early birthday presents, not late Christmas presents so no more worrying about the giveaway being late.

Really eff'd up dream

I haven't been able to write for the last week. I thought things might get better after writing about it but its worse. This morning I woke up at 4 after dreaming that I had not just one but two dead babies inside me. It makes no sense at all but somehow I had a baby who died a while ago still in there and then got pregnant again without giving birth to the first one. I was in huge panic because the new baby was getting bigger and was running out of room so I had to get the first baby out of there. Then I was in my parents' basement and both babies just were out and of course dead. (and somehow cleaned up so there was no blood.) I wasn't really interested in the bigger baby but have a really clear memory of holding the tiny little new baby in my hand. It was the size of a walnut but was perfectly formed and proportioned like a full term baby and of course it was a boy. Then I remember some really weird thoughts about putting the babies in the freezer so I could keep them with me but being worried about freezer burn. Creepy, I know, but I have no control over what my brain spews out while I'm asleep.

It doesn't take a shrink to figure out that I am worried about losing another baby. Of course I'd have to get pregnant to be able to lose another baby first. Too bad I saw the counselor yesterday, so he can't analyze it for me.

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Tomorrow is 10 months since Reid died. This past weekend I was lying in bed with a headache and kept thinking of the sound fat little hands make on the hardwood floor as a 10 month old crawls down the hallway to find mommy when she tries to sneak away for some "me" time. I wasn't trying to torture myself but I just couldn't stop thinking about whether Reid would be crawling or using the walls to walk by now. I swear I could see his happy little face smiling at me from the doorway of my bedroom. I followed that up by having a huge argument with D.G. on Sunday. (You guys aren't the only ones I'm not communicating with these days.)

More ugghh.