Christmas 2011

Sending peace and love to all my friends and readers 

and their children, where ever they may be.

 My gift from G. My plan is to put all the letters thanking us for the donations 

we make in honor of Reid at Christmas time in his stocking.

 

The ornament I made this year. I kept some things from the flower arrangement 

my aunt gave us last year and they made the perfect filling for the ornament.

Christmas Eve 2011

I have not spent the last month and half in a constant state of dread like the last part of 2010. It's not that I have been looking forward to Christmas 2011, but I am dealing with it better.

Being in the middle of what has become a high-risk-like pregnancy and Thing 3's imminent arrival has provided plenty on non-Christmas related distractions. It has also given me plenty of excuses to stay home and avoid as much of Christmas as I want. (I better start looking into a plan for next year now while I still have a tiny amount of brain function left.) But it's not just the new baby distracting me.

I decided that the Christmas tree should be upstairs this year and have more than the ornaments made for Reid and those that D made at school on it. However, I did let 2 four year olds do most of the decorating which allowed me to not focus on the fact that the bottom of the tree should be naked in order to prevent Reid from having his way with the ornaments. The sad thoughts about what should have been are still in my head, but I can think them without crying, most of the time.

I have stopped hoping that anyone outside my little family will mention Reid in relation to Christmas. (and by anyone, I mean all those people who aren't missing their own children too.) I would be thrilled to find a mention of him in a Christmas card, but it doesn't send me into a sobbing fit when he isn't. I am pretty bitter about other people's ability to have live children though so the Christmas letters where I found out that D.G.'s cousins have managed to have 2 live children in the time since we started trying for just one more make me wish our fireplace was wood-burning instead of gas.

(I did receive a beautiful gift from my wonderful friend G and hopefully I will be able to take a good picture of it tonight to post tomorrow.)

This mornings activities had nothing to do with Christmas, and maybe I was just torturing myself by doing it on Christmas Eve, but I felt the need finally split up Reid's blanket and get his ashes and clothing moved from the crib to my nightstand. I don't regret doing it, his things now fit into the box I wanted them to, I have a piece to hold on to when I miss him most and there is a piece that is going to stay under the bottom sheet of the crib right under where Thing 3 will sleep (hopefully). I held it together through actually cutting and sewing the blanket, but putting his piece into the box with his ashes and clothes, I fell apart. Lots of the sadness that is always present and some of the anger that a few others of us have mentioned feeling this year; anger that this is the only thing I can do for my son this Christmas, anger that I can't sing to him, or give him gifts or bake his favorite cookies.

36 hours from now Christmas will be over and the world's focus will be on Bo.xi.ng Day sales and hockey (at least here in my local "world" it will be). Those I can deal with.

I finally got what I wished for

I realized a few days ago that this time spent on bed rest is exactly what I wished for in the weeks and months after Reid died. I desperately wished to be allowed to just close the door on the rest of the world and spend my days curled up in bed with only the TV and the computer for company. All I wanted was to be left alone and not have to deal with anything.

Now I have had 7 weeks of bed rest which had included me being at home alone during the day for the last 3 weeks. When I got hospitalized, I was horrified, not just about the risks to this baby but also about being stuck in bed for 8 weeks. How did things change so much that I was upset at the thought of not being able to go places and see people (and cook and do housework for that matter.)? How did I get to a place where I had a "normal" reaction to this? Is it all because of the pregnancy or did I actually start to heal in some small way?

I may be a wuss but I'm not short on Omega-3's

I'm still a huge wuss. I haven't read the email from M yet. I did ask D.G. about the letter from last fall and he informed me that he recycled it long ago. It clearly upset me so he wanted to get rid of it. It's okay that he wanted to protect me, but he now knows that he shouldn't "recycle" letters without checking with me first.


I bent the bed rest rules to make Kristin's bacon guacamole recipe. So yummy, why have we never thought to put bacon in the guacamole before? Clearly the way to make something yummy and full of fat even more delicious is to add another kind of fat. And I can actually have quite a few tortilla chips before I hit my carb limit for a snack so it worked out great. Not that I wouldn't sink to eating this stuff with a spoon if I was maxed out on carbs.

20 months

I swear it was just yesterday that we hit 19 months. I can even remember writing the post in the hospital. I am so all over the map right now. I can casually bring up Reid around other people (some who know, some who don't) without tearing up. I also have 20 minute cries triggered by a dad on CS.I.Mia.mi hugging his son and calling him "little man".

I finally went through all the babyloss things that were in the "baby room". It only took me 20 months to be able to make myself do it. I found plenty of meaningless paper work that could be shredded without remorse and completely unhelpful brochures that could be recycled without tears. I boxed up the casts of Reid's hands and feet and sorted out all the cards we received after he died, last Christmas (the whole whopping 3 that mentioned him) and on his first birthday. All the cards and little things have now been moved to the designated drawer in my nightstand. Reid's ashes however are still in the crib, waiting for me to be able to divide his blanket so his ashes and going home outfit and blanket will fit into the box I want them to fit into. (That's my first job when bed rest ends in 2 weeks.) It was a hard afternoon looking at all those reminders, but I am glad I finally did it. I almost feel like I should do some kind of spiritual cleansing in the baby room now. Not to get rid of any part of Reid, but to clean up all the sadness, loneliness, desperation and anger that poured out of me in that room in the months after Reid died. I want Thing 3 to know their big brother, but they don't need to be surrounded by the pain of losing him.

I love you Reid, and I think about you constantly these days.You will always be our little man.

Not everything will go away if you ignore it long enough

This is the post I was planning to write when the pregnancy announcement of the previous post arrived.

Before that email, I was obsessing about the last upsetting email I received, but have been too scared/angry/have enough shit to deal with already (not sure if there is a really a correct term for my feelings at this point) to read. I just saw who the sender was and stuck it in the first folder I could drag it into before the preview pane could kick in. It was from M of this post and this post. (I had to go back to read these posts myself and remember what was going on back then.) I am somewhat ashamed that I never did deal with that issue after receiving her letter but I did have an miscarriage a week later, followed by Reid's 1st birthday, Easter, Mother's Day and then getting pregnant again, so I will let myself off the hook for that. (An appreciation for the merits of procrastination is definitely a post-Reid facet of my personality.)

I had been toying around with the idea of finding that letter and dealing with things back in September when D started preschool again and I had a little time to myself during the day, but then other stuff came up and the next thing I know it's the end of November and I've been on bed rest for a month. You would think that being on bed rest would give me time to deal with issues like this, but it's amazing how the days just start to fade into one another and soon it's been 5 days since you got an email that you meant to reply to right away and those are the from the people you are happy to hear from.

I probably should find the letter now and then read the email. (Well likely I will have to ask D.G. to find it since prowling around the house is not on my list of approved activities and once I'm allowed to do it, I won't have time.) I know I should be a grown up and deal with this stuff, but I have latched onto the excuse that because I can't reward myself for being a grown-up with ice cream, (I have GD on top of the other issues) I therefore don't have to do grown up things that are awkward or upsetting. (Except for the bi-weekly internal ultrasounds to measure my cervix, those are always awkward and sometimes upsetting, but I can't figure out a way to avoid them.)