December Twenty Fifth

I hope that your Christmas was gentle. Or if you don't celebrate Christmas, I hope that these holidays have been gentle. Times of family can be difficult to negotiate, no?

It was wonderful to watch my baby open his gifts - his innocent joy as he played with his new toys. The other part of it - the silent struggles in my heart and mind - well, they deserve something, a post maybe, but I am tired. It is time for me to rest.

Tomorrow we will travel to visit relatives and friends. And maybe spend money on electronics. Until the alarm rings - I will rest.

The Season

The tears are never very far away these days. It isn't all deadbabystuff that sets me off. But the emotion is all stemming from my feelings of loss - where is my 3 year old. God. I think of all the things that 3 year olds do at Christmastime and I well up again.

I guess it is an emotional time of year. And it is seasonally imprinted on me. The last 4 years have been so emotional at Christmas. In 2004, it was complete and utter excitement. My husband talking to my belly, trying to convince C. to come early and be the New Year's baby . 2005 was agony. There were small, gentle moments of healing, but not many. Certain family members ignored our pain. We weren't pregnant. Our baby was dead. A horrible, horrible year. 2006 brought the hope of BB's arrival, but continued BH contractions, that terrifying (transient, turns out) arrythmia, and the polyhydramnios had us hardly daring to breathe.

This brings us to 2007. We have our boy. His brother isn't here. It is sometimes so complicated to live in my heart and soul, trying to reconcile those two sets of emotion. Joy, cuddles, and giggles. Silence, pain, longing, memory. I am so often amazed that I can and do continue on despite the torrent of conflict that I am bombarded with on such a regular basis.

Discovery

I have been over putting up new links on the Directory, something that I am not finding as much time for lately (my apologies to those who have to wait to get their links posted). However, I think it is important work, though small in the grand scheme of things, so I do it when I can. In the process of organizing the new submissions, I usually read the first few posts so that I know a little bit about the writer's background.

Today I came to a realization. I can't go backwards. I can't read the posts of these new mommies who only just had their hearts broken. I can't offer support. I can't leave any wise words of experience with them. I just can't.

I feel like I should. But I don't have it in me. I have worked too hard to get where I am. Something about dredging up all of those old emotions is too difficult and too painful. Because they are all still there, waiting for me, behind this precarious dam that that time and effort has built. And it would be all to easy for the dam to burst and the happiness I have struggled for would be swept away in the rush. I am not willing to let that happen.

So know that I wish I could be that person who offers the right words at the right time. But also know that it just isn't possible for me to do. There are too many hurting souls out there and there is not enough of me.

I will do what I can - with the people who are hurting in my offline life and by maintaining the Directory. But going back there is just not good for me.

Photos

I updated the photo site.

Catching Up

Wow. This has completely become one of those once-a-week blogs. Sorry. Like I have any readership left.

I have found day care. It is a wonderful home situation, and the care provider has been doing it for 17 years. Also, she is a survivor of 6 miscarriages and her living children are both the product of fertility treatments. She works with babies and kids all day. That is heartening, somehow.

I am almost prepared for the holiday season. Gifts are purchased and will hopefully be all wrapped by the end of this evening. I am not doing any baking. I love to eat it too much and it the new suits I am buying for work will not look good with extra Christmas weight under them.

I had a very long and heavy moment where I was absolutely dumbstruck with the grief of doing Santa gifts for the first time. 3 years after the birth of my first child. Not what I pictured for my life.

I promise to add some photos of BB on the other site soon, and will notify.

I also will write a not-sucky post someday.

But he's MY baby

I return to work on January 7 (afternoons only). I don't want to; I am really struggling with the idea of leaving BB with someone else, especially considering his issues with sleep. However, if I want to keep this job (which I like well enough, and would be nearly impossibly to replace without adding a huge commute to another city), I need to return once my maternity leave is over.

So I need to find daycare. I know, I know, I am really into last-minute mode here. I have less than a month to find someone. It could prove to be very difficult.

We will definitely be using home daycare, as anything else is almost non-existent here. So we are relying on word-of-mouth to find someone.

What questions should I ask? Should I ask to come and spend an afternoon with BB to see if I think it will be a good fit? HELP! I know nothing about this.

Clearing Out

My mother set impossible standards for cleanliness and tidiness in the home of our youth. Most tension and anger in our family revolved around housecleaning issues. As a result, I have impossible standards for my own home. I assure you that these standards are never met.

When the main floor is clean and tidy, the basement is a disaster. The reverse is true. It bothers me to the point of constant irritation. And spending all of my time in this messy/dirty house can make me a horrible person to live with.

All of this history makes it a little easier to understand why I am just so satisfied that my bedroom is clean and tidy. It has been vacuumed and dusted, the sheets are clean, and clean clothes are starting to make their way back into the closets and drawers.

The kitchen floor has no food stuck to it. The baby can crawl in the bathroom and suck on the toilet without causing me to disintegrate in panic (I disinfected the hell out of it today - and no I don't let him suck on the toilet, but he's getting really quick....).

Yesterday, I started this cleaning binge with a closet purge of momentous proportions. I ruthlessly disposed of anything that I don't wear and anything that I do wear but look horrible in. 5 large garbage bags of clothing were neatly piled into the trunk of my car and donated to the lovely people at the Salvation Army. (incidentally, as soon as I got back from the Salvation Army, I had to rush back to beg and plead with them to let me recover my husband's good coat, which was accidentally donated)

The most satisfying part of the whole thing is that this is something that I have been daydreaming about for a long time. Although it is always good to get rid of the clutter in our lives, this was the sort of clutter that carried extra weight with it. So many of these clothing items were ugly, and I knew it when I bought them. But these are the things that I bought between pregnancies. When I was looking for something cheap to get me through to next month, when I would surely be pregnant again. No use spending a lot of money on something you aren't going to wear for very long.

These clothing items spent too much time in my closet. And every time I put them on, I would remember wearing them when I didn't care about how I looked. When I gave up on appearances. When the only thing that mattered was my desperate charting of basil body temperature and cervical fluid.

These things carried with them the spectre of death. Yesterday, I purged my closet. In so doing, I moved even further away from a life of Death towards a life of Life.