loneliness and holidays

The aftershocks of grief roll on.

The damned holiday season… I spend most of Thanksgiving locked away sobbing while my family laughed and talked a floor below. It was the darkest I’ve been in a while. I was swallowed by the black, suffocating. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t stop crying. I was crushed under the waves.

So far I’ve spent the build up to Christmas vacillating between the urge to create new traditions and the desire for everyone and everything to go to hell. I refuse to put up the tree that Damon pulled down and permanently wonkified in the process. I will not hang stockings and try to decide if I will hand four or five. I wont. I did create a messy little tree of lights on our living room wall. My first born absolutely loves it and the rainbow baby stares at the lights like it’s the coolest thing he’s ever seen so I’m satisfied. There is some satisfaction in doing it differently, because we are different.

I’m terrified of the crash. I’m afraid of what the holiday that was once my favorite is going to do to me this year. I’m still trying to think of how to bring Damon into each ‘celebration.’ I need him there. I need him remembered but I haven’t figure out how.

The pain of isolation intensifies as I walk deeper into a life of grief. The knowledge that only my few friends who grieve their own children don’t grow tired of my weeping is devastating. So many who I thought were life-long friends have drifted away. I know I must be exhausting but it is so painful to feel like a mission rather than a person.  To be abandoned by the people who knew Damon, by the people who stood by his graveside. It feels like losing a piece of him, again.

Until next time…

Once a day...

Once a day the light hits this monitor just right and it lights up his handprints. I refuse to clean it. The pain of seeing his sweet little prints is unbearable but the thought of wiping them away is abhorrent. They are all I have left of him. The little prints here, the little prints on the back door, the little prints on the oven door, all left in stasis.

Yesterday the little rainbow concieded to be entertained by his daddy and I swept into the boy's bathroom on a mission. How do little boy's bathrooms get so completely and utterly disgusting? I started grabbing the hodgpodge of medicine and shampoo bottle scattered all over the counter and dumping them into the top drawer (because, yes, that is how I clean these days). I grabbed a bottle and stopped dead, my heart threatened to clench so hard in my chest it would just stop. They were his prescriptions, there was his name, one bottle, two bottles... what the hell? I haven't touched anything, nothing. All of his things have stayed exactly where they were. His medicine cabinet hasn't even been opened... and there they sat, staring at me, telling me what I'm starting to have to see. I can't run from this forever.

Will and I have discussed Damon's room, decided that it is time to make it rainbow baby's room, then done precisely nothing about it... over and over. I stopped going in there nearly a year ago. I just couldn't... I just couldn't. I refused to close the door. I was afraid I would close it and never open it again. I felt like closing it was somehow denying his existence, something I refuse to do. I love him. I miss him. He was here. He was REAL.

For a long time I would make sure when I left our bedroom I had absolutely everything I could possibly need so that I wouldn't have to pass that horrifyingly empty room again once I had managed to do it once. I spent months avoiding the hall. One trip out of our room in the morning, one in at night, minimize the number of times I'm stabbed through the gut. It's nuts, as if I wouldn't be stabbed a million times, a million other ways...

Every single time I pass his door I touch the doorframe. It's like my way of saying "This affects me. Every single time I pass your door. I notice. I see you standing in your crib excitedly pointing at your Zebra. I see you getting zipped into your footie pajamas by your daddy. I SEE you!!!!" And I do. I see him... always.

I carefully put all of those bottles back into his medicine cabinet. I may very well keep them until the day that I die. I may have a random computer monitor smeared with baby handprints perched somewhere in my living room for always.

He's gone... how the hell can this be real?

Until next time....

Sweet tea and Hard work

Most mornings after I drop Isaiah off at school I swing by McDonalds and get a gigantic sweet tea, because I’ve given up Dr. Pepper…again. Don’t smirk, it might stick this time.  Hush.

Anyway, four or five days a week I see roughly the same people and by in large they are exceedingly pleasant. I have so much respect for these incredibly hard working individuals who manage to smile as they serve everyone else all day, every day. I don’t think I would be quite so easy to get along with.

Am I the only one who somehow got the impression at some point that these type of jobs were somehow dishonorable, that the very people on whose shoulders our country is built are somehow less? I’m not exactly sure when I realized that this was a subconscious belief but when I did I was pretty disgusted with myself.

It seems like there’s an attitude that anyone who isn’t wealthy, or god forbid, needs help is somehow a drain on society. Well, we’ve needed help. We need help. Often it’s really hard to admit. It’s hard to know that we can’t just make it work like everyone else seems to be able to.

I’m frustrated by this. I’m frustrated that it seems that worth in our culture is so centered on money and the perception of perfection. We gasp in shock as life after life crumbles to the ground after years of plastered smiles, perfect houses, and perfectly styled name brand clothes. When are we going to get it? When am I going to get it?

I’d really like it if we would all get real but in the mean time I’m just going to work on me. I’m going to work on identifying my underlying beliefs, reinforcing the ones that are beautiful, and rejecting the ones that are ugly.

People have worth. The sweet lady who grinned like I had made her day when I complemented her fuzzy hat as she handed me my change has worth, big time worth. So do I, so do you, period.

Until next time.

Pain, Isolation, and Adoption

I’ve been in an exceedingly bad place lately. Honestly, it’s not really fair to say I “have been” because quite frankly I’m still so there. I’m hurting and angry and confused and I suppose that is nothing new which makes it that much more exhausting.

I’m lonely and I have to acknowledge that at least part of my isolation is my own doing. I had my first panic attack in months a few weeks ago because I made the mistake of acting like I’m not thoroughly broken. I participated in an activity that any mentally healthy person would think nothing of and it just overwhelmed me. I was stuck in public, going dark, and feeling terrified. I was horrible. It was frustrating. I’m so sick of being shattered. The truth of the matter is that, at least to some extent, I isolate myself. I do this partially out of fear, fear of the panic attacks, fear of having to have that conversation one-more-time, fear of the awkward silences when I just don’t do the let’s-talk-about-nothing portion of the conversation. I also do it to avoid the pain. The pain of never ever fitting. The pain of hearing one more freaking “God is so good!” when the eleventy bagillionth person has their life fit nicely into the American middle class ideal. I think “so what is the reverse? If God is so good when he heals your child, gives you your dreams, protects your husband on his trip to XYZ then what is he to me?” Not good.

I’m lonely and I don’t fit. No one knows how to deal with my reality so they just don’t.

I’ve been in a bad place with everything. I’ve been incredibly overwhelmed and wondering if we should continue Damon’s Dance. The fundraising, the application review, the interviews, the requests for check dispersal… it’s a lot and this year I barely managed. I’ve wondered if we are even helping. I’ve wondered if we are doing any good at all. Quite frankly, I’ve just wanted to quit.

Yesterday I got an email from one of our families with new pictures of their son, awaiting them in Korea. The mom had great news about a fundraiser they just had and the pictures were beautiful. Then, we interviewed a new family. I wanted to just sit and listen to their story. They had that intangible something. They talked a lot about their son’s birth mom. They talked about her with such love, gratitude, and adoration. This perspective is certainly not new to me. Two of my favorite parents in the world honor their son’s birth mom similarly but I don’t think I had really stopped to consider the difficulty of this choice and I was deeply moved to hear this couple speak about this person they now consider a part of their family.

Then today I watched a show that was supposed to be about a weight loss journey. It turned out to be a lot more. The young woman who was the subject was adopted at age two. Her birth mother chose adoption for her because she was homeless and made the agonizing decision that the best choice for this child she loved was to be with someone else.

… can you imagine?

At one point in the show the young woman got to travel to meet her birth mother. She approached her with such love and gratitude. They walked the streets of her birth country and the woman’s birth mother showed her the shack where they use to live. I was so incredibly humbled. I was deeply deeply moved. I was reminded that this is quite simply not about me. Not at all. Not even kind of. This is about them. This is about the babies, the kids, the moms, the dads, the brothers, the sisters. It’s about them.

Life is so hard. Every day is full of pain. I think the only way I’m going to survive is to find a way to focus out. To poor everything out. To give because I want to.

How ironic.

Until next time with pain and love…

Nasty nasty ugliness

I’m so angry and so so so confused.

I completely stopped reading the bible several months ago. I was so sickened by the suffering and horrors of the Hebrew Bible and my complete inability to reconcile the truth of what is plainly written with what I had been taught to believe that I just stopped.

Every time I happen across a sermon on the radio or read an “inspiring uplifting” devotional my stomach turns. It infuriates me. I’m disgusted. Isaiah comes home with stories of the “heroes” of the bible. Sampson for example. Sampson who was a murderous, disrespectful, vile, lying, selfish man who squandered an enormous gift, whose only semi-redeeming act was murder-suicide. Seriously?

How is it that we just conveniently ignore the hundreds of thousands of deaths perpetrated directly by the God of the Hebrew Bible. I was in a class that touched on this subject much to the extreme discomfort of the room full of ministers. One of them said “Well, they must have deserved it.” I’m so flushed with rage just at the memory I can barely type. Seriously?

How did I make it through the vast majority of my life as a Christian without ever having the courage to confront the black and white truth of the horror of the Old Testament? Because I just didn’t want to. Because it didn’t jive with my health, wealth, and prosperity gospel.

How is it that we scream about homosexuality but have no problem with divorce? How is it that we are so willing to judge the teenage mother but justify our enormous houses and piles of stuff while people starve to death? I’m just plain pissed.

I’m disgusted with myself and I’m so confused about what is true. I don’t know what I believe anymore. I just don’t.

I know that I’m disgusted with the prosperous west. I’m disgusted that I never realized how much North American Christianity completely fails until I was one of the disenfranchised. Until it was my life that was devastated, destroyed, broken. Until I stopped fitting.  

So much of what people spout simply isn’t biblical. That I know for sure. Most Christians know more about celebrities or sports than they do about the bible. How dare we? How dare we claim to have the answer, sit on our high horse when we don’t even know what damn color the horse is? Seriously?

But that which is biblical often is far from pretty. It can’t be packaged and put on a wall hanging or a shirt. A while back I heard “Life is complicated, God is not.” On a local Christian radio station. I choked on my Dr. Pepper. Is your life really that easy? Have you really confronted that much of the history of your religion that you think your God is simple?! Seriously!?

Have I mentioned that I’m pissed? Cuz I’m pissed. And I just don’t fit. I wish I could go back. I wish I could go back to when I believed life was shiny and happy and good, when I believed I was the apple of this God’s eye, when I believed He was good or gave a crap about me but I can’t. There is nowhere to go but forward. Forward through all of the questions. The anger. The doubt. The nasty nasty ugliness.

I don’t fit in your world anymore…

Until next time…

The Stroller

Ugggghhhhhh!!!

This sucks! This hurts! I miss him so much…

Today I decided Raz and I were going out. I’m restless and stir crazy and quite frankly running hard from a wave of grief and is washing at my heels. The crash is coming and I’m so tired of missing, hurting, raging being ruled by agony. I’m running, just like I always run, because I just don’t know how to stand still and be taken by this kind of pain. I just don’t know how.

I’ve been staring at Damon’s things for nearly a year and a half. I didn’t want to use any of them for Raz. Because it hurts. Because they’re Damon’s. Because… hell I don’t know. I just don’t.

But we just don’t live in that word. We can’t afford to buy a new carseat, a new stroller, a new high chair. Raz has been in Damon’s car seat since he came home from the NICU. I made my peace with that. It wasn’t that hard. Damon hadn’t ridden in that seat in over a year. But today I screwed up my courage and grabbed the stroller. It was filthy. A year and a half of life piled on top. I went after it with my Lysol wipes, determined to hold back the Tsunami of pain welling in my chest. I found myself apologizing over and over. “I’m sorry baby. I’m so sorry.”

Then the gut punch.

I opened the stroller and there in the basket were his diapers. His diapers from our last nearly daily trip to the park to play. Him with his banana in hand and his big brother trotting along beside as I pushed. We were happy. God we were happy.

The river of tears broke through. It felt like something someone would think was poetic as they dripped on the stroller while I cleaned. It wasn’t poetic. It was hell. Just another day in the hell of being the mother of a dead child.

God this hurts…

Mommy meltdown

I’m tired y’all.

My man has been back at work for just over a month. I’m so fortunate to be married to an academic. He gets most, if not all of the summer off. So, for those first crazy months trying to adjust to being home from the NICU, adjusting to Raz’s heart monitor, and re-learning how to parent a baby my partner was home.

Well, spoiled I am no more. The hubby commutes to teach at a college a little over an hour away. There’s only so much support a man can give over text message. Sympathetic frowny faces, suggestions, and reminders of where I put my blasted keys are about it. This momma is on her own and I’m tired.

I was absolutely determined to breast feed Raz. I didn’t breast feed Damon. This is one of my biggest regrets and biggest sources of guilt. My son died of an infection. I didn’t provide him with my immunity. It’s my fault. You can point out the obvious. Thousands of children grow to be completely healthy on formula. Mine didn’t. This is the first time I’ve ever “said” that out loud.

But my rainbow baby had his own agenda. When he was born six weeks premature and unable to oxygenate his blood he was far too weak to breastfeed. So, I started pumping. It sucked (no pun intended). He received my milk through a feeding tube, what little I was able to produce. Once he was able to eat I tried to breast feed then pumped at every feeding. He refused to breastfeed but I kept trying. The nurses kept telling me that once we got home and I could rest I would produce more milk. I was dubious. I was barely keeping up with him and he wasn’t eating much.

Lo and behold we came home and my production dramatically improved, thus began my love hate relationship with my pump.

For those few glorious months while the hubs was home it wasn’t so bad (except for the actual pumping part). I could hand my little one off to his daddy and go pump. It wasn’t fun but it worked and I was successfully providing my child with the immunity I had failed to give Damon.

As you can probably imagine once we finally got to hold Raz we weren’t so interested in putting him down, like ever. Therefore our little rainbow learned to sleep in our arms, pretty much exclusively. Fast forward to now with a mommy still trying to provide breast milk and a baby who refuses to be put down. There’s lots of crying in my world.

Add a very bright, very inquisitive, very busy seven year old with a life of his own and you have the perfect storm of mommy melt down.

I’ve said it before but I need to hear it again so here goes.

Losing Damon does make me more aware of what really matters. There is so much that just isn’t important and there are a precious few things that so very very are. My kids, my husband, my family top the list. BUT this doesn’t mean I’m some sort of Zen momma. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to go hide in my room so I can go five minutes without someone needing something from me. It doesn’t mean parenting ceases to be SO FREAKING HARD.

I just needed the reminder. I’m gonna go cry now.

Until next time. 

Consumed

I spent a long time not crying, barely feeling, just moving. Then I cried. I cried and cried and cried. I’ve been leaking for days now. Leaking and raging. Raging and biting and snarling at everything in biting range.

Last night as another volley of poisonous thoughts rammed through my consciousness I realized something. I’m angry. I’m burning alive with it.

I’m resentful angry. I’m jealous angry. I’m pour pitiful me angry. I’m sick with anger.

And I have every right to be.

I have every right to be angry. If any time in my life I have ever had the right to be angry it is now. Life sucks. It’s not fair. I’m so tired of watching everyone else raise their children, celebrate birthdays, smile, and have entire days, or hell weeks, untouched by sorrow.

I’m tired of being one huge walking bruise. I’m tired of being hurt so easily. I’m tired of aching to be included then running scared from people. I’m angry and even scarier, I’m bitter.

I’m bitter.

Ugh… which means I have another blasted choice to make. I have every right to be angry. I want to rage and mope and scream and cuss. But I don’t want to be consumed. I want to heal. I want to find a balance. I want to reclaim beauty and peace and life. I don’t get to have both. F-word.

I’m not saying anger isn’t ok, or natural, or even healthy. It is. I’m saying this particular all consuming, this is who I am anger has to be rejected or it will become my god. Quite frankly I don’t know if I can do it.

I have every right to be angry. That I know. What I don’t know is if I have a right to be anything else. Do I have the right to be happy? Am I even capable of such a thing? If I turn from the burning anger am I somehow saying this is ok? Am I saying my child being ripped from me is ok with me if I smile or learn to celebrate life again?

It’s easy for someone who’s never done it to say no. It feels like a betrayal. People would say things like “What would Damon want?” You have no idea what Damon would want. Damon wanted to be held and eat popcorn and poop in the bathtub. This isn’t on him. This is on me.

Yet another realization with an unanswered question.  And the pain never ends…

Until next time.

This can't be real

This isn’t real.

This cannot be real.

This. Is. Not. Real.

Dirty handprints on the back door. All that’s left. Shattered world, never restored.

Baby in my arms who will never know. Brother whose memories more and more go.

The spinning, reeling, tilting world. The fear, the loneliness, the desperate twirl.

The lovers fighting to stay intertwined. The exhaustion, the hiding, the silence that binds.

The world moving forward. Time marches on. The normal the happy. I don’t belong.

The drowning the drought, fragile, fearful creep and crawl tossed and thrown by anything at all.

The memories that cannot escape my head, clamped to my heart heavy as lead.

Sadness, blackness drags me down. I failed. I failed just let me drown.

No one gets it, doesn’t it show? Death would be mercy. I can’t take the blows.

Doubts and questions all drenched in fear. No relief, not even in tears.

I MISS HIM! I WANT HIM! My heart wails. No such thing as justice scales.

My constant mourning appeal. This can’t be real.

Stuff and stuff

This weekend was one for huddling in the dark, realizations, and attitude adjustments. It seems that anytime I feel that I may have some semblance of a grip the world whips into a tailspin and I go flying again. Have you noticed how NOISY it is out there? Geez... Turn it off already.

Huddling
I was reminded just how broken I am and just how far I've come all in the same experience. Even now I really don't spend a lot of time around people. My introversion has fooled me into forgetting that my mind as well as my heart is shattered. After spending a relatively short period of time fighting to interact normally in a friendly social setting I completely stopped speaking for nearly three hours. I curled up in the dark in my room and disappeared. When we were leaving the gathering Will said "you did so well talking to people today babe." Wow, I'm so broken, so so broken.

Realizing
My oldest has inherited his mother's complete scatter brain. My poor husband is the only one in the house who ever knows where anything is. We send Isaiah to another room to accomplish some task and without fail find him wondering aimlessly having forgotten there was a task to be accomplished at all or having actually made it to his destination happily destroying something there. I really can't blame the kid. Like I said, he's got lots of stuff you can't point at his mom for but that one is all me. They say its a sign of brilliance. I'm going with that.

A side effect of the complete inability to focus on any one task for any length of time results in some serious messes. Again, this is one I try to be patient with. While now that I am mature (coughs) I am the resident cleaner/organizer/declutterer it took a loong time to get here. Saturday I decided I was going to tackle my big boy's room. He was out of town and I was determined to get things under control.

After digging my tenth "I don't even want to know" out of a nook or cranny and opening his toy box to find an empty cereal box and an egg crate (that was just in the first layer) I uttered about my hundredth variation of "I'm gonna kill him."

But over the next 5 or so hours as I slowly worked my way over, under, and through mounds of junk my attitude  did a 180. When Will came in to make sure I hadn't been eaten by whatever was living in there I looked up and said "I'm a HORRIBLE parent!" While my penchant for the melodramatic may have taken that statement a bit over the top the truth is I was feeling like I had failed my kid, majorly. I was buried under piles of STUFF. It took me hours to clean and organize it all. I was stressed by the clutter and the claustrophobic feeling in the room. Why does my kid have so much stuff? On what planet can i expect him to keep this clean?! Ugh, Mommy fail. I purged and purged and purged and promised myself this was going to change.

Adjusting
Isaiah is a typical kid. Anytime we're anywhere he wants two of everything. I usually say something like "Babe, you have tons of stuff you don't even play with" but this weekend I think a change that has been working itself in my head finally clicked into place. Stuff is stressful! Today when we went to the grocery store and Isaiah asked for a pillow pet even though he already has one (but that one glows!) I said "having too much stuff just causes stress babe. Let's work on enjoying what we have." - attitude adjustments

I've been purging my own stuff for a while but now I'm even more motivated. Stuff is stressful. I want to spend my time loving on my guys not doing piles of laundry. Seriously, why on earth do I need a closet full of clothes? I so don't. So I'm hoping to keep my eye on what's important and start removing what's not.

By the way, when Isaiah explored his room after the massive toy/junk purge he said "it's so calm." From the mouths of babes.

Why Adoption?

This morning I was talking to my Papa, by far the kindest, truest, most steady person I’ve ever known. He’s one of those people who loves you even when you don’t think you want to be loved. Strong when strength is required and gentle when gentleness is needed. If you can’t tell I adore the man.

I’ve been asked a lot lately why we choose to found a fund in honor of Damon that assists families with adoption expenses. Why adoption? Damon wasn’t adopted.

The short answer is it never occurred to us to do anything else. Adoption was just right. It just was.

I’ve been exploring myself lately wondering if there is a longer answer. I think yes… and no. The short answer is plenty but maybe our choice tells us something about ourselves. I’ve been considering what that might be.

I’m not entirely sure where this story begins… so I guess I’ll start at the beginning. I’m adopted, in a manner of speaking. The man I introduced you to at the beginning of this post shares no blood with me. Neither do my aunt or uncle or cousins or the man who has been my only dad. The entirety of my extended family folded me in when I came to them at two years old, likely clinging to my mother who married their son and brother. Every Christmas memory, every Thanksgiving, my graduations… all populated with people who adopted me. They are the only family I have ever known.

There was pain, and brokenness and challenges. I struggled, battled, and wrestled with my identity. The desire to belong is hard enough when you’re 15 without the drama of convincing yourself you don’t even belong in your family. It wasn’t always pretty. It was hard and I was a real jerk. I think sometimes I had every right to be but that doesn’t make life any easier on the people who deal with you. Maybe because such a huge chunk of my biological family had just walked out on me I was convinced my “adopted” family would, too. Sometimes I think I tried to make them. They never did.

Very slowly, as an adult I’ve confronted my demons and begun to settle into the place my family has been holding for me all these years. This morning, talking to my Papa, I realized that it has been a long time since I’ve even thought about the fact that I’m not their blood. Papa always answers the phone “How is my Jodie-girl?” when I call. He’s called me that all of my life, his. It’s a beautiful thing.

I wonder if my ache for adoption stems from this? From knowing what it’s like to be taken in, wholly loved by people who didn’t “have” to?

I don’t know but I think this is a piece of the puzzle.

It’s just wrong, babies should be held, loved, kissed, adored. Two of the best parents I know, people who, whether they know it or not, taught me so much about how to be a parent got to be parents through adoption. I feel like people like them should get to raise ten kids if they want to.

So, adoption. It’s sooo expensive. I know what it is to ache for your baby to come home. Mine never will again but we get to help adoptive moms and dads get their babies in their arms and that is just plain good.

Until next time…