where i am is right here

I’m alone, in the most literal sense of the word and it is usually then, in the solitude, when he comes to me.  I mean, of course, he is always there in my periphery – a wavering figure against the backdrop of everyday life.  But when I am quiet and alone my vision focuses and his blurry outlines solidify.  I’m tempted to pull out his three photographs and let myself sink into the familiar darkness.  There are times, like this moment, when his absence fills up the entirety of my being.  

We’ve just returned from a visit with Leif’s family in Oregon and the jolt of living in the truth of his death has left me reeling.  In those few days it became all too easy to imagine a reality different than the one we have been given and almost unbearable to live in the one we have.  

I still want to say his name and tell his story but I am finding it more and more exhausting emotionally to allow others to participate in –and observe- my grief.   The more time that passes the more uncomfortable I am in letting people see just how broken I still am, because this is the part in the screenplay when everything is supposed to start  wrapping up in a satisfying way for audience members.  This is the part where I should start expounding on the gifts that his death has brought me; a greater sense of sympathy for the world at large, a greater sense of appreciation for the beautiful things in life, a greater sense of self.  Maybe that is all true in one way or another but right now, at this very moment, I just want him back.

What I do know for sure, and maybe for now this is enough, is that I’m one year and forty-seven days older and in that time I have somehow managed to haphazardly stitch myself together into a whole person again, or at least a reasonable facsimile of one.  I'm not what I used to be, and certainly on days like these that shows more clearly than usual.  I’m threadbare in places, with oversized button eyes, mismatched threading and dingy cotton stuffing that peaks through in places and for which I am constantly trying to sneakily push back in less someone see just how shoddily I’ve been put back together.  I’m whole –as complete as I can or ever will be- but if anyone were to look closely enough just how timeworn I am would be apparent as would just how much I still miss my son.

*Thank you to Angie for bringing this project to life.

scandinavian demon

I wanted to title this post "Scandinavian Demon" because at our previous ultrasound with the Perinatologist he made a joke about how one of the images of the baby looked vaguely demonic.  We laughed and made a reply something to the effect that our two bloodlines never should have crossed. Maybe this would have offended some but it just made us like him that much more.  Having a doctor with a sense of humor is nice, at least from our perspective.

This past Tuesday was our last visit with him.  From the beginning of this pregnancy his goal -aside from the ultimate one of helping us have a living baby- was to get us into the third trimester.  Had George been but a few weeks older, say 28 or 29 weeks, when his condition first started they would have just delivered him and ablated his heart immediately when it became evident after the first few days that the medications weren't working.  The long-standing hydrops would not have had the time to rob him of any real chance at living a normal life.  Who knows, maybe we would have a fourteen month old baby right now and I would be blogging about first steps instead of this.

Well, we are hovering on the cusp of the third trimester at this point.  On Tuesday I will be twenty-eight weeks.  According to March of Dimes if for some reason I delivered this baby right now there would be a 96% chance of survival.  An impressive number (and one I am truthfully dubious about) but statistics are a joke- just a way to soothe ourselves into believing that we will be exempt from the bad things that happen.

Still, after speaking at length with my therapist on the subject, I am doing my best not to live in the future where I have to say goodbye to another baby.  Tonight, as I am writing this, I am mother to a dead son but also mother to a daughter and right now, at this very minute, she is alive.

year four of the best years of my life

Apparently if you subscribe to the modern lifestyle in the U.S. for the fourth wedding anniversary you are supposed to exchange gifts of electronics.  In our relationship, if we followed this suggested gift category, the gift-giving would work out in Leif's favor seeing as he is the one in our duo who has the affinity for things of this nature.  But alas, poor Leif, we are apparently not modern Americans and so he missed out on his chance for new electronics this anniversary.

We hardly ever exchange gifts, it just isn't our thing.  Instead we do vacations.  This year was no different and we headed out of town to celebrate the anniversary of the day we got married by staying in a hotel room and eating ungodly amounts of food.  It is the Leif + Brianna way.

Personally, I am looking forward to our ninth wedding anniversary.  By that time I am going to convert to the modern American lifestyle so I can finally get those leather chaps I've been eyeing.

all befuddled

Sometimes I wonder if I am going to need to continue seeing my therapist twice a month until she dies.  Or I die.   She isn't too much older than me so who knows which one of us will go first.  If I have learned anything this last year it is that you can't bet on the natural order of things to keep any order at all.  It is all just random chaos.  So like I said, until one of us dies.

Each day that moves me farther from George and closer to this baby's arrival -and let's be completely honest I still have my doubts about the "arrival" actually happening- seals my lips more securely.  I recoil from questions, other than the most superficial, regarding this pregnancy with an almost allergic response.  So my therapist has become one of the very few people who I feel comfortable enough with to share what has really been going on inside.  Let me just say that what has been going on inside has been confusing and not all that pretty.

I feel sad.  I feel happy.  I feel overwhelmingly lucky and at the same time overwhelmingly unlucky.  I feel grateful and ungrateful.  I feel envious.  I feel loved and I feel love.

I feel lonely, definitely lonely.

I feel like I don't want to write any of this because I feel like I can't write what I want to anymore.

It is probably a self imposed restriction that is only real in my own head. But it doesn't feel that way.  It feels like I have to be one of two people.  The person who misses my son and writes about that here.  Or the person who is happily pregnant with this baby and who doesn't acknowledge the more complicated aspects of what being pregnant again means.  Either or but it feels like there is no room to combine the two.

I can't write about how impossible it is to feel like a normal pregnant person when sometimes I so desperately want to feel like one that I pretend I am.  I can't write about how I feel undeniably separate from the rest of the pregnant, baby-having world and how sometimes I actually prefer it that way.  It gets so damn confusing at times to remember at any given moment which person I am.  Am I the person who wants to be like every other pregnant mother or the person who finds the idea of pretending that I am stomach-turning?

I can't write about how being pregnant again has fixed nothing (not that I thought it would).  It has only made things more muddled and difficult to dissect.  It has made me more intensely protective of his memory and of myself.

I can't write any of that because I should be nothing but excitement and love and nursery decor and birth planning.  I can't write any of that because it makes me feel terribly guilty that by not being those things I am not loving this baby the way I should be.  Honestly, it makes me feel ashamed and like I've already failed.

I've never been good with failure or with people seeing me fail, which is why for twenty-six weeks I have remained so silent here (and why I have been so neglectful about commenting on others blogs).

I am just so grateful my therapist is willing to see me on Saturdays.

sunday afternoon

I miss him and his absence is a constant hum to my days.  But I also can't deny that my life, in all its imperfection and grief, is still so very beautiful.

an update

I've had a few posts written about how it feels to be pregnant again but I've deleted them all.  So here I am, again, trying to find the words to accurately describe what has been going on in my head.  But it is a mess in there so I'm having a difficult time sorting through the rubbish and collecting the bits worth writing about.

So while I am trying to figure out what I want to say, I just thought I'd throw out this quick update.

Baby is doing just fine.  Heart rate has been normal.

I'm twenty-two weeks as of today.  I have to write out that whole number because writing "22" just doesn't seem to do justice to how long t...w...e...n...t...y-t...w...o weeks really is.  That is five and a half months of being pregnant.  How I've made it to this point is still somewhat of a mystery to me.

I'm thinking eighteen more weeks seems like a really, really long time.

But better eighteen more than only seven more.

a first anniversary

Last year, when George was born, it was wet and grey.  The world was desaturated, the color drained from the sky and soaked through to the soil where it stayed for a very long time- a still-life in charcoals.  This year, if George's birthday was a painting it would have been a watercolor. All washed out in pale shades of blues and greens with pops of purples and yellows.  There would be ink-outlined objects and figures, giving some definition to the pooling and mottling of the colors.

We didn't anticipate that contrast between this year and last but spring, in all of its vibrancy and softness, has come to this part of the world. After one of the wettest winters on record here, all the wildflowers have begun to stretch toward the sky to gratefully meet the sun.  Small, delicate stems and buds belie their tenacity to grow in even the most peculiar places.  Flowers ornament the empty lots and poke through the cracks in the sidewalk.  Brightly colored graffiti, splashed on the dirty concrete walls, reach down to meet equally brightly colored tiny flowers growing through the asphalt.

When George's birthday finally came upon us we didn't have any big plans. Just a drive out of town, two kites -a goldfish and a phoenix- and a wish for some seclusion.  I wore my new blue dress.  Leif; his favorite chambray shirt.   We found ourselves driving along side vast swathes of yellow and purple wildflowers, spreading over the green hillside opposite the blue of the Pacific Ocean.

After some time we stopped for brunch and then into a children's store with the intent of buying a toy for a one year old that we could donate to a local charitable organization.  We figured that we would continue with the tradition that we started in December so that every holiday or birthday some other child who is the age that George would be gets a new toy to play with they way we wish George could.  In the end we picked a wooden duck push toy that flaps its wings and quacks; something we would have gotten for George.

Before heading out to find a beach we purchased a simple unlined, black moleskin journal that we decided will be George's Birthday Book.  Each year we will write to him and tell the story of what we did to remember the anniversary of the day he was born.  There will be photos of his day and, hopefully, notes from his siblings.  Something that will grow and change as we grow and change.

After driving around for almost an hour, looking for a suitable beach (one without throngs of college students), we took a chance and parked alongside a trail that led into a thicket of wildflowers.  Not sure of where we were going, but knowing the general direction of the beach, we walked along the path for about twenty minutes before coming to the edge of a steep cliff that dropped off above the beach.

There was no easy way to climb down but we eventually found a precarious little path weaving around the jettied rocks and outcroppings.  About two thirds of the way down we realized that it was not the wisest thing for a woman five months pregnant to be trying to traverse but I made it down safe and sound.

A view of the path we came down.  Would not recommend for pregnant women. Especially those in short dresses.

As it turns out, scrambling down a very steep pathway is not for everyone so we ended up nearly completely by ourselves, aside from the occasional ambler from the nearby nude beach (life certainly has a sense of humor, even in the least humorous of times).  Those next couple of hours we spent assembling kites, attempting to fly them with no real success due a pathetic lack of the requisite wind, and generally just feeling the absence of our son.  Together we wrote George's name in the sand and decorated it with shells and as 4:00 rolled around, the time when he was born, we wrote out George's 1st birthday letters in his Birthday Book.

Had to fake this shot as our poor kites never did make it very far off the ground.

Twenty four "official" minutes of life is so brief.  It is a half hour sitcom devoid of commercials.  It is the amount of time it takes me to shower and get ready for bed every night.  It is the amount of time it takes to eat a packed lunch or read an article in a magazine.  George lived for twenty four minutes, although I assume he was gone for some minutes before they actually declared him dead.  So very miniscule in the grand scheme of time.  Not much more than a spark in the dark.

I picked wildflowers for George along the scramble back up the cliff and the walk through the fields.  Purples and blues and yellows, all tiny little blooms.  A bouquet of wild growing flowers made from blossoms that exist for such a short time each year.  They sprout in the cool early weeks of spring only to return back to the soil a piddling time later.  A fitting gift for our own little wildflower.  A gift we will add to the letters and the photographs and the stories every year on his birthday.

To where ever you are, even if you only exist in my dreams, Happy Birthday son.  We love you forever.

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Thank you to everyone who remembered George on his birthday and offered kind words of encouragement.  You have touched our hearts.  Family and friends shared with us the ways they remembered him as well and it touched us to know that his existence has not gone forgotten.