My Past/My Present
Originally published at Welcome To The Dollhouse. You can comment here or there.
Originally published at Welcome To The Dollhouse. You can comment here or there.
Thank you, everyone for your good wishes on our match. I went into the weekend on an emotional high, feeling excited for the first time in a long time. Things might just go according to plan, for once. I kept holding on to that thought.
AdoringHusband and I got busy. We took time to clean out the baby’s room and seal it off from Major Pooper, otherwise known as Willow, who seems to have developed a bad habit of pooping and peeing outside the litter box just because she knows that it pisses us off. The crib and dresser should arrive this week. The co-sleeper is here as well. Things are coming together.
But on Saturday, despite my emotional high, I began to reflect on the date. I kept feeling like I was missing something…an important memory. Sure our anniversary is on the 15th. That wasn’t it, but it was something related to that date. Something close to it.
I tried to remember how we spent our anniversary last year. Was that the year we went to the restaurant where all the waiters sang arias between their meal deliveries? No, that wasn’t last year. What did we do last year?
All of a sudden it hit me like a brick. Last year for our anniversary, we sat together eating tasteless pizza and crying. It was one year ago that we lost our Zappy.
On March 7, 2006 I started bleeding and went to the hospital. I was 16 weeks pregnant. On March 8th we discovered that Zappy’s heart was no longer beating. March 10th was the day of the D&E. And by March 15, our 3rd anniversary, I just wanted to die along with my baby.
How did I manage to so compartmentalize this terrible anniversary? Maybe I had to because the pain remains so overwhelming that it threatens to take me over the minute I let the memories into my consciousness. I sit here now letting the feelings wash over me. My head is foggy, my eyes leak, and my hands shake. The pain is horrible. The ugly pain of memory.
I’m torn. I vowed never to forget my dear Zappy. I still love her so much. But when I think of how I lost her, I feel traces of the searing agony from last year. And I don’t want to let that pain back in. I want to put it back into its unbreachable container until the memory becomes dull ache instead of excruciating heartbreak. Does this make me disloyal to my little girl lost?
I chose to do what my therapist always said, when facing past trauma, try to stay present and not get lost in the memory. But the present was at such a contrast. A match with an expectant mother almost a year to the day after the most painful loss of my life. Is this evidence of life sinusoidal path, one second up, the next down? Is this an important synchronicity? Is there a message of hope in this? Or it is just that God/Goddess/Fate/Whatever has a really crappy sense of irony?
I don’t want to relive the pain of the past. I’d rather run toward the hope in my present. Perhaps this makes me a coward. I don’t know for sure.
I want my Zappy to know that she is always loved and is sorely missed by her Mommy and Daddy. Mommy will heal…in time.
Technorati tags: miscarriage, adoption, infertility, loss, grief