I miss her. I miss her so damn much. It’s the most unfair thing to have to live
with everyday.
I wake up every morning
and have to accept it all over again.
That after 9 months, I only got to hold her for a day. After years of planning, I was deprived of
years with her. And then I have to go
on. Walk down the halls, interact with
hundreds of people who neither know nor care what I’ve been through. Look into their eyes, not knowing who is more
dead inside – me for having experienced this, or them for not. I hear words coming out of my mouth that I
didn’t realize I was saying. I see
everything differently. My life is split
in two – life before I was the mother of a stillborn baby, and life after. And there are very very black pages in the
history and timeline of “after.”
I ask myself sometimes “why
am I waiting?” Do I really think that
not being the same time along with my next pregnancy at the same seasonal time
is going to help? Either way, I’ll think
of Coraline, and my pregnancy with her, and everything that happened. It doesn’t matter if I have another baby on
the same day at the same time – nothing is going to make the next one (if there
is a next one) any easier.
I feel empty. I’m filling the dead space with writing and
blogging and school and starting a new career path, but nothing fills my
arms. Nothing stops the pain. Nothing changes my opinion of the dark and
horrible reality that is the world for me now.
I go through the motions of daily life because I have nothing else to
do. I feel my hollow stomach and retrace my steps through my old life and want
to scream until I choke on it. Think of
all the time I wasted crying over stupid shit that didn’t matter. All the complaints and anger – all the
meaningless “loss” I thought I had experienced that equates to nothing more
than insignificant, unregistered blips on the radar.
All my hopes. All my dreams and plans and secret desires gone
in two minutes. I relive the realization
every minute. It’s never gone from my
mind. I relive her birth over and over
and over. Even with as many drugs as I
was on, I still see everything vividly.
I could tell you the color of the nurses scrubs. I can never watch the Patton Oswalt episode
of Burn Notice again, because that is what was on television. I wore my new green and yellow paisley pajama
pants home, with my burgundy tank top.
My anesthesiologist was Filipino, and the old nurse who came to give me
Fentanyl as I screamed through Cytotec-induced contractions had a grey and
white moustache. The curtain to my room
was pink – they wrapped her in a pink and white blanket. They got me up at about 3 am to use the
bathroom – I remember cringing in pain as I did. I asked for my purple socks.
And that’s how I know it
wasn’t a dream, or even a nightmare, because a nightmare you can at least wake
from. You won’t always see color, or be
able to read, or remember all of it except in fuzzy detail. This comes blaring back at me daily, often
hourly. I fell apart going in her room
the other day – not seeing her there.
There’s an eternal absence in my life, one I will always try and always
fail to fill.
And no one left really
cares. I’ve put on a great show of being
“over it”, so that’s what they see, and what they accept. They bitch to me about their problems, which
are obviously so much more important than mine.
They demand I make their lives easier because my situation has been “just too hard on them.” My life doesn’t mean anything anymore – maybe
it never did, but now I am so painfully aware of it.
I am a fraction of the
person I used to be – and a shattered, ruined fraction at that. I put on a really good front, but it’s a lie.
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