So how have I been?  Well, I haven’t written anything in several weeks.  Daily life has picked back up so much, but the real reason is that I feel like I have nothing to say.  Well, maybe not nothing to say, but no way to describe the differences that have settled into my life.  Into my person.  Sure, there are still those moments of grief that take me by surprise.  Like the other day at my in-laws.  It was a family dinner for my husband, and to tell the truth I had forgotten most of the reason why I was reluctant to go, so when my husband suddenly changed his plans and decided to stop by, I was not any more hesitant than usual.  As soon as we walked in though, I saw my sister in law pulling her son out of his highchair, and as she turned around, her mother leaned in to tickle the baby’s feet.  And that was it.  All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe.  The room started spinning and I just got up and walked out the door.  I had not laid eyes on the baby since the day he was born…two weeks before my daughter…  The sudden realization that that should be me, holding my baby, hit me so hard, but what hit me even harder is that nobody in that room even remembers.

From what I understand, these types of sudden outbursts of grief will continue out of nowhere for forever.

In my everyday life I am okay.  I get up every day.  I go to work.  I go to church.  I see my pregnant friends.  I pick up people’s babies.  Well, I make myself do it.  It is a struggle.  It is a constant battle of forcing myself to do what I know I should do, but inside it doesn’t feel right or okay.  To be perfectly honest, I spend a lot of time dreaming of running away.  Moving to a new town where nobody knows me and never talking to any of my friends or family again.  Why does that sound like such a promising solution to me?  I truly have no idea.  These are the very people that have loved and supported me in such a time of need.  Maybe so I wouldn’t feel so guilty about wondering “why me?” a thousand times a day.  I mean, I had a perfectly healthy full term baby.  I had no medical conditions, engaged in no risky behaviors….nothing…but my baby died for no other reason than her movements somehow got her so tangled in her own umbilical cord that she had no chance to be born.  Sometimes I have this daydream where I imagine myself in a dim room with a bunch of other pregnant women and everyone is talking quietly and there is an uneasy feeling and then all of a sudden out of nowhere, this spotlight lands on me.  Me.  Out of all the hundreds of other women in the room, it’s me.  I know immediately what it means.   And I want to scream no.  I want it to move to someone else, but I can’t, I couldn’t…. I wouldn’t but…why me?  Really it mimics what my son said to me the other day.  He was asking about someone who was pregnant and said “will her baby die?”  I told him no.  That only sometimes do babies die and that it is very uncommon, so to reinforce this we named off fifteen or so people we know including him, and I reminded them that they were all babies once and that they all lived.  He thought for a moment and then tilted his head and looked at me.  “So pretty much only our baby died.”  With every ounce of my being I wanted to yell “Yes!  That’s right.  Just ours!  God knows why, but every single other person I know is busy holding their babies and ours will never ever be here with us.”  So, I guess I feel like a 3 year old that just can’t understand why, but with the guilt of an adult who knows that you can’t ask for it to be someone else.