Lower

When you lose your child... you lose the ability to say "ugh, today was the worst day ever".  It isn't.  You know it isn't.  It isn't even close to the worst day ever.  But today was a very bad day.  It even makes the top 10 list of bad days... and believe me, that is saying something.  Today I found out I am not pregnant.  Again.  And I am out of Clomid... and if I take it again I will be going over the 6 month recommendation of the medical community.  I honestly really haven't thought of this day.  I put everything I had into the last 4 months... all of my hope rested there.  I was CERTAIN we would get pregnant.  So certain, I refused to think of the alternative.  Where would we be if it didn't work?  And here I am.  In this place.  With no good options.  Do we go to more aggressive treatment, which we always said we wouldn't do?  Do we give up on having a child of our own and hope that an adoption works out for us within the next couple of years?  Thinking about 2 more years without the hope of a child makes me want to crawl in a dark hole and never come out.  I just keep thinking... what if Owen was it for me?  He's gone and I can't hold him, and what if that is all there is for my life?  If he had lived... that would have been enough.  I could have been happy just loving him.  But what do I do now?  I didn't think I could get any lower than I was... and yet here I am.

Dark Spaces

I have been struggling with flashbacks.  Some would say that I am suffering from PTSD.  This may be the case.  I really don't care what it's called... it what is happening.  And it sucks.  These flashes take me to the darkest places of my life.  Some of them I don't even remember until that moment.  Others I replay over and over like a movie reel of my worst nightmare.  It sneaks up on me.  Sometimes I am singing along to Taylor Swift in the car.   Then I am at the cemetery watching two men put my son into the ground.  I am walking into the chapel and seeing a casket far tinier than it was in my imagination.  I am in the NICU and my son is hooked up to 7 thousand wires to try and find out why he is having seizures.  I am in a private room because I was swearing in the hallway of the hospital and disturbing the other parents, because they just told me we were out of options.  I am tuning out the doctor who is trying to talk to me while I'm holding my son for the first and last time.  I am in the hospital at the end of April listening to a doctor tell me that if I deliver my sweet precious boy that day... he has a 0% chance of surviving.  I am seeing the doctor check his pulse and telling us he is gone.  I am picking out a burial plot, trying to decide where Owen might like best.  I am talking to Owen in my belly on bed rest.  Telling him how many more days he has to stay in there to give him the best shot we had.  I am sitting at the hospital on delivery day, and the anesthesiologist is telling me that if he dies right away, they won't be able to bring me out of it to say goodbye. 

I am trying so hard to get some control in my life... and it feels like the powers that be don't care how hard I am trying.  Life just keeps getting more difficult and no one sees that I can't take one more thing or I am going to drown.  I am trying everyday to be positive and be hopeful.  And I am constantly sucked back to those days, to the most horrible moments of my existence... which unfortunately are intermingled with the absolute best moments of my existence.  I don't know how to reconcile this. I don't know how to live with it yet.  I don't know how to separate the light spaces from the dark spaces.