how i'm doing new years

i've had a few glasses of champagne. i wanted to write a list of some sort. i want desperately to be positive about how 2008 will have to be better than 2007. the list (short) will come tomorrow.

but right now, i've been excited all night about an auction. really, stupidly, wide-smiled excited. i think if i can be excited about something, go with it. good, but i'm also worried about retail therapy, but i'm such a financially paranoid person...i guess it can either be a normal good thing or go woefully out of control.

i'm not gonna overthink it.

I WON MY BRACELET!!!!! and that's awesome right now. sure, i've also won a rooster pin (love roosters), another really huge pot metal bracelet, another vintage leaf/amber/huge bracelet, and a vargas ring, but who's counting. hey, there were 23 other bids on this here beauty!

oh, ebay. i resolve to quit you. soon.

but for now, YAY!!!!!!!!

crumbs

i tried to order birth announcements when i was about seven months pregnant. the website was having a big sale, and i wanted to take advantage. plus, if i already had them ordered, once the baby was born i could just send in the info, and maybe, possibly, get them mailed out before the kid turned one.

along with my order i emailed the obligatory, "just in case, can i get a refund on these if something happens?" it seemed so ridiculous at the time. but, well, joke's on me! HAHAHA!

they wrote me back saying it was too early to order; they need to close out orders within three weeks. they cancelled the order. (i wonder how many refunds they've given because of dead babies.)

i spent hours looking for the perfect announcement. when i got home from the hospital, i remember deleting the link from our favorites list.

*************

i secured a labor assistant with a $100 deposit for her services at my labor/birth. when the baby died, i asked her for the money back. she told me she would send it when she could; she didn't know when that would be.

i don't care about the money, but it bothers me and i'm not sure why. i don't even know why i felt the need to ask for the refund. i must admit i'm mad about it.

*************

when we purchased this house, i spent two weeks painting the entire thing. i painted the kids' room with navy blue on the ceiling and a twilight blue on the walls with plans on painting murals of a moon and stars and trees and bugs and night animals.

husband made a point of being annoyed the entire, i don't know, year and a half, about the "strange" colors and lack of murals that would force the colors into making total sense. whatever.

when i was 37-38 weeks pregnant, i painted the murals. i excitedly thought this excess of energy was my "nesting" period (HAHAHA!!!!!). i sat on the computer and copied all of our astrological constellations to paint into the sky.

i just remembered a few days ago that what would have been her sign stares at me from the kids' ceiling.

*************

husband is watching an "historical" game of american football tonight. it is supposedly the first time in a billion gazillion years (i think maybe he said something like 35) since a team has gone undefeated in the NFL.

about fifteen minutes ago, he yelled to me from the other room.

husband: "HEY HONEY...remember that fantasy football thing?"
me: "yeah?"
husband: "charmedgirl mama and the incubators won the whole thing!!"


fuck me.

ahhh, those zen buddhists

"they say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. everybody can see that. but only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well-- the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from the nothingness to maturity. in this respect, say the zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it is born."
quoted from elizabeth gilbert's "eat pray love"
italics, boldface, and lack of proper capitalization- charmedgirl


i read this, laying in bed, after i hung my dead baby's acorn ornament on our tree. coincidence? of course it is...but there it was, in my face, nonetheless.


at first reading, i thought of the baby that grew inside me, that little acorn of herself; and the tree, the life she would never lead, the woman she would never be.


i started this post days ago. i think before the weekend, even. my point in all of it was that i realized that I AM the tree, I AM who is to be born at this point. I AM the force that will pull my future self into existence. NOW is the time.

because shit, i couldn't do it for my kid, but i guess i should do it for somebody.

the only problem now is, all i want to do is smash that fucking acorn into a gazillion pieces. and then i want to stick the shards into my eyeballs.

i dreamt last night that i was pregnant; that made me happy in the dream. i am thinking about it again. i am spinning madness in my head.

1-my sister is pregnant, due three days after p@ige was born dead
2- just about the same moment she was peeing on the glorious stick, blood was starting to come out of my, well, you know...
3-i called to set up my IUD appt, and OH! they don't do that particular IUD right now! I JUST WAITED almost FOUR MONTHS to get my period since my baby died, and now i can't even get the fucking birth control??
4-husband was notified the friday before christmas that he was being punitively transferred out of his precinct; only the mayor himself can overturn it, and although many owe him favors, none are the mayor (this is a very long story, the abridged version of which is simply, THIS WHOLE THING IS BULLSHIT)...he's not very upset about it, because (in his words), "my baby died this year, who cares?" which kills me.
5- my baby is still dead

i don't want to clean my house. i don't want to write. i suddenly want to get pregnant again right now. i don't want to answer my phone. i want to sleep all day and not see another living soul. i hate myself and i hate what is happening.

oh, and i think i decided i'm going to see an attorney. i probably shouldn't just put that out there like that, but whatever. i am starting to think my pregnancy wasn't managed properly. that is making me very angry, and for once, at someone other than myself.

oh, 2008, please be better.


edited to add: soulmate friend just called to tell me the baby is being admitted to the nicu under SIDS observation and testing...2007, you are the year from hell.

where the fuck do i start??

i thought i would try denial for xmas. it was working, it really was. i was shopping, wrapping, cooking, planning, playing xmas music all the while.

deadbaby? WHERE? i'm no dead baby mama!

there were times i felt it, but i pushed it back. i just didn't want to be that person, upset for the holidays. and i was ok! i really was. for the most part. except i started thinking of her face alot. it's almost like the more i pushed it out, the more realistic it became.

then, today. my sister took a pregnancy test (at my urging; what? i need to knowwwww thingsssssss). she's pregnant. due date?

september 12th. 3 days after the anniversary. 1 day after the cremation.

am i going to lose it now? am i going to lose it next year?

HOLY SHIT.


ps- i missed all of you so much. i'll be trying to get to you all very soon, but husband is home and gets antsy if i'm on here too long...but i hope you all are holding up...i'm thinking of you!!!!!

back in the weeds

i think the whole thing with soulmate baby is finally hitting me.

i'm thankful that i can always have good, strong feelings about thea's arrival. i was actually happy for a few days, and it's good to feel that close to another human being. i think losing a baby might be the loneliest thing in the universe.

but i think i have crash-landed back to earth. a few days ago i noticed myself eating randomly. that is a big sign for me. i wasn't hungry, but i was ravenous. in my life, that means i am having feelings i don't want to acknowledge. that hasn't happened since p@ige died; i think i have been feeling more than i ever have in my life about my dead baby, and in a big way, it's been all about the pain connection to a baby i can never have. so, i was surprised to be asking myself the old question: what is it you don't want to feel?

on the surface, i don't feel much. i don't feel envious, i don't feel angry. i've cried a few times, once tearing up in the store buying ornaments, the other times crying when fellow bloggers recognized p@ige in their remeberances. but the feelings behind the tears are mere shadows of what they used to be.

is my pain going underboard? has my brain decided it's become all too much for me to continue bearing? am i now to begin fighting my old coping mechanism of the stuffing down and purging of feelings with compulsive eating and restricting?

WHAT THE FUCK?

this is becoming interesting, for today. a new stop to add in the round and round of this shit.

ornaments FOUND

i knew i didn't want anything obvious. there were a couple of times i picked up something girlie, once even a funky hot pink one, which would have been cool, because i felt she was going to be a feisty one. but none of them were right. i just kept thinking i would know when i saw it.

the little acorn behind p@ige's is a gift for my sister, who lost her pregnancy at about 8 weeks this past summer. i'm not sure how much she's allowed to show her sadness about it; it's almost six months past and people have pretty much dismissed it already. but i know she's scarred badly. she is scared shitless to get pregnant again, even though it's the thing she most wants. she decided out of the blue to go to graduate school in january, and i think it's because it will naturally put off questions of when she'll try again.

our acorns. eerily relevant, yet totally mysterious.

perfect.

untitiled post

this post- empty of words, with just this photo in the stark white- has been sitting in my posts list as a draft for...i don't know...over a week. i thought of this picture when i saw heather's ferma il tempo post.

i don't even know what to feel about this. in retrospect, i am so angry at that pregnant girl. i was irresponsible. i was selfish. i was wracked with stress and anxiety about my future guilt. i was MISERABLE.

but i have to be honest and say i hated being pregnant. this photo was taken in august (check out the sweaty armpits, people) and it was just gross. and at the time, i knew it was ok to hate it...that it's normal to hate being pregnant. cause being pregnant sucks.

but now i know that baby inside me, inside that big round belly, DIED. does that change the reality of how i felt in that photo? you may look and think it's such a beautiful moment, with my girl E kissing her baby sister...but it's totally staged. they were fighting like crypts and bloods over that sunflower plate mere moments before.

now i know that she died, how do i feel about these pregnancy photos? i feel like they should be in a photo album stored in an alternate dimension. sometimes, when flipping through the hundreds of other family photos, i catch a glimpse of one of these and for an instant, think, "oh yeah. i was pregnant." what the fuck?

i wish i could say i want to freeze time. i do, however, wish i could go back and do things differently. (NO SHIT.) i wish my body would have given me some other sign something was wrong (would you like some pre-ecclampsia with that pint of ice cream? why, yes!) that would have necessitated me getting my big fat ass to a hospital for a c-section with a doctor BEFORE she died.

where i find myself now is desperate; desperate to get this weight off. desperate to move farther and farther away from that pregnant girl in the photo.

desperate to be someone other than her.