Off the Wagon
I've fallen back off the wagon...with the smoking and drinking. And I don't care and I don't want any lectures. My mother was pissed when she overheard me telling one of my few "life line" friends I remained connected to over the past two weeks that I was anticipating and planning my return to the bottom of a pint glass in the very near future. After I recovered my D&C at least- which was about Saturdayish.
Accepting the reality that I was going to lose my unborn baby, and that there was no getting around it, devastated me on a level that I didn't think was possible.
How does a woman mourn and grieve the loss of a child she never got the opportunity to meet? How does a woman escape the fact that the life she believed to be growing inside of her ceased to develop? How can a woman ever heal after seeing an empty gestational sac in her uterus, where her baby should have been? How does a woman get to the last stretch of her first trimester only to discover that, just kidding, there will be no baby at the end of it all?
Once I realized that there are no answers to those questions that could provide any remote aspect of comfort, I decided that I would voluntarily surrender myself to what would be an unavoidable black hole of misery, rather than waste any energy on trying to fight it by trying to "stay positive" and see the "bright side."
To someone who has never experienced the roller coaster ride through hell that is miscarrying a baby, there is some Holy, unexplainable reason from God as to why a baby is "lost..." in a place where an overprotective father figure holding a lightening bolt sits atop a fluffy white cloud, handing out babies to women when "the time is right" as he sees fit. In this place, a bright side exists, where everything happens for a reason and there are plenty of healthy pregnancies in the future.
To some women experiencing the roller coaster ride through hell that is miscarrying a baby, there is no God. Not for me, because no God of mine would ever put any woman through this kind of physical and emotional torture, I don't care what anyone wants to preach to me- because that is what I have been subjected to over the past two weeks: TORTURE, in all directions.
On this ride, there is no bright side to anything. In fact, the sun might as well have erupted into a world-ending Supernova...where all life on Earth has ceased to exist and all that is left is the infinite nothing that goes on forever...where the pain is so deep and numbing that it feels as if all of your vital organs have been carved out of your body with a dull, rusty spoon and all that remains is the hollow shell of a person who is no longer there. During and in the wake of the miscarriage process, thinking about healthy pregnancies, that of celebrities or friends or even your own future pregnancies, only works as lemon juice in a paper cut or hard soap in the eye.
I find myself laying face down in the dirt while the metaphorical wagon I've been traveling on keeps rolling along, but I'm not interested in catching up. I have no fear of losing my way. I am already momentarily lost and hopeless and I don't want to uncurl from the little ball of nerves I have coiled myself into. We all choose to channel our pain in different ways- some turn to God, some turn inward, and no one person on the planet can tell another how to cope in this situation...I can only rely on my own power to collect my wits and make of this what I can. Healthy schmealthy...
Right now, I can only lay paralyzed and relish in allowing what I consider to be necessary irrational thinking to temporarily cloud my judgment long enough to create a make-shift bandage for my broken heart and soul.
I'm drunk off of my own grief and clinging to it just to keep the last shreds of my pregnancy alive- if only in my mind, because my body has already let it go.
I am capable of flipping on my autopilot switch~ which allows me to go through the motions of the day, void of any real feeling or emotion to distract and raise eyebrows. I can smile, I can function, I can perform the duties required of me in order to carry out my every day, pregnant-no-more life...because I have to.
Oh, the masks we wear so as to not scare the ones we love or the people we must coexist with in society...
The facade that we put on to save face when we are screaming obscenities and suffocating on the inside is such a sham...why can't we illustrate how we are really feeling in times of grief? Why are we so concerned with making other people uncomfortable? Why can't we just put it all out there instead of diluting the truth and shielding everyone from the brutal ugliness of it all? There's a raw and intense static that hovers around me these days...stale leftovers from an exhausting two-week trip through the wringer. It's confusing...having your hormones dumped into a blender left on high speed with no lid on it. What do you DO with a mess like this?
There are no funerals or memorials for babies who die before they are born~ it's almost as if they only existed in the mother's dreams...as if none of it was real and all of the hopes and joy and planning and anticipation and excitement and enlightenment that a woman creates in her heart when believes she is going to be a mother just gets crushed into smithereens.
In my mind, I am wearing all black: black boots, black dress, black coat and gloves ...and even one of those black felt, old lady hats with just enough netting in the front to cover my face...and I stand by an unmarked gravestone the size of a hand mirror...wondering if that baby was a girl or a boy, what they would have sounded like when they laughed, what their favorite after school snack would have been and what they would have chosen to go to college for.
In my mind, when someone asks me how I'm doing, and my preprogrammed automated response answers, "I'm doing better~ I'm OK," that girl in the straight jacket throwing herself up against the padded walls of my brain wants to grab them by their shirt collars and wail,
"I don't have enough pain killers to last me through what I know is going to be a very long stint of gut wrenching sadness and I want to fucking go to sleep for the next year or however long it takes for my heart to stop crying."
But instead I strap that girl in my head down onto a gurney and shoot her up full of sedatives so that I can try try TRY to remind myself that I will live and this huge pothole- not bump- in my road will only make me stronger in the long run.
When you fall to pieces and put yourself back together, there is no avoiding the newer version of yourself who results from the reconstruction. I'm just adding more torn out pictures and memorabilia to the collage of my life.
"Once upon a time...when I was a young woman...before you were born..."
