Sample itinerary from the trip of grief and sorrow

7:15 am, wake up after third night in a row of terrible sleep due to inadequate air conditioning and odd blankets combined with no black out curtains.
8 am, email old friend from highschool who recently lost her mother because you dreamed about her and her mom.  Send carefully worded email mentioning that while you are experiencing different kinds of grief, you are thinking about her from your corner of this terrible world.

Traveling with spotty internet

I have thought of several different blog posts but been unable to get online when they are seeming clear.  Right now we are 1 week into our 3 week running away trip.  San Francisco is nice because I lived in about 15 years ago so I have some sense of the geography but it is unfamiliar and takes all of my attention to navigate.  Today is R's bday, tears started the day.  She thought we'd have three Geminis in the family to combat my singular Leo-ness, but we do not.  We took a bus part way to Japantown, walked up all the hills, had sushi, picked up two different desserts and walked the several miles back.  I think the physical activity, and the wine, is helping for a calmer end of the day.  Also the in and out of denial makes a pretty big difference in functionality.  Sunday we are off to Big Sur on our southern leg.

War and peace

A few nights ago I had a truly wicked nightmare. I dreamed that I killed two people.  Intentionally.  One I took to the forest and put in a deep pit of mulch where I knew wolves would be and the other I may have dismembered.  I did not see them die but I knew I had done it.  I didn't know why I did it and I felt so confused.  I woke up several times throughout the dream feeling sick about what I had done,  terrified that someone would find out and so so lonely.  When I woke up for the final time it took a long time before I realized I hadn't actually killed anyone.  That realization came with such a feeling of peace.  I am not a murderer.  Even though my cervix failed my children, I did not kill my babies. If I can hold onto that, let go of some of the guilt and just grieve for them I might be finding a path to live through this.

#microblogmonday

The New Laughter: Hysteria and Emptiness

Laughter hasn't been to frequent of a visitor lately, but there have been some moments, particularly when with people who deeply understand loss when I have laughed hard.  I've had two responses, one is to feel like I am watching myself and a hollowness engulfs me and the other is to feel a little like I can't stop.  The edge of hysterical.  That has happened twice now.  Has anyone else felt like this?

Functioning

Yesterday we squished approximately 75 crickets and dropped, maybe, 200 slugs in soapy water.  For some reason all my (too small) bathing suits are in the babies' room and, in preparation for our vacation, I had to retrieve them to try bottoms on, so in addition to mass murder, I went into the almost nursery.*  We did not fill out the adoption agency's application form.  We did not buy groceries for the week.  We did not go to bed at a normal hour.  I then had dreams about finding insect infestations on our plants until I gave up and got out of bed at 5:15 this morning.  I still didn't make it to work until 8:30.  This is what functioning looks like.

*Tops are another story, although I did not get to nurse our babies I did lactate, my breasts are now about 3X their pre-lactation size.

From infertility treatments to cervical insufficiency

For years we tried to get pregnant via ICI at home.  LOTS of people we know were successful at this, using known or unknown donor sperm resulting in beautiful babies, toddlers, children and young adults all over the place.  Our schedules are tricky, my cycles are trickier, after years of trying we decided to see a reproductive endocrinologist.

Time of Day

My mother is a cartographer by training.  [I am not, so this is not an inexact description.]  It is possible to look through a lens down at a photograph of a landscape and the shadows of the clouds on the mountains will reveal the time of day that the picture was taken.  Capturing a still image of a transient shadow of something almost insubstantial creates a permanent time stamp.

The babies nursery has one wall painted purple, the others still cream. One giant giraffe. Two dressers. One baby bath. Drawers full of baby clothes. A gift bag full of sympathy cards.  A permanent time stamp.

I struggle with the urge to finish the nursery. To hang their names on the wall, to reorder the returned cribs. To unfold the handmade blankets. To have a room finished and permanent.  To further encrypt the message currently stamped on the room, to make the message unavailable to anyone without the appropriate lens, without the key.  And then to loose the key, to hold the nursery as a marker for them, of them. To deny the message entirely.