I Think He (figureatively) Wept Too

It is officially done.  The stump is ground and the mulch has been scattered.  Wyatt's Willow is no more.  I have carefully replaced his garden decorations and cautiously unburied the plants which were just starting to reawaken after a long cold spring.  I hope they all will come back to us but it's too early to tell.  Hope extends now to the new tree, Wyatt's Prairie Reflections Laurel Willow.  So named because the leaves are supposed to glimmer like mirrors in the sunshine.  Our newly planted willow is a bit bare right now so that much remains to be seen.  It feels good to have something different, yet special, in the ground.

My husband confided that he also felt relieved to have another tree in that garden.  He spent many hours out there cutting the tree down himself and chopping the trunk into manageable pieces.  He cut off two special pieces which are now drying out for us to keep as remembrances.  Silly maybe, but not to me.  That tree was supposed to outlive me as I have outlived Wyatt and while I have no ill feelings toward it there are a lot of complex emotions.  The tree is what tied me to this house.  It was planted less than two months after we moved in and only three months after Wyatt died.  It was a great period of transition.  I had my first baby.  I buried my first baby.  I bought my first house and moved in.  I began my career after finishing school.  I hadn't even been married two years.  That tree grounded me to a place, to a point in time.  It felt good to know that I wasn't the only one grounded by that willow.  That I'm not the only one who will miss it's rough bark and weeping canopy that just barely tickled the ground when left untrimmed.  It's almost painful to look at that area of the yard from my kitchen window.

Weeping for Wyatt's Willow

Nature has seen in its infinite wisdom to remind me that nothing is permanent, not even when it is carefully nurtured and unconditionally loved.  It is a lesson I am not unfamiliar with.

Wyatt's Willow, which is just shy of ten years old, as is my boy, has been reduced to a small stump in our backyard.  The last few years have been difficult for the willow.  It suffered sun damage, bug infestation as a result of the damage which could not heal and a final insult - woodpeckers.  My husband wanted to just cut it down but I insisted that an arborist examine the tree and make an education determination as to the poor willow's fate.  My husband was right, our willow was too damaged to stand any longer.  We risked having it fall towards our house in a wind storm and that was just unacceptable.  So now it is gone.  We are only waiting to have the stump grinded out and then it will only exist in my memory and photographs.  Just like Wyatt.  Ugh.  

Of course this would happen just weeks before Wyatt's 10th birthday.  Of course my hormones are all wonky from being in the weaning process for our littlest girl.  Of course Eli's little pee gee hydrangea tree had died last spring (as an aside, his new hydrangea tree, quick fire I believe, is showing many signs of life thankfully).  I'm left throwing my hands in the air and my fate to the wind.  These trees and their gravestones are what I have left to care for.  The gravestones are inanimate objects but the trees, the trees, they change and grow and show awesome beauty and strength throughout the year.  They are what I really treasure.  

To watch Wyatt's tree come down after ten years has been very sad and frankly, something I have pushed to a far away place in my mind.  The decision of what to do next has also been very difficult and sad.  Wyatt's weeping willow was just too perfect.  A big beautiful weeping tree to represent our tears shed for Wyatt.  Due to the tree's health issues we don't want to plant another weeping willow and then take a chance that another ten or so years down the road we will have to say goodbye to that one too.  So we've had to choose another type of tree and this decision has been far less emotional and much more rational.  There are hardiness, pest and disease considerations which take away a lot of the "specialness" to me.  But, just like saying goodbye to Wyatt on a rainy morning almost ten years ago, we have no other choice.

Those Old Gentlemen Made Me Cry

A couple of weeks ago I found myself watching an episode of the Dust Bowl by Ken Burns on PBS.  Having not been around during the Dust Bowl I found it sadly fascinating.  But no more so than when they interviewed individuals who had been around during the Dust Bowl.  These men and women were just children during the Dust Bowl so their perceptions and recollections are very pure and emotional.  Like the older gentleman who recalled his mother going into labor after a dust storm blew through.  She gave birth to twins and it sounded like they were premature.  The gentleman teared up as he recalled the doctor telling his mother that there was nothing he could do to save the little boys.  His tale of how they were buried together in makeshift surroundings made tears run down my own face.  Different story, same result, as another older gentleman told of his family of eight children and how the youngest two, twins, consisted of one boy and one girl.  The only girl of the eight children.  He recalled how she was so adored by the entire family, and clearly by him.  Then he told of how when she was only two years old she got dust pneumonia and became gravely ill.  She had called for him before all others but there was nothing that could be done and she died in their house.  This particular episode recalled the Dust Bowl in the late 1920s which is eighty or so years ago for these men.  Eighty years had not dimmed their sharp recollections of siblings they knew for so brief a time nor did they dim how affected these men were by the absence of those siblings for so many years.  I cried and I thought how amazing and amazingly sad it was that after all of those long years and the many intervening events which occurred in their lives up to that point, that talking about and recollecting their little brothers and sister was still so profound.  I thought of my own daughters and their brothers.  Words are only part of those stories, the tears said everything I needed to know.

Does One Bad Seed Spoil the Apple?

I find myself waking to a country song repeating in my head and while I can't relate to a lot of them in many ways (though I thoroughly enjoy them nonetheless) there is one that I can extrapolate on.  Two Black Cadillacs.  Now if you know this song, you may be saying, wait a minute!  I'll put you at ease quickly - my husband has not had an affair and I have not plotted to or succeeded in killing him.  Now that we have that settled....

The lyrics say something like "[t]he preacher said he was a good man and his brother said he was a good friend but the women in the two black veils didn't bother to cry".  Of course my first thought was what a dirt bag this guy was, how could there be anything good to say about him?  But then once I started thinking a little deeper it occurred to me that perhaps he was a good friend.  If he was a father, he could have even been a good father.  Obviously he was a lousy husband and a lousy boyfriend but the question then becomes ...

    Does a bad deed, even a very bad deed, make a bad person?

I struggle with this question because my instinct says yes.  My relation to this song comes from some interpersonal relationships and judgments that I have made in those relationships based on the other parties' behaviors.  I have deemed these behaviors bad and so I have attached that label.  Once that label is stuck on, goodness gracious do I find it hard to peel back.  The fact that I have made these judgments in the first place pains me and is a different topic for perhaps a different day but I've done it so we'll move on.

Could I be wrong?  Absolutely!  Have I ever made bad choices?  Absolutely!  So why am I throwing stones?  Short answer - weeding my garden.  Wyatt and Eli have brought great introspection to my life and how I lead it as well as who I let grow in my garden.  I've come to realize that some people can act as weeds in my garden.  Their negative energy, words and actions can threaten to overtake the beauty which I carefully guard within.  I've learned that a weed is a weed and no matter how nicely you treat it, a weed will grow all over your flowers, veggies and fruit and make absolutely no apologies.  My weed removal method of choice is to pull them very slowly from the ground taking care to remove the entire root system if at all possible.  As an aside, it is also really fun to burn them with a handheld torch until they shrivel and die!

Yet all of this still leaves me speechless.  I don't have the answer.  Perhaps there is goodness.  Honestly I want there to be goodness but I have yet to find it.  So I will leave you to ponder and maybe even contribute to this discussion.  Does badness eclipse goodness?  Can they coexist?

Ushering in a New Period of Mourning

My littlest little girl is going to turn one next week and I find myself not only now sleeping mostly through the night but also feeling that old pull.  The one that catches my eye as I pick out our infant daughter's clothing in the morning.  Those little boy outfits that have been hanging in that same closet on the same hangers, untouched, for about nine and half years now.  The ones for my son.  The baby blue Winnie the Pooh outfit lovingly washed and hung, ready to wear.  Frankly, those outfits have done nothing but make me angry lately.  Angry because even though those outfits weren't for Wyatt, they were for Eli.  He was the son that came after Wyatt.  He was my boy.  I knew it soon after he started growing in my belly.  I knew he was a boy.  I knew it just as surely as I knew that something was wrong with him before I even walked into that ultrasound room.  What I knew then doesn't matter now.  I now know that I will never again hold another little boy from my own body and that I will forever mourn those two little boys I did get to briefly hold but that I will also forever mourn the absence of another son.  At the same time there is great peace in my heart knowing that I will not carry another child.  There is a very real possibility that we could have had another child with Potter's syndrome.  I am so thankful to have welcomed our healthy little girl one year ago.  It has been healing for all of us.  After Eli died I wrote about how heartbreaking it was to watch our three daughters love him and then have to say goodbye.  They had empty arms too.  I have now filled their arms and their hearts.  They still miss Eli and talk of him often.  We know that Baby cannot take away all that hurt but we did not expect that she would.  She just fills a different place in our hearts.

Staring My Demons In The Eye

I have always been a shy person and there are so many reasons for that.  In part because genetics have not been my friend.  I was sporting eyeglasses before I started school, got asthma in first grade, wore braces starting at age 11 for five years (yes 5 years!) and those braces were super awesome with rubber bands, then due to the congenitally missing teeth as a teenager I was missing two front teeth and had a super fun retainer with fake teeth which through a couple surgeries was then replaced by dental implants.  And I won't even go to my frizzy, coarse thick hair, bad skin, or abnormally long legs with a short torso (which equaled high water pants)....the list goes on.  Basically I never felt confident in my appearance nor was I given any reason to feel confident in my appearance.

I can now say that my appearance issues for the most part have resolved themselves  - even my hair (yay!) and I do feel confident in my appearance.  But inside, I'm still that teenage girl sometimes and I tend to regress to her emotional maturity.  Which means that I basically crawl inside myself socially.

This is where the demons have found their ways in.  The cracks in my facade have left them plenty of room.  The insecurities are deep and profound at times.  Wyatt and Eli's lives and deaths only intensified those feelings and urges.  During each of their pregnancies and after I delivered them I felt that my forehead had some kind of neon sign announcing that my baby would or had died.  I was sure that sadness was just seeping from my pores most days.  I didn't want people to see that, I didn't feel comfortable with many people seeing that.  My answer was to huddle in where people couldn't see that.  And each time, it took a lot of time for me to venture back out into the world.  Even then, I was so fragile, so afraid of just breaking apart.  I avoided so many social situations and find myself still doing so even two years after Eli's birth.

Until last weekend.  Through fate and a long string of fortuitous circumstances I didn't just agree but volunteered to organize and create a new spring carnival for our elementary school's pto.  Did I mention that the school has almost 700 kids?  I put over two months of blood, sweat and tears into it and had many sleepless nights wondering if it would actually happen and then if it did, whether my ship would sink or float.  Friday was that night.  But to make it happen I had to stare my demons right in the eye.  I had to put a smile on my face and look people straight in the eye, over and over and over and over that night.  Not something that is easy for me to do.  Definitely sent my flight reaction into overdrive.  But I did it!  I walked around that carnival all afternoon and evening organizing volunteers, introducing myself, talking to participants and ... I enjoyed it!  For me it's just more proof that I can get through anything, even when that self doubt creeps in.

Because of my boys I can always tell myself in a difficult situation that I have been through much much worse and I know that's true.  I know that I made it to the other side not once but twice and that most anything else is small peanuts.

Take that demons.

Two Years Flies By When Mourning a Rosebud and Raising a Rose

Today is Eli's second birthday.  In my memory he was born just yesterday.  Memories are like snapshots frozen in time.  I remember getting to the hospital, just my husband and I wearing my "lucky birthing outfit" (I've been able to wear the same outfit to the hospital all six times I gave birth).  I remember waiting for everyone else to arrive.  I remember before going to the OR everyone waited to give me a hug one by one before they filed out and left us alone once again.  I remember the excitement of knowing in just moments I would meet my little boy.  I remember pure joy at hearing his cry and knowing he was alive.  I remember my very next thought was of his impending death.  I remember crying and smiling and smiling and crying as I stroked his cheeks and nose.  I remember the soft little cries he emitted.  I remember when those cries stopped and he became still.  I remember my cries when that happened.  I remember how Eli looked in my husband's arms.   I remember the wonder of his naked little body as we bathed and dressed him.  I remember every precious moment we spent as a family of five as I watched my daughters meet their brother and snuggle with him.  I remember the anguished cries of my older two girls as they sobbed uncontrollably when they had to say goodbye.  I remember how good it felt to take pictures because I knew how invaluable each one would become.  I remember the anguished cries as I had to say goodbye.  I remember the crushing  loneliness after he left us that evening.

I've wondered how it's possible to miss someone I didn't even know so much.  I have no real memories, no words to cling to, no stories to laugh or cry about, nothing but a few items of clothing, a clip of hair and many photographs and snippets of video.  But I did know him.  He was knit in my womb.  I knew him from the moment of creation.  My body recognized a tiny bundle of cells as a human being that needed special care and attention from that moment on.  I grew to understand his waking and sleepy times, his movements and even what sounds he liked.  I knew his spirit from within and I believe he steadied my spirit.

I miss you baby boy.  Every minute of every hour of these last two years.  Happy birthday.