Nothing Places

I recently read the book "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Up Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer.  In it is a married couple with some serious love/communication issues which results in the creation of what they dub "nothing" or "something" places.  They invent these places where they can just disappear from the other person's presence.  It's an interesting thought to me, these nothing places.

With four kids and a husband in this moderately crowded sized house I can't fathom any place being a nothing place unless they were all out from under its roof.  But it would be nice sometimes to find one of those places.  A place where just for a few minutes I could be nothing, feel nothing and do nothing.  Nothingness.

I imagine that those few minutes would lead to a few minutes more and then eventually I would never leave my nothing place and that scares me.  Because nothing is really nothing.  We are meant to feel, the good and the bad, and to live, the easy and the difficult and through those things we learn and adapt and want more.  I want to be in a something place and mean something to at least someone until the day that I turn into nothing on this earth.

Untangling the Knots

I feel that I am just navigating a complicated web of knots lately much like an unraveled ball of yarn.  Some strings are loose and easy and others have inexplicably wound themselves into the tightest of knots.

I think it has a lot to do with number four.  More than ever, watching her grow up and move through the babyhood stages has made it crystal clear what I am missing and what I will always be missing.  When I went through this stage with number one I was so overjoyed just to have a living baby it really didn't matter as much whether she was a boy or girl and though her babyhood was bittersweet it was also elating in the celebrations of each little milestone.  With number four I know what's coming and I know what has passed.  The surprises aren't what they are with a first living child.  There is still joy and celebration but there is also a level of comfort and knowledge.  I've done this three times before so the little things don't send me into a tailspin of doubt and worry like they used to.  There's an ease to raising a fourth child and that ease has paved the way for my mind to wander down a different path.  A path on which I have at least one little boy, though hopefully both, in my life.

It probably doesn't help that Eli's birthday is just two months away.  Last year at this time I was pregnant and all of my focus went into getting this little girl here safe and sound.  I focused on a little person wriggling in my belly.  She didn't have a face, a personality, a smile, a laugh or a cry.  I couldn't make her happy or scare her or soothe her bad times away.  This year that is most of what I find myself doing and it's just too much sometimes.  I wonder how things will feel once his birthday is passed.  As my four year old says, "One, two, three, wait and see".

Christmas Future

Here we are into the new year, another Christmas gone.  My ninth Christmas spent missing my firstborn and only my second missing my fifthborn (if that's a word).  My emotions got the best of me this Christmas, and not in a good way.  Six stockings and four children really hit me hard.  My daughters perfectly innocent but searing questions as to why Santa didn't leave their brothers anything and how I knew their stockings were empty just killed my inside.  I left the room with a trail of tears.  We did everything like normal.  The usual hustle and bustle, the usual family busyness and the usual stress that goes along with a lot of family visiting for a short time.  We still got the boys gifts for their graves which we lovingly placed at the sites on Christmas Eve.  But it wasn't enough.  It wasn't right.  For me.

Next year will be different.  If I get my one wish we will find ourselves at the happiest place on earth and I will leave with some of the best memories ever.

But there will always be the year after and it is for those that I am seeking change.  The traditions that have been in place and that I find myself and my families clinging to desperately have to give some or give way to new traditions.  Traditions are traditions for a reason, I know.  They stand the test of time.  But I need to be able to stand through them and this year they frankly brought me to my knees.

For those of you newer to the grief that accompanies the loss of a child and specifically the shooting range full of triggers that accompanies holidays such as Christmas, I am officially nine years from my first loss and I can honestly say that ever single year since his loss I have experienced an unnamed sadness this time of year.  I have found it hard to smile, found it hard to find the joy in the season at times (not always) and found it so much different than the Christmas I remembered.  I thought hard about it this year since somehow as I find the years passing I find myself less internally flexible.  I am less willing to give myself license and space to grieve.  Another words, I am my own worst enemy.  I am telling myself its not okay to grieve, or at least grieve so much, at Christmas anymore.  That's not okay.  I have given myself permission and now taken it one step farther.

I am changing Christmas.  I am willing to create new traditions that will work for me.  Ones that respect my sadness and will hopefully help me through it much better.  I've come to the conclusion that it's just not worth it for me to continue putting on a smile just to make others happy when I am anything but happy inside.  It's not all about me and I am going to find a way to gently incorporate as much tradition into my new traditions along with a healthy infusion of honesty and let the chips fall where they may.  A few words to the big guy and the two little boys he's keeping for me can't hurt either.

My Christmas Family

So I've been feeling this sadness settling in like it does each year right around this time since our first Christmas without Wyatt in 2003.  My mood and temperament noticeably dip so I found myself trying to explain it to my husband last night.  It took alot of nonsensical descriptions before these words came out.

Christmas makes me sad because it's about family and that only reminds me of how incomplete my family is and will always be.  It is the one time of year when my family never seems so incomplete.    I can't say it any better than that.  The boys' birthdays come and go and those days are about them individually and how much I miss each of them.  But Christmas.  Christmas is the time when their presence in our family is so obviously missing to me.  Everyone else in our family (parents and siblings) have all of their children.  I am missing two and I just don't know how not to miss them.  The heart of Christmas, truly the meaning of Christmas is family.  Christmas is the celebration of Christ's birth and the creation of the Holy Family.  It is also the creation of God's own family as he welcomed his only son into this world.  So, you see, any which way you look at it, it's family.  The one thing I value above all else.  My blessed and blessedly incomplete family.

He tried but had no answers.  There are none that I have found over the last ten years since Wyatt's birth.  I don't know that Christmas will ever be the same for me.  It is a very conscious effort to recognize and appreciate the joy that is going on all around me each and every holiday season.  Today I find myself in need of a silent night to spend in quiet reflection and sorrow to make more room for joy from the world tomorrow.

Up on the Rooftop

Since my post on remembrance I am just bursting at the seams wanting to shout from the rooftop "Remember, remember! My sons are gone".  While all of you (family) are making your holiday preparations all I can think about is the empty chair and high chair at my table.  The unwrapped presents under my tree.  The candles in my window.  Blinking away tears.  Gifts are unimportant, dinner is unnecessary.  What is important:  buying something small for their graves, making sure their Christmas tree lights are lit up at night, getting to and from the wintry cemetery, honoring their memory through a gift of charity, hearing their names.
So I'm up on the rooftop waiting for Santa to deliver me the one miracle that even Santa doesn't have in his bag.

Through a Child's Eyes

This weekend I came face to face, quite literally, with the demons of my adolescence.  My congenitally missing lateral incisors.  As a teenager I endured a five plus years of braces, tooth extractions, retainers, rubber bands and finally dental implants to fill in spaces left where no permanent teeth grew.  (Yet another fun genetic grab bag item in my family).  Friday one of those implants failed me in a big way and let's just put it this way, he is no longer with me.  I'm just a wee bit (translation: super duper enormously) sensitive about walking around missing a tooth right in the front part of my mouth so I was joking with my kids that they will have to put up with pirate mom until a temporary replacement is made.  To which they responded that I was not even a good pirate because they at least have gold teeth.  (Sigh).  Some days I just can't win.

I Heart my Heart

Wikipedia defines the heart as "a hollow muscle that pumps blood throughout the blood vessels by repeated, rhythmic contractions.  Gray's anatomy goes on to say "the rhythmical action of the heart is muscular in origin." But most of us probably don't think of the heart in this way.  If we even think of it at all.  That's because the heart goes on beating around 70 beats every minute of every day without any effort from us.  Yet for something so unnoticed, it's role in our lives could not be any more important.

Yet it's still a muscle, one that can be weakened by a sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy habits and strengthened through exercise and healthy living.  A healthy heart is a happy heart.  Except that the heart is more than just a blood pumper.  It is a vital organ of emotional health too.  One that just like the beating drum in our chests needs exercise and healthy habits to function optimally.  After Wyatt and Eli's deaths my heart needed a break and so I tucked it away somewhere safe for a while.  I needed to protect it and keep it from any more hurt because I just didn't know how much it could take. 

I learned this last week that the human heart can take an awful lot.  It can be poked and prodded, shocked and even endure having tiny pieces of it literally killed off and still keep beating.  So too can the metaphorical heart.  I have endured hearing that two of my children, while each in utero, would most certainly die before, during or shortly after their births.  I have carried those little boys to term and watched each one die in my arms within hours of their birth.  I have stood at a tiny bare grave site to bury my first child and then eight years later at my oldest son's grave site by my very own headstone to bury my second son at his feet.  

I have also learned of the heart's incredible capacity for healing.  Both physically and emotionally.  At the age of 25, approximately one percent of the heart's muscle cells are replaced yearly, falling to one half of a percent by age 75 according to Dr. Jonas Frisen of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.  What I can take away from this is that the heart really heals, inside and out.  The heart that I had ten years ago is not the heart that I have today, neither one of them.