What's in a year?

I can't believe that it has been one year since my first post. I had been lurking around here in db land for a while, somehow having found my way to a post by Ashleigh, appropriately entitled 'Bite Me' ( a great post btw, definitely worth reading) and later somehow found Niobe who had recently put up a post about the worst thing a medical 'professional', or other a**hole, had said to you, and my love affair with this place we call db land was sealed.
I started reading the blogs of women who commented on those spaces and found my way to C, Coggy, Charmed Girl, Olive Lucy, A., Julia, Tash, G., the list grew and grew until my side bar of favorites, formerly full of things like holiday cupcake recipes, places to take children and decorating ideas, slowly became a list of lifelines, a support network like nothing I had ever known before and certainly didn't know even existed. I never in a million years would have seen myself as a 'blogger', who could imagine that I would have anything of interest to share with strangers or that I would even be brazen enough to do it if I did. But as we all discover, once we get the chutzpah to actually comment on another's blog, it is like the opening of the flood gates. All of those words and thoughts we have kept to ourselves during the painful days, weeks, months after joining this G*dforsaken club, come spilling out, or as Janice would say, we vomit them all over the screen (I love that saying as it perfectly describes how I write) and pretty soon we need our own space to do it. As happened with me. And to my utter bewilderment, these lovely ladies who I had never met, never seen, never spoken to, reached out their collective broken hearts to me and began to help me heal. They encouraged me to keep spilling, keep talking, keep sharing. They offered me a safe place to be honest, brutally, painfully honest without fear of hurting someone else's feelings or offending someones idea of decency or worse. They offered solace, comfort, shared tears and even the occasional laugh, sometimes a hearty one, cuz even a db mom can laugh, sometimes.
In the beginning I told no one about my blog. I wrote late at night when the house was quiet, a cocktail or three at the ready (the only casualty in the creation of this blog I am afraid was a treasured bottle of Scotch my husband was saving for a really special occasion, which, turned out to be the writing of this blog, but as it worked out, I was the only one who was toasting....sorry honey).
I had no idea where my life was headed 365 days ago. It felt like I was in a downward spiral, hanging on by a thread, going through the motions, trying to hold things together for my children, trying to make life normal in a world that now felt so alien and cruel to me. I knew I was lucky, lucky to have two beautiful children already, lucky to have such a supportive family surrounding me and lucky to have many friends who stayed by my side as I struggled to regain my footing, trying like hell to find that new 'normal' we all search for after being handed our dead baby membership card. But lucky doesn't count for shit when you get handed your membership card, does it?
I wrote about wanting out of the club. The daily strapping on of the grief backpack was burdensome at best and suffocating at it's worst. I wanted to be finished with it. I know now, you don't ever finish, you just learn to live with it and someday's it really isn't heavy at all, it just is what it is.
I wrote about wanting another baby. I truly did not think I would get one. I did not think my husband would be willing to gamble again. He was much more inclined to believe the message was clear, you're done. A miscarriage and stillbirth back to back at our age...give it up. But I made my case, I told him I thought our marriage, our life would be altered forever if we just quit. That I didn't think I would ever recover if we didn't at least try. That I didn't want to walk away from my child bearing years with the awful memory of being handed my dead son as my last memory of the baby world. I told him, it's the tragedy you don't want again, a baby you would love. And somewhere in the pleading, he heard me and, well...we got supremely lucky. Unbelievably, mind blowingly, lucky. I still can't believe how lucky.
And through it all, you ladies stayed here with me. Even when you were dealing with your own grief, your own loss, your own disappointments and shit luck, you still stayed here and even cheered.
And I am humbled. I am awe struck and amazed. That out of this nightmare has come something so beautiful. If you had asked me a year ago to write that sentence I would have spit my drink out in your face. A horrible waste of perfectly fine liquor. But it is true. I am not going to wax on and blow sunshine up your nether parts because I know for some of you this last year has been more thorns than roses and for others it is still unfolding. But for all of you, I am hoping like hell that luck or whatever it is that brings happy endings or beginnings, depending on how you look at it, visits each and every one of you and soon, god damn it. Soon. Because I could not have survived this past year without you and I plan on hanging around here trying to lend the same comfort and shoulders that you have given me. And I'll do it forever and a day if that's what it takes.
I don't know what this blog will turn into now that Cason has joined our family. I still have plenty to write about but it is all wrapped up in this new place I am in and I don't know how to separate them. And this is a place where dead baby mom's should be able to go and not read about the musings of a mom and her newborn. Which is not to say that I don't have db things to say, because believe me, I do, I just need to find a way to do it that is right.
But I'll figure it out. It takes time. As all things do.
So thank you to all of you, new and old to this place of mine. Your friendship has literally kept me afloat and made the difference for me in ways I don't think I could ever describe. But I suspect you know what they are.
Happy Anniversary to all of us...I think...is that sick or what?
Now, be a good friend and go have a drink...on me:)
And make it a double.