Gratitude

I don't keep a diary. I did when I was little, when I was young, when I was innocent, when I believed my own thoughts mattered. I still remember, quite vividly, one of the more important entries in my wallet sized, "Holly Hobby", (yes, I am THAT old), diary,:

"Brad kicked a milk carton at me.".

I loved that boy Brad. He rocked my world. Even at the ripe old age of 8, I knew, because of that milk carton, and of course our family history, (our parents were Godparents to each others kids), that we were meant to be together, forEVER. As it turned out, we weren't.

I don't have that diary anymore. I kinda wish I did. I'd like to see what other vitally important thoughts I had over the years, how I changed, who I was and who I thought I might someday be.

I stopped writing. I don't know why. Maybe it was school, maybe I was too busy, maybe I spent so much time flapping my gums that I didn't feel the need to spill on paper anymore. And, yes, 'back then', we still wrote on paper. I was WAY ahead of the curve with my Word Processor....but that was just for the big college papers, not the draining of my emotional drivel.

Years passed. Life passed. I was silent. I got married. I had a baby. I had a miscarriage. I had a baby. I had a miscarriage. I was silent.

And then Caleb died.

I wanted to talk but I couldn't. I didn't know how to be vulnerable. I didn't know how to ask for help, or how to even begin to speak of what was happening inside of me. On the outside I wanted to prove to everyone that I was OK. On the inside I wanted to collapse. And I never wanted anyone in my 'real life' to ever see me as wounded as I felt. As wounded as I was. So I hid.

Then I found the Dead Baby World. And it was perfect. Fatally flawed and imperfectly, perfect. I was surrounded by other moms, other women, other 'me's', who were feeling as sucker punched as I was. And they let it out. All of it. A door was opened for me and I ran through that door without ever looking back. I was home.

Only now, with time and literally lifetimes between who I was then and who I am right now, it has I wrote a diary. And as is my typical life pattern, it was not what I had planned.

There is talk, lots of it, about exercise, and how when you work out you have to hit that 'groove', find that focus so that you can totally let yourself go and just submerge yourself with the task at hand, forgetting about everything else that surrounds you. You don't see the journey, you don't count the steps, you just start moving, you close your eyes and you just start moving.

And that is exactly what I did. I started moving. I typed. I gushed. I read. I read more. I found more who were like me, so many more that I stopped thinking that I was so different. And I wrote. I bled myself dry, as often as I needed to. Which, was all the time. If I didn't have the words, someone else did, and then I could write again. It was, for, as it turns out, almost two years, my voice.

I feel myself turning more inward now, not feeling the same urgency to write. I still think in posts, but they feel like posts now, before, they didn't. Before, when I came here, I knew no one and I wrote only for me. I had no expectations for who might read my words. It was, 100%, a self indulgent exercise. And, so I wrote, not always well, not always coherent, but, always, honest, because I never thought about how my words might impact someone else. I do now. I have come to know so many of you, I can no longer write to just myself. I am invested in all of you. I have hopes, I have dreams, I have focused on something for every one of you too. And everyday that I wake, I look to that goal, I close my eyes and I take a step. And another. And so it goes. Everyday.

So I write less now. But this has allowed me, for the first time, to look back. I have never looked back at what I wrote in the past.

It's almost torture. Reading the words that spilled from myself, that self, the person I had to be to birth and mother my dead baby, IT'S AWFUL. I read and I look back and I think, even to myself, my GOD, did I really live that life? Was that really me?

And yet, it's REAL. I think, there might have been a time where I thought it might be the easy route to forge through to the future without ever looking back. To be able to say, in an amost non and not so non-chalant way, "Why YES, I do have a dead baby.." and then continue to try to prove to everyone, self included, that I had walked through that firestorm with hardly a scar worth mentioning, hardly a name or baby worth my words.

But he was. He was a baby. He was my son. He is my son. He is as much a part of my past as he is a part of my future. He is who I am. And he was, he is, so worth every.single.word. that I wrote.

I started going through

I don't know, to this day what brought me here. An internet search for stillbirth, a goo.gle for grief, I just don't know. I don't even know what I was looking for when I found this place. I'd never even looked at a blog, I'm not even sure I knew what a blog was. Somehow I landed smack dab in the middle of deadbaby land. And just like Dorothy, when I opened my eyes after that horrendous and frightening tumble through space, I saw things in colors I had never before seen.

My Oz was quite different. No lions or tigers or bears, oh my. Just dead babies and grief and life, oh my. I wish we had a catchy theme song, a verse we all picked up on, a melody we could all hum in solidarity. But we don't. We are all so very different. Even in our sameness, we are all very different. We have different stories to tell. Our losses, our children, they impact us and our lives in ways unique only to them. I don't think I realized that before. I think, in the beginning, the idea of anyone who had or was, living with the stillbirth of their child, meant they would be just like me. That all other things would stop and we would be the same.