Okay, so FINALLY, after almost 18 months, he's decided to walk. Apparently, the hold up was all about how to take 'bear' with him. Now that he's got that all figured out, all systems seem to be "GO".

ETA...the pic seems small, so just in case, 'bear', clenched in teeth...feet almost firmly planted...world, look out:0)

T-Shirts Anyone?

Cara at Building Heavenly Bridges is gearing up for SHARE Southern Vermont's second annual Memory Walk. They have created a beautiful T-Shirt for the event. The shirts are available for purchase on her site.

Go over and have a look. I'll bet you don't leave without picking up one (or more) for yourself:)

I left with 5!


Just in case anyone is actually still checking in here, I have many posts in the queue but just haven't been able to get them finished. I hope to have something new to contribute, soon.

Hoppy Easter

But, if you really want some serious Easter Hilarity, hop over to Aunt Becky's place. She cooked up some of her own, personalized greeting cards. Hallmark, watch your ass, she's gonna kick it, hard. Here's my favorite:

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.

My little Leprechaun

In my mind, today is Cason's birthday. Yes, he was born on November 17th, 9 months from this date, but this date, March 17, St. Patrick's Day, this is the one where he was born in my dreams. This date was the date I found out he was a possibility. And even though I spent the next nine months biting my nails, closing my eyes to shut out the ever present fear and crying, lots of that, I still, at some point almost every day would allow myself to hope, that maybe, just maybe, a live baby was coming.

And he did.

And we named him Cason Patrick, because on March 17th, he, my very own little leprechaun, planted a tiny fleck of hope in my oh so weary heart, enough to begin to chase the snakes that had taken up residence there away and for the first time in months I began to dare to imagine that I really didn't know how the whole story was going to end. And that maybe, just maybe, a new chapter was beginning.

And as luck would have it, I did indeed, catch me a leprechaun.

Many years ago, on a wet and cool but still warm and dry evening, I got married. sadly, for this pst anyway, one of my least favorite people and my life long "I will do better than you',

The name game

I was always in charge of finding names for our kids. I had my first sons name chosen, (almost) before he was born. Way before. Yes, I was one of those idiot types who picks out names for my imaginary kids long before they ever came to fruition. Hell, long before the guarantee of a second date was even in the picture. I look back at that version of self and both ridicule and stand in awe of my utter optimism.

But.

That being said, as time marched on and after the marriage thing and my fertility, our fertility, seemed to check out ok, I was in charge of the lists. Then we would go over the names and when we agreed, bingo.

First C., like I said, I had it all picked out. It was a favorite name of mine, uncommon, I never wanted to name a baby a name that I associated with anyone else, it was not easily turned into a nickname or shortened into something else and when I put my dad's name in the middle, they worked together. The husband liked the sound of it and the baby complied by being a boy, so we got our C.

Next up, C2. Not on purpose. I never intended to be a 'all my kids names start with the same letter' sort of parent. But we have an odd last name and the hard C or K sound flows well with it. We do like names that are unusual. Neither of us wanted our kids to be John H, or John W, etc in class. We had two great names ready for baby 2. I was really, really pulling for a girl because I so loved the girl name we had chosen. And we got to use it. I love saying it. I love hearing it. I love seeing the quizzical looks on peoples faces when they hear it. She carries a unique first name and my favorite grandma's nickname as a middle name which is also, to say the least, unusual. But it suits her. It's perfect.



We had only just decided on a name for 'the baby', at least a boy's name, the week before we lost him. It was another unusual first name. A "C" name and then the middle name was the last name of a very close friend who had died a few years before.

When we were told that our baby had died we were asked if we would want to name 'it'. We still didn't know if we were having a boy or a girl. We both, without even talking about it, said no, it will be "Baby _" fill in last name initial. And that was how we left things. Even after he was born, after I asked, "Is it a boy?" and the nurse said, "Yes, did you know?" (confirming my suspicions that indeed he was, a boy). We told her that on the birth certificate it should read "Baby Boy _".

It wasn't until after we got home that I changed my mind. I wanted him to have his own name. And so we named him Caleb. The story of why we chose that name is here.

I had never known anyone with that name before. That was one of my naming 'criteria', to not have another face to put with my child's name. The thing is, when you are so NOT religious, like me, you forget, that other people might actually name their kids names found in the Bible. And, even though our kids attend public school, turns out, those other people might not keep their kids at private school. And, as I so harshly found out, they might even have a little boy the same age as my daughter and he might just end up in her Kindergarten class. And as luck might have it, I might get to sit down at a tiny little 'phonics' station, in a tiny little kinder sized chair on my first day back to reality after my Caleb had died having come to fulfill my volunteer time in the classroom (xanax thankfully fully on board, although the next dose was stupidly left out in my car, 20 endless feet stretching between me and it, THAT would never happen again). My luck continuing, I would have to call children back to work with me individually, and the first name I would have to call, would, of course, be, CALEB.

I had to say it out loud. I had to call for this child. I had to beckon this child to come to me. I had to summon this little boy, who I had never seen, to come and sit with me to learn his letters. There was no avoiding it. I thought, seriously, about running out to my car and choking back a few more of the little pills tucked away in the console. But I didn't. I forced myself to say it. To say his name. And then I waited. And then I had to say it louder, maybe the first time I had only whispered. It's possible. And so I said it again. Louder. I fought the tears back, I swallowed the hard ball in my throat. I put on a happy face. Well, a xanax face anyway.

And a chubby little dark haired boy ambled his way back to the station where I waited. I so wanted to like him. I so wanted that soap opera moment. I wanted him to be perfect. I wanted to love him. I wanted to heap a lifetime of something onto this child. I wanted it to be magical. It wasn't. He annoyed me. He was irritating. He was not my Caleb. But he shared his name and I hated it. About an hour later, I left the classroom, got into my car, threw back a diet coke and several of the little white pills that had waited so patiently for me. I drove home and went to bed.

Two years have passed since then. And every one of them has brought the 'other' Caleb into my daughters class. Every. Single. One. His grandmother, who, small world, is friends with a good friend of mine, came to the surprise baby shower my friends threw me when I was pg with Cason. She made me an adorable diaper bag. I had never met her before that day. But she heard 'my story' and wanted to come and bring something for the baby. For me. I love her. I can't stand her grandson.
Ugh.
And now for the real point of the post. My very good friend watches the other Caleb, everyday after school. I came to know this friend 'after'. She has a son my daughters age and a daughter my older sons age. We became good friends during that darkest of years of my life. Such good friends that I never once talked about Caleb to her. I never told her and it made that friendship easy for me. She found out later. When I was first pg with Cason and people started to guess and then the whispering of "She isn't saying anything because of....' and then she heard. But we've never really ever talked about it. And that's on me, not her.
But I digress. She watches him. She can't stand him either. She calls me just to vent about him. And when she does, it's, 'Caleb this and Caleb that and Ohhhhh Caleb....' and it just kills me. Hearing his name over and over, hearing it linked to the words, 'is so awful' or 'is so rude' or 'is so slow' or 'is so gross when he eats'....the list goes on. And I hate it. To be fair, she's right. I have volunteered at the school for years with kids and even I have to say he tops my list as one of those kids you just have to work really hard at even tolerating, but still.

The name.

The name.

The name.

I hate hearing her say the name.

I hate that this little boy has taken hold of the name I so carefully chose for my son, for my baby. I hate that at times it is his face that comes to mind when I hear the name said out loud. I hate that others can utter his name and it goes unnoticed, that another tiny life also shared that name. Shares that name.
I want no one to ever say his name, ever. I want it to be mine and his, alone. I want for it to never be spoken aloud.


And yet, everyday I say it, I whisper it, I think it. And I miss him.

Caleb.