Wishing you courage

"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying 'I will try again tomorrow'."
- Mary Anne Radmacher

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

"I wish you'd never learned to weep"

I must have listened to "Pure" by the Lightning Seeds thousands of times as a young girl.  Even after so many years I remember every word.

So there I am in the ladies room at work blotting tears quickly because I need to pull it together and get back to my office and my brain remembered that line.  "I wish you'd never learned to weep"

It's like tears are for the shorter lived sorrows but once you weep you cannot go back.  You can't un-learn it.  And quietly in the back stall, weeping was exactly what happened just minutes after smiling, reassuring, and asking questions after my colleague told me she was pregnant.  Since I began this blog she has already had a baby.  SHE ALREADY HAS ONE.  The little boy who wouldn't smile for me a few weeks back.

Where is mine?

I tried to have a baby and that turned into unimaginable heartache.  I tried to have a baby and my entire life fell apart.  Two and a half years later I'm still trying to put things back together.

*****

The past two days have been incredible - I made progress towards getting a student loan out of default, a housemate issue is improving, and my fractured patella is healing well and I'm now able to wear a flexible, supportive knee brace instead of the one that has kept my knee straight for the last 3 weeks.  But these are really just situations where a something bad is getting better, and it's so pathetic that I was so truly happy about these things just hours ago.  I understand now why she has been distant and distracted and it sucks that when I stopped by her office to chat she was probably just thinking about how she needed to tell me about her pregnancy because she knows it is a sensitive topic for me.

*****

A "sensitive topic" - that's how I act about it when really it is a soul smashing topic that strikes down whatever lightness was buoying up the leaden weight in my chest.  And then this body remembers what it was like to carry a baby, and not just any baby, MY precious little boy.  This body remembers releasing him into the world and then these arms released him and he went to the morgue and I went home.  Empty womb, empty arms, empty home.

If emptiness had a sound I think it would be weeping - weeping echoing on and on and on. 

*****
"still I love you"


2 comments:

Quiet Dreams said...

I'm so sorry.

I sometimes (often?) have those times when other people's blissfully ignorant lives seem to be shoving my own pain back in my face.

I have not been through what you have, but this post deeply resonated with me.

I'm so sorry you lost him.

Catherine W said...

I must also have listened to Pure about a thousand times.

I wish you hadn't learned to weep Anna. As you say, once you have, it is difficult to stop. You can't unlearn it.

As Quiet Dreams says, I'm sorry. I really am.