The garden today

Dormant. Drenched from rain. Frozen.

Jizo is getting dirty! The pristine white was so lovely but I knew it would be impossible to maintain with the red clay of Georgia. The statue will be lovely when aged by the elements too.


Here's some cute fungus on a stump!


My New Years adventure was wonderful and healing. I'll give details later (unless my lazy blogging habits continue) but here's me January 1, 2009.

Dormant. Frozen. Standing strong against the elements.

I hate being unloved.
I hate marital separation. I bet divorce won't be great either.
I hate not having any guarantees that the future will be beautiful.
I hate that all of this emptiness began with the decision to add to our family and share our love and lives with our own baby.

Sometimes I feel like I'm being punished for asking for too much, but so many other people have husbands and babies, why couldn't I have that too? How is it possible that the desire to add love resulted in so much love lost?




Miss you Dear One.

Recent moments

This past Sunday night while on my way to pick A up from the airport, with traffic clear I accelerate and enter the highway - the little car obediently and easily surges ahead and I think "how fun!".

Just over an hour ago I exit the bank and the wind catches my hair and my entire being feels light. I had just opened my own checking and savings accounts. My first "own" accounts in over 11 years. My husband and I have divided our finances.

Three hours ago my hair had 6 inches of length removed. I left the salon wondering if I should ask for the hair to use in a ritual tonight before deciding walking away and not looking back was the ritual. The length I loved is gone but so are the dry, thin, fading ends; what remains is thick and black and wild with so much weight gone.

Before going to the hair salon I read blogs, enjoying your end of year/New Years reflections. Ya Chun posted photos of her daughters name written in the sand and I thought about how I want to write Toren's name over and over in sand as a silent shout to the Universe, but also thought that I wouldn't visit a beach any time soon. Hours later, plans have been made, I'm packed and soon I'll be joining some friends for an impromptu journey to the coast. Tomorrow morning will find me watching the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean.

I didn't realize until just now how urgently I need to get away from my home and daily life. Up until right now I saw the new year as just an extension of 2008, which was all about dealing with the events of 2007. I wish I could have some sense of a new start but with so much past baggage that I'm dealing with I don't know if that is possible. I now approach every day as a new day but in each new day there are still things from previous days that bring about heartache. But maybe, MAYBE, I can feel that things will be different now. Perhaps a visit to one of my favorite cities and the ocean and the sun can restore hope for happier days.

Best wishes to you all for happy dreams to come true in 2009!

Exciting news, as promised!

The arrival of good news was delayed a bit but this afternoon the puppy I adopted was delivered! I only took a few photo's and none are good but this is her drifting off to take a nap.


It's been kind of a rough day for her being in a new place and away from her litter mates for the first time. Tonight we are just hanging around the house together while she settles in.

My family had dogs when I was growing up and I dog sit sometimes but having a puppy around is new to me. Please share any advice you have on raising a dog and wish us luck!!!

I'll tell you more about her later, right now I have a puppy to attend to!

All I can do is laugh at myself

Um...

Last night in group therapy my friends stressed that even though I don't have answers for why so many things have been happening in my life that I find disagreeable, I am exactly where I need to be right now. This is kind of difficult for me but I'm trying it out. Perhaps the tiny car, sized for a single girl, is representative of what I need to be focusing on - my own mental and physical health.

So, I start to come to terms with the car that I didn't want. Now this is where things become absurd. Guess who drove into other cars this evening. I am not even kidding! I caused a 3 car accident tonight! My first accident, beyond bumping into another car when backing up in a parking lot, that was my fault. This comes two days after buying the car and the day after I added the car to my insurance.

Clearly I still need to get used to driving the car but that will have to happen after it gets repaired.

I am in very good spirits though. All that therapy seems to be paying off!

Car talk

You know how people sometimes say they had an out of body experience with a traumatic incident? I had an in-body experience this afternoon! All of a sudden, when signing papers to buy a car, I wondered "what am I doing and how did I get to this point?" It felt like I had been sucked back into a life that I've been outside of. That only lasted a few seconds though and retreating back to the outside has been kind of a relief.

An hour and 15 minutes ago I bought a car I did not want.

Let me tell you a story ...

Prelude
My car, as in MY real car - not the new thing, is a 1982 BMW model that was never imported into America. Parts for it are getting very hard to come by and mechanics often don't like working on it since it's not what they are used to. It is also the cutest vehicle ever made! And let me just say that with old cars it would be difficult for anyone not to become obsessed with their vehicle, so I make no apologies for my unhealthy attachment with my car, Polly Prissy Pants (she earned that name!). As wonderful as Polly is, she has some issues and it is about time for her to have an understudy while she gets restored.

My wish
So I asked the Universe for a 2009 Toyota Prius in black or a dark smoky color, with GPS. I wanted a car that was common, reliable, had 4 doors, was not a convertible, and was from this century. Later I would stick a car seat in the back so I wanted a family friendly car.

What actually happened
Yeah, Thanksgiving and the whole marital separation discussion... Aside from the entire plan for my life being maimed, money will get tighter so affording a car payment is further away than I wanted. Then last weekend my husband hears about a car for sale and wants to get it for me because he is worried about me living alone with PPP. I think this is thoughtful of him. So the car belonged to a trusted friend, was a good deal, and will serve my purposes of getting from place to place safely. My husband really likes the car and is out driving it now (he drove it home too while I drove his car). I let him decide on whether or not to buy it since I am so very NOT excited about the situation of needed a car because I will be living alone that I had no opinion on whether the car would be good for me or not.

I don't even know what it is! Aside from the unknown make and model it is a small sporty thing with no back seat and a T top convertible. It is exactly what I did not want. But at a friends suggestion, last week I stopped asking the Universe for the specific things that I wanted and began to ask for blessings instead - whatever blessings the Universe would like to send my way. So maybe this car is a blessing. Sigh - a car I do not want for a life I'm not happy about.


Non car talk
I'm doing well though. Still going to craploads of therapy and working very hard towards emotional stability. There are a lot of changes happening in my life so I'm on edge and cry a lot but I'm so glad to have mental health resources available to me and I'm working towards identifying things to look forward to as a single woman.

I've been wanting my life to change back to being good as quickly as it changed to lousy with that one ultrasound. I wonder if things ever get good that quickly. This weekend there have been many changes though and my life actually looks different now than it did Friday when I left work. There's one more thing that happened this weekend which I'm going to keep secret until I'm sure it will work out and if that all comes together things will be exciting around here sometime next week!!!

Take care Friends!

Ducks are out of their row

I haven't even looked at my blog since the last pathetic post. I wish I could be saying how much things have improved but alas...

Anyway, I'm here representing those who are NOT COPING WELL. What follows will be a recount of more "not my best moments" but maybe this will help someone else out there.

Since last post, in chronological order
1. Gave up, consumed too many pills and too much alcohol
2. Taken to ER
3. Involuntary inpatient treatment for 4 days
4. Evening outpatient treatment
5. Thanksgiving - husband says he does indeed plan to move out once he gets a job
6. Heartbroken, rejected, but thankfully numb most of the time
7. Gotta see if my outpatient treatment can be extended beyond this week since I can certainly use more therapy and mood managing skills

From this point I think I'm not going to talk about or read about deadbabies for a while without a therapist present since I'm right at the edge of hanging in there. Oh fuck, that's not even true, I have fallen off the edge. I'm not hanging in well but I'm going through the motions of being a person who has hopes for the future.

All of that sounds really bad but right now I'm not a physical danger to myself or anyone else. I'm not drinking anymore. On a positive note I've been communicating with my Mom again and it has been really nice, and my husband understands that I want to live in the house and he will contribute some money to the mortgage every month and in return he'll get what he paid back whenever I sell the house. That way he still has an investment. And the housing market is not pretty here right now so it's a relief to not have to try to sell the house right now.

So ... no hope for a baby any time soon. In fact I'll be even farther away from a baby than I imagined a year ago. So many preparations with finishing degrees, buying a house, a long term marriage, so that a child could have a stable home to grow up in and now a key part of it all is leaving. Leaving without even giving it another chance. But I guess anyone would want to get away from a crazy lady.

You know, this all seems so surreal. While no where near to perfect I really don't try to intentionally hurt people, I really try to be a good person. But my life looks like it must belong to someone who sucks. Surely good people get good things, don't they? At least some of the time?

So this blog is not about rebuilding a marriage and successfully having a child after a deadbaby anymore. If anything, it will be about finding something to do in life once the life you carefully planned is no longer a possibility.

Rough week in Terminus

So bad in fact that I felt it was too depressing for my grief blog but I just want to say some stuff.

On the second day of life my friends baby had a seizure and a stroke, or a stroke then a seizure, (doctors were not able to determine the cause) and he has been in the NICU all week. My heart breaks for his parents. The baby is improving and hopefully they will get to take him home on Tuesday and time will tell if he suffered permanent brain damage. So far it sounds like he will be on anti-seizure meds for a long time/lifetime. My prayer is that he grows healthy and has no permanent mental setbacks.

After making sure it was ok with them if I accompanied my husband for a visit tonight (this is the woman I wrote that letter to, people learn from my mistakes, it looks like it is a better tactic to remain a silent deadbabymama when perky prego's gush about their joy), guess who only lasted about 5 minutes in the NICU waiting room before having a panic attack and stumbling out of the waiting room, hallways, elevator, lobby to smoke, cry, and tremble outside.

Not that my week has been shittier than the new parents (since it's hard to top that) but I have experienced so many emotions this week. Although if I had to pick one overriding emotion of the week it would be humiliation. I don't ever want to show my face around them again after freaking out like that. Way to show support huh? I really didn't anticipate such anxiety.

AND that wasn't even the only humiliating moment of the week! I also finally had sex but once it was over I really regretted that act of seduction. HUGE mistake! It very much did NOT have the desired effect. Perhaps I'll save that story for my next installment of "Don't do this!"