Almost a year

It's been almost a year now since Sebastian died. I hoped we'd be pregnant again by now, and maybe the pain would not be so intense for the first anniversary. But that's just not happening. I don't know why my body isn't working but that's life. All I know is that I miss him, I miss the life we should have had with him and I'm still trying to live life fully, to honor him. It really does feel like a hole in your heart that never heals.

To sum up what it feels like, I am posting a very personal, awful photo. This picture really represents what every day feels like inside me. The nurse took this picture for Mimi to have of her with SJ. She was kind of baby talking with him and I fell apart. My daughter was in the room at this time and had no clue what was going on. Everyone left right after this because I was so upset.

I'm not sure what else to say but just getting this out of my brain and onto a blog will hopefully lessen some of the intensity of my grief. I can always hope, right?

Tschus.

What I am really.

I love you all for saying how strong I am. I really do. But guess what? I am not strong. I am nothing amazing or extraordinary. I think sometimes people say I'm strong so they don't feel bad when they think about me. "Oh she's been through a lot, but she's strong." No, I'm not. I'm just a mom who lost her baby.

Many times I wish I was dead, in heaven with him. I would never hurt myself. I don't think suicide is an answer to all this, but I do wish at times that I was with him. And his sibling. I do not know what would have happened, had they both lived. But I think about them both every day. And wish I could turn back time. No matter what I did, nothing made a difference in the outcome. I never delivered a healthy baby. And now I have to live with the past, something that I think of every day when I wake up and every day when I go to sleep.

The first two weeks after his death I existed with the help of valium. Now I have xanax during really rough days. Some days, not very often but some, I indulge in alcohol. It seems the best way to get by is by being numb. The number the better. Oh, what a shitty mother I am! What a horrible wife, a terrible person! And why? Because I admit what I am? Admit my weaknesses, my faults? To do something awful in order to get by? So be it. I care not what others think anymore. I just need to get by for now until all that is raw and painful is dull. To be able to continue to fake it until I can make it. To pretend what has happened is not on the edge of every waking moment of every day. Because right now, he is there, in my thoughts, my dreams, my tears, my anger, my frustrations. And trying to be a wife and mother have been the most difficult things I've ever undertaken before. Trying to be something for everyone when I feel less than whole. And to try not resenting those demands.

So here it is, raw and in your face. This is what a family looks like a few hours after giving birth to a still born. The result of learning of the death, going through labor and then the aftermath. This is what loss looks like, what marital strife is, what the ultimate worst nightmare is for parents to experience. I am not strong. I am merely working to continue to exist right now.