Rage, Rebellion, Trying.

I couldn't write after my baby died.  Actually, I couldn't write when I was pregnant either, nor paint. I guess all my creative juices were busy growing another humans brain and fingernails.  Then after, the grief thief stole my words.

I read a few stillbirth blogs in the first months.  I thought, aha, this here is what I'll do.  I'll enter the blogosphere, join all the other grieving mothers and fathers writing to stay alive, to make sense of it all, so that I don't become isolated with the grief.  Then I didn't.  I had no words.  I stopped reading too.

It's been 18 months since Jackson died inside of me.  We were getting ready to start trying to conceive.  I had all my blood tests, my vaccinations, dental work, counselling, lost 17kg and grew abdominal muscles.  March loomed, the month we'd planned on.

Then a baby in the family was born, February 29th, and they named him Jackson- my son's name.   All my grief erupted.  I started this blog and in one snot filled, tears dripping on the keyboard night, wrote the Taking of a Name.   It was a case of trigger, trigger pop bang go.
I have to write now.  It's all I can do.  I can't move with this grief sitting on my chest.  It fills my mind, consumes every moment, inescapable.  I want to scream, to flail my arms about me, to pull out my hair and carve out the unspeakable language of grief upon my skin.

  That wail from the early days comes rising up out of me.  I cry for days, as I did back then.  Fine one minute, sobbing the next.  I am immobilised.  I can not run from it and I all I want is to run, screaming from it.  I want to lash out and smash.  The anger of grief.  Rage that we have no control over death.  Rage that I cannot change things. Rage at the cruelness of it all, this cruel world.  Rage that I have to live through this.  But also; just rage.  No reason, no meaning, un-nameable.  Just a tightening in my sternum, heart beating hard against my bone, constricting my lungs.

My back and pelvis and hip disabled from, well, genetic predisposition and an action packed youth. 
 A fucked-upness, sub clinical,  just waiting for the trigger of pregnancy and labour to bring it all undone. Throw in an unresolving dose of symphysis pubis dysfunction that all the Dr's blew off as the usual pains of pregnancy.
I am old and weary and in pain. Every. Single. Day.  I am older than my mother.  Left unable to physically throw myself into dance, or stick fighting and fire dancing, or even in just a really fast and furious stomping walk, not even a cruisy bike ride.  I can't even do a damned yoga class without it exacerbating my shitness.  All the ways that I would try to deal with my feelings in the past, now make all the pain worse.  I am under Dr's orders.  It's been a year of  (expensive) physiotherapy, of being a 'good' dedicated client, doing all my prescribed exercises, hydrotherapy, mindfulness of posture, Bowen therapy, chiro, hot packs and acupuncture, and a few painkillers (but never as many as I really want to take) thrown down the gurgler for good measure. 

  Yet still today, my hip locked up after being OK for the last month. Now again, I cannot stand or walk without the pain, without feeling the bones grinding, without feeling the pulling apart of the front of my pelvis as it cuts down into my vagina like blunt scissors.  The back of my pelvis feeling like it's about to pop out through my skin.  My bones move in the wrong direction.  I can't roll over in bed properly.  So I lay here, on my right side, not my left because that causes pains down my leg, and I cry.   I want to give up.  I don't want to die, but I want to give up.  I can't bare my own bitching, can't bare my own pain.

I am tired of trying.  I think if one more person calls me brave and amazing (or the worst, 'You're so brave, I don't know what I'd do if my baby died'.  Um, darling, none of us dead-baby-mummys know how to deal with it either, we certainly didn't plan it.  Also are you implying that because I haven't thrown myself off a cliff that I somehow feel less for my baby than you do for yours?)
-- I'll not just stand there wordless and dead inside; I'll scream at them; I'll say fuck that, it's not brave to have a dead baby; I didn't choose to go into a burning building and rescue some old lady.  My baby died and now I just breathe, it's an involuntary muscle response thing y'know.  You just want me to be brave so you don't have to see all the horror of it, so you don't have to worry, so you don't have to feel burdened or feel guilty that you hardly call; you want me to be brave so you don't have to be. 

 So I'm gonna go out and get drunk and start a fight, I'll be loud and foul-mouthed, untamed and unforgiving.  I'll wear steel capped cow-girl boots and stomp on sleazebags that get in the way of my dance.   Be the loud angry 18 year old, headbanging and chewing my tongue with the taste of amphetamines in the back of my throat in smokey death metal caverns, daring anyone to fuck with me.  I'll find a dodgy Dr and get oodles of opiates and wash them down with whiskey and I won't get out of bed and I'll order take out every day and I won't clean the house, I won't try and smile and look sane for my partner when he gets home from work.
 I'll score an ounce and smoke it in a week and chain smoke rollies, leaving overflowing ashtrays around the house instead of artful arrangements of Buddhas and stones.  I'll swear at the nosey post office lady, tell her to mind her own fucking business and tell the people that compare the loss of their grandmother to the loss of my baby to go fuck themselves.  I won't care, I won't try, I won't bite my tongue in the face of others tactlessness.
I'll throw grace out the window and move in with tragic. 

I think I'll never try to have another baby.  It's impossible.  This back pain is never going to end. I'll be immobilised the whole pregnancy.  This grief is never going to end, I'll break the baby with my anxiety.  Besides; I'm going to be drunk and stoned and speeding off my dial, remember.  Can't possibly have a baby.

Then tonight, the bloke that sits next to me on the couch asks; "So are we going to try get pregnant this month, next week, when you'll be ovulating?"  He keeps track of my chart.  He's ready.  In one moment adrenaline surges through me; I see silky soft chubby baby thighs and I want.  I want.

I should eat some leafy greens tomorrow.  Some fresh fish.  I'll remember to take my pre-conception vitamins that I've been taking for months, but not for the last week.  That's been the extent of my real life rebellion; no multi-vitamins this week and no exercises.  I even went so far as to cancel my physio session and my counselling session.  It felt like I was wagging school.  I took off to the beach where I saw teenagers wagging school.  I wanted to bum ciggies off them.  I didn't.
I'll try and do some of my physio exercises.  I'll have lunch with a cousin, I'll appear sane.  Tired, but sane, and more, like someone who is coping.  I'll reschedule my appointments.  I'll water the garden, and call my mother and tell her I'm OK.
I'll try to sleep in the bed instead of falling asleep on the couch at 4 am watching t.v.

I'll see how I feel next week.