Right Where I am 2012: One Year 8 Months 3 Days.

I'm new to the blogging world, a late bloomer if you will.  It's taken me well over a year to blog about the grief, to write anything anywhere about it actually.   I've lurked in the blogoshpere of stillbirth blogs for a while, and came across last years Right Where I Am  project .  I'm trying to be brave and participate this year.   Writing this has been confronting, making me look at where I am right now, because right now is not somewhere that I'm proud of, or somewhere that I'm particularly comfortable with sharing.  I'm no light on the hill saying 'it gets better'.. The grief is harder on me today than it was 4 months ago.. Still, writing this has made me tell myself that wherever I am is ok for me, so thankyou Angie for getting this project together.

Today I weeded and pruned a garden bed, in the early winter sunshine.  A garden that has lain neglected for 1 year 8 months and 3 days.  It was the garden I planted when I was pregnant with Jack.

I spent my pregnancy on my hands and knees planting my favourite blue flowers in a border around the bed.  Masses of lobelia, and between the roses, brilliant blue cornflowers.  Blue for my baby boy, growing fast inside me.  I loved that my due date was in spring, and knew this garden I was planting would be in bloom for when he arrived in the sunshine time.

We never brought Jack home to that garden.  He died and was born on his due date, spring equinox.  The blue flowers blossomed right on time too.  We picked the flowers and put them in the coffin with Jack, our little bird nestled amongst the flowers.  Bittersweet.

That garden has taunted me all through my grief.  I ignored it.  Let the weeds grow back, let the roses grow wild, dead rose heads turning to rose hips.  It nagged at me, I sneered at it.  I didn't want to know.   It hurt to look at it.  It hurt to think about growing flowers when my baby is dead.

Finally today, that sunshine demanding that I spend some time in it before the depths of winter arrive, I gave in.  I didn't go out there with a rush of energy, enthusiasm, or with the old delight that I used to find in gardening.  It was just something that had to be done.  So I did.  That's where I'm at with the grief- I'm able to do the things that need to be done now, but it often starts out empty, I force myself.  I cut those roses right back.  I pulled up weeds, the sun warmed me, and I found myself thinking about new flowers I'd like to plant.  I tried not to see Jack, my 20 month old ghost of a boy digging through the soil looking for worms. 

Because I see him sometimes now.  Not really see him, not all Ghost Whisperer style.  Not even a presence, I don't see signs; white feathers and rainbows are just from my white budgie and uh, sunshine refracting through rain.   I just have these moments now, where I get up from the couch and walk to the kitchen and think 'where is he?'.   I walk in through the back door, and think 'where is he?'    He's always just around the corner.  Just out of reach.  Toddling down the hallway, I can almost see him, almost hear him.  Those moments, those absurd thoughts of  'where is he, what's he doing, he should be drawing on the wall with crayons and why isn't the house toddler proofed' set up a quiver in me.  Like a ping in my gut, that reverberates through my body turning it into jelly, till it reaches my eyeballs and stings them.  All in a millisecond.  So I'll be walking to the bin, put something in it, and bang, tears.  Just for a second.  I'll be mid-conversation with someone and ping, it's there.  No-one knows it's happening but me.  I'm wondering where my boy is, and why he isn't playing with my friends little boy, and the world keeps turning.  I can picture Jack, what he'd be doing at the age of 20 months, more clearly than I could picture him at 6 months, so in a way, it hurts more.  The rawness of his death has been taken over by the sadness that he is just not here, living.

The grief isn't jagged like it used to be.  I get through days without crying.  It's been ages since I smashed any crockery.  I laugh.  I crack (bad) jokes, and have whole conversations that don't include Jack.  I don't have urges to tell the lady at the shop that my baby died.  Much.  Ok, so I wanted to tell the new receptionist at our Property Manager's office the other day, but I didn't.

 But lately the grief has turned dark.  There's a new edge to it.  It's come on the heels of acceptance.  A total misery.  I don't cry all night or day, but I cry in a moment and it fills me with a despair that didn't used to be there.  There's no new rainbow baby.  There's no other older child.  I have a depressive disorder, or is it p.t.s.d?   Whatever, I'll let the phsychologist ponder the label while I live it.  It's episodic, this epsiode I'm in right now triggered by major family stress.  So here it is, the grief walking along with the black dog.  What a party pair.  It's hard.  I have not found peace.  My Grief is not linear.  It's not 20 months down the track, and here are the increments of my acceptance, the stages of grief ticked off, not going back to that one, moving down some linear road to peace.  No. 

Sometimes it's raw again, with even more hopelessness, because he's still dead, will always be dead, and the road stretching out in front of me is empty without him.

 Acceptance is not what I waxed lyrical about at Jack's funeral, because I was determined to only feel love, to let my love for my son be the dominant sense at the funeral, not tears and anger and bitterness, because I didn't want the world to see me rocking on my knees like a crazy woman, because I was gonna be GOOD at grief.
I was gonna kick griefs ass with my zen-like acceptance.  But now acceptance is kicking my ass.

 Oh yeah, acceptance is a bitch.  Acceptance is the knowing that he is never ever going to be here.  That the grief and loss always will be instead.   That if I have another child, Jack will still be dead, and I will still grieve for him.  A new baby will have a different mother to the one that Jack would've had.  A new baby, his younger sibling, will have a mother that is a little bit broken and always wondering where her first born is.