It is so hard

It is so hard, all of this. It is too hard. On some days I think I will suffocate from the very heavy thickness of the air I now breathe. On some days I think that no one would even notice if I did, so alone do I feel even amongst the friendliest of company. I am on another plain. Though I sit next to you with open eyes and an interested expression, I really am very far away, and you would not want to follow no matter how much easier you'd like to make my road for me. You would not want to follow, though I'd desperately like to take you, just for a glimpse, of the way things seem to me now that I've lost my little son. Only then, perhaps, will you understand that there is no closure for me to find. There is no place better I can expect to be. There is no neatly packaged lesson I have learned to have made this, in that sickening phrase, 'meant to be'. My injuries can't plastered, and there's few aids I can find to help me stand tall again. All the torn and raggedy parts of my heart and soul cannot be sutured shut. I can't re-break a fracture this fatal so as to re-set it in a more pleasing shape.

God, or the universe, does not dish out only what it knows we can survive. He, or it, has no concept of what is 'enough' or what is 'fair'. We will not be rewarded for our good deeds, or compensated for our suffering in the next life. This is all we have. These fleeting moments. The ones that most spend worrying about what they're going to wear in the morning. That's all you've got.

And you know what else? What doesn't kill you sometimes doesn't make you stronger. It makes you more tender, more easily wounded than you ever were. It puts a impenetrable fence between you and all the things, and all the people, you used once to love. You just can't care about the minutia anymore, and that means you just can't care about most anything anyone wants to talk to you about.

Of course other people's infant gains, most of all, sting you until you just go numb from all those bites. You resent people with choices - even the people you love - because you had none, except to watch your baby die or let him die alone. And probably, they resent you because you're selfish these days. You don't want to see their newborn babies or hear about their birth plans, or have them stay for a jaunty holiday in your 'spare' room (yes, there's room for guests now as what use does your dead baby have for a room lovingly prepared for him?) And not just now, but never. I never, never ever again, want someone else's newborn baby slumbering under my roof when my own flesh and blood didn't even have that opportunity. I think that's an entirely reasonable response to what is an entirely unreasonable situation to be placed in. But still I come off as a selfish bitch with no feelings anymore for anyone other than myself.

I feel like I am being judged. Always judged, because, no I do not feel 'lucky' the way, perhaps, I should, when you tell me a story of parents whose baby died of SIDS, and how much worse it would be if you'd actually bonded with your baby and gotten to know him and then he was snatched away. It's not a sliding scale. I'm nodding and smiling politely when you tell me that you lost a baby in 'similar' circumstances (not really understanding or even asking what the circumstances of my loss were) and you've come to discover that it happened for a reason you now magically understand. That's fantastic for you. Fantastically deluded. I'm only smiling because the quickest way to get out of the conversation is to let you gob off rather than taking you to task on any number of the inane responses that fall from your lips.

Call me selfish because I don't have the energy to fix friendships that have been offended by this new me. Call me ugly, hurtful, or self-obsessed. . . say they all must be my true colours coming through in my time of darkness. I just don't care. How could I care? I care about Leslie and Max. I care about Max and me. I care about the people, many of whom weren't even good friends nine months ago, who have cut me some slack. Who can let me be unreasonable, and venomous, and weak, and hopeless, and self-pitying, and who haven't tried to snap me out of it by throwing me in front of a fucking filthy window and demanding that I see the sun. I'll be there for each of you, you can count on that.

I don't want sympathy, because sympathy suggest that the giver is outside looking in, feeling sorry for a tragedy they believe couldn't possibly happen to them. But empathy. . . well, that's what gives comfort. Sit with me and show me that you are willing to imagine the extent, the magnitude of what I have lost. Sit yourself beside me, not in opposition. Only then do I know to trust that you've gone as far as you are humanly able to 'get' it.