The Weekend

So Bryan and I took the kids to Lake DeGray to stay at the lodge there for the weekend. We were getting ready to leave on Saturday morning and I got a call from a friend telling me that another baby had gone to heaven. Someone I KNOW. All I could think is that in the past couple of months there have been 6 babies go to heaven just in this area. People that I know. That doesn't count the ones that I DON'T know.

Why does God need all these babies?

The anger hit me last week about Zoe Jane. It's not fair. I don't really care what the reason is for all of the infant deaths because IT IS NOT FAIR. We love our babies. I can't imagine the moms who had theirs for a month or so and had to go through losing them. I never saw Zoe Jane alive. I knew she was gone before I even went into labor. It was cruel and awful, but if I had KNOWN her alive and she had been taken from me I am not sure that I could have taken it.

The death of a child changes you. You don't mean for it to. You think that you will be OK day after day but the little, insignificant things hurt you. A new baby in a stroller, or asleep on their daddy's shoulder at a restaurant, the baby section of every damn store that you walk into. The facebook pictures of all the precious babies lucky enough to be here. The little Raggedy Ann doll that you find tucked away for your little girl that died. It hurts like hell.

The whole time we were at the lake I would look out at the water and think that I was supposed to still be pregnant. I still feel self conscious of my body. The whole time I was thinking that next summer she would have been so sweet in her little swimsuit with a hat going to the lake with us. I hate the things that will never be.

The butterflies are going away. I haven't seen one in a week or two. It makes me sad. I felt like seeing them all the time was Zoe's way of telling me that she is still here. Where did she go?

Things change a few weeks after your child dies. The people who were surrounding you with love and support go away. The cards stop. The messages stop. People think that you should be good by now. I think this happens when you lose anyone in your life. It's not really fair to think that people would go out of their way to comfort you weeks after the funeral. It is like I tell my brides who spend a year planning a wedding... you better find something else to occupy your time because after the wedding you will feel lost, like you don't know what to do next. What happens is that real life sets in whether you are ready for it or not. When you lose a baby, real life sets in and you have to hide your grief so that people don't think that you are a freak.

I am to the point where I just want to work and sleep. Oh precious sleep. I crave it. I can't wait to crawl into bed every night after working all day. I feel like I have aged by ten years. My body hurts, my brain isn't working and I feel like my closest friends think that I don't care about them because I am a hermit to my bed these days.

We didn't want to come home today. We wanted to stay at the lodge where there were activities for the kids and where we could sit and gaze at the water for hours. I read a whole entire book over the past two days. That just doesn't happen anymore. I did enjoy getting into a novel and pretending for spurts of time that my life wasn't real. But it is... and the minute we hit Texarkana the stress hit my shoulders and neck. Back to real life and time to find things to occupy my time.