The past few posts have been things that I have written over the past few months, and I've posted them here in case anyone stumbles across this blog and needs to know the backstory to make sense of the current postings.
First of all, I'd like to make sure that everyone (mainly myself) understands that this blog is primarily for me. My therapist said it would be good for me. I'm not seeing her anymore, but I'm still taking some of her advice. I do believe that writing will help keep me from internalizing my emotions, mainly the ones that are very difficult to talk about with my husband and other people who loved my son. I am hoping to have a place to think, ponder, and vent my emotions without any expecting any sort of particular emotional response other than for people to be kind, gentle, and considerate of the fact that I am a newly grieving mother.
That being said, I also started this blog for other parents who have lost their kids. Whether it be a pregnancy loss, people who have given birth to sleeping babies, parents who have lost babies to SIDS or some other infant death, or anyone who has lost a child- we all process loss differently, but no loss is greater than another.
After Charlie died, my husband David and I went to support groups, I sought out support online, and I talked to people who had lost loved ones, It seemed like everywhere I turned I saw the same thing: people hurting, but not healing. It wasn't inspiring for me to go to support groups with people who had been going for 5 years and still couldn't deal with life. I know that most people who go to support groups are there because they
need to be there, and most of the time the people who are healing aren't
going anymore, but oh, if there was just one mother there who could
have told me that the crazy would end, it would have been so helpful. It terrified me to think that it was never, ever going to stop. That the crazy would never go away.
And I mean crazy. Like crazy, crazy. Not ,"Oh, Im so
crazy," but the kind of crazy where you have thoughts like, "I wonder if Im really here right now, or if Im on
some special drugs in a hospital somewhere and Im hallucinating all of this." Crazy like wanting to steal babies from the grocery store. Crazy like visualizing myself dead or how I could kill
myself multiple times a day, and getting lost walking in the
neighborhood I lived in for 6 years, and thinking that my food was made
of bugs, and walking around running into walls because visually I was
somewhere else entirely. Having regular thoughts about wanting to dig my baby up out of the ground
with my fingernails and being able to smell the dirt. But mainly, I felt like I was in a movie all day everyday.
Sometimes I would even think to myself (while I was watching this movie that I was in), "that poor girl, I dont know
what I would do if something happened to one of my kids." And sometimes
it took me 20-30 minutes before I would allow the thought to occur: that was my kid.
I was literally out of my mind. Thankfully, I have amazing family and friends to keep my safe and take care of my daughter.
And then one day, I woke up and was ok. Not great, not happy, not even really alright, but ok. Making it. I suddenly came to the realization that I would live through this, that I would move on from this,
that it wouldnt be the rest of my existence- that the pain would eventually become
more distant. Dont get me wrong, Im still crazy. But I'm better than I was before, and I hope that some other grieving parents can take that from this blog. Hopefully it will be a place where I can eventually share a story of healing.
Healing-not forgetting, but moving forward with hope.
Holly, I know exactly how you feel. I have setbacks from time to time and there are still days that I find incredibly hard, but I have had to limit my exposure to groups and certain blogs these days because I feel as though they are setting me back to where I was a year ago.
ReplyDeleteI go through different emotions but sometimes reading some blogs make me feel as though because I AM healing it means that there is something wrong with me or that I didn't love my son as much. (Both incredibly untrue.) I actually think that in some cases, the people have trouble healing because they think that it means that they are okay with their child's death, when that's not what it means at all.
The online groups have been hit and miss for me. In some of them, the people are so caught up with their fundraisers and SIDS magnets and pins and events that I feel like there is less support and more competition than anything.
Finding that good balance of people who will let you grieve and heal and those who will still stand beside you is important.