You Just Have to Get Through it

You just have to get through it.  You just have to get through the day; just get through this; just get through that.  These are phrases I have heard from various people and said or thought of myself for months.

Well, time waits for no one.  Six months has gone right ahead and marched on as if no one was watching; certainly as if no one has been grieving while trying to figure out how to move forward in life.  I knew that this milestone would be a tough one, measuring half a year since we had to say hello and goodbye to our tiny, baby boy all in one day.  Rather than sit and just wait for the day to pass I decided to plan a surprise party.  Sean’s 30^th birthday is coming up and so I thought a way to put a happy spin on the day and distract myself was to plan it on this six month mark.

I planned for about two months, inviting out of town family and friends, some high school friends and work friends.  I squirrelled away money so he wouldn’t notice anything strange about the places showing up on our checking account. My mother-in-law helped make all of Sean’s favorite foods a few days in advance to make the day as low maintenance as possible; I arranged a plausible ruse for getting him out of and back to the house; I though we had it all planned out.  What I hadn’t planned on was feeling as crazy sad as I did the night before and next morning. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’d known all along it would hurt something sort of familiar.  I just didn’t plan on it being so raw again.  We got up early and left to visit Jack’s “special spot”, letting his big sister leave him some pretty flowers.  My heart broke a bit more when Sean was looking down at his grave and Kennedy asked what he was looking at.  When he responded with, “Jack,” she said, “No Daddy! He’s not down there, he’s up in the clouds,” and laughed as if to tell him how silly she found his mistake to be.  We got through it and were back home to have Sean leave to fish and to have us begin the last minute prep.

Everyone arrived, including the birthday boy, whom I believe was moderately surprised, and the rest of the day was a success.   

Monday morning got here quicker than I would have liked and I had barely slept the night before, which is always a key ingredient in my recipe for disaster.  I still just didn’t feel ready to go back to work, back to where I had to be Ms. Doyle again, a person with (most likely a delusional) self-perceived control over most things.  This first week is only staff so it would be just dipping my feet in but I was still terrified. The last sixth months have gone like this:  Extreme grief, grief, grieving while functioning, grieving while functioning and caring for Kennedy.  Now I had to add another component back into the mix and I felt brutally overwhelmed. 

I woke before the alarm, applied a minimal amount of makeup, because if nothing else I am a realist and knew that there was a good chance it wouldn’t withstand the day, got a hug and pep-talk from my loving and optimistic husband and left for my first day back.  I almost made it to the highway before the tears flowed freely.  I called Sean for reassurance, which he was ready to give, and finished what was left of my ride.  As I pulled into the parking lot I began to shake.  I mean really shake, like couldn’t shift to park easily because my hands were shaking so hard.  Two of my girlfriends were waiting for me in the lot to walk in with me, which I loved them for.  As we got close to the doors, doors I hadn’t walked through since the day I left school to head for Philadelphia two days later, I began to sob. Hard.  One of them took my hand and helped me get through the door.  They led me to my office, ironically a room crying middle school-ers often find their way to for comfort, gave me hugs and water and we made our way to the first of our meetings for the day.  I made it through, it sucked pretty badly but I got through it.

The thing is though, I don’t want to just “get through” life.  I want to live it.  It dawned on me that I haven’t really been doing that the last six months; but I am trying to.  So maybe, God, I hope, that with it going like this: grieving while functioning and caring for Kennedy and being Ms. Doyle and living.

So Long, Sweet Soother

It started out three years ago with everything I read telling me that if I was planning to breastfeed I should absolutely not give a pacifier to my new baby girl as it could cause “nipple confusion”. Now, I don’t know what anyone else’s nipples look like but I was pretty certain there was no mistaking mine for the little newborn Nuk “pacies” that I had laying around from free samples I’d received in the mail and baby stores, but I had had a baby for all of two days so what the hell did I know.

Let’s move ahead 3 weeks to my little bottomless pit nursing to the point where I felt like a dairy factory and that if I didn’t get an hour with my bra being closed and my shirt down I thought I was going to lose it and tell everyone I knew to buy stock in Similac. In a moment of absolute desperation I dug out one of my samples and gave it to her. It was an instant miracle. She took to it immediately and slept soundly for hours. Hours!! From that moment forward I’m not sure who loved the pacifier more, Kennedy or me, but in any case, we were sold (and in case you were dying to know, there was no confusion between nipples. Imagine that!). Throughout our love affair with the pacifier we may have changed brands and how many we were working with at a time, two being a favorite for nap and bedtimes, but our relationship stayed strong and unwavering. We were hooked. Literally, right to the front of whatever she was wearing; the pacifier and security strap quickly became a wardrobe staple.

Flash forward through the years and I’m pregnant with baby number 2 and telling everyone I absolutely would not take her pacifier away as she was getting the boot from her crib and baby nursery, while finishing up toilet training and sleeping in a big-girl bed; too many big changes. For me too. We battled with disapproving family members clucking about how we should take it away soon or she was going to need braces though we were assured by our pediatrician and pediatric dentist that as long as we got rid of it by three there was less of a risk for braces than if it continued past then. As a thumb-sucker until the age of about ten, I really viewed it as a good thing that she preferred a pacifier to a finger. I mean you can take a pacifier away eventually but fingers are there for the long run so….

When Jack died we were all a mess.  Sean and I trying to reconcile this unimaginable loss and trying to explain to a two and a half year old that her baby brother wasn’t going to be coming home, not ever, the thought of trying to wean her off of the only comfort she could find was out of the question. So for the last five months I was of the mindset that if she needed braces she needed them; who really gives a shit. I wasn’t going to take away one more thing from her. Her being content was a small comfort to us and we’d take what we could get.

We did decide that as she was losing her pacifiers, we were not going to replace them. It made Kennedy a bit more mindful of where she was leaving them (I convinced myself we were teaching responsibility. To a three year old.)  She was only allowed to use them in bed or long car rides. We were patting ourselves on the back for standing strong even when this last month brought us down to one solitary paci. 

Last weekend I was on an overnight getaway with a girlfriend and when I gave a call home the next morning to check in and see how things were going my Sean informed me Kennedy slept through the night without the pacifier! In all actuality they couldn’t find it and she begged him to go buy a new one, but either way she made it. When I returned home I brought her a small surprise and told her how proud I was. She started to whine a little bit at night that she “needed” it. We made a deal that if she could be a big girl and make it a whole week with not paci we could go to the toy store and pick something out. She got all jazzed up and went to bed without much fuss.

Well, that made one of us.

As I lay down to sleep I literally broke down into hysterics. I couldn’t believe it. It felt like I had left my baby girl for one night and came home to a big girl. I officially had no baby. As I sobbed into my pillow I started to realize that I might have been allowing her to hold on the pacifier more for me than for her. If Jack had lived we were planning to “give” all of the paci’s to him as a ceremonious way of getting Kennedy to give them up. I suppose my fear has been, without him, once she was done with them it would feel like losing a baby all over again and I didn’t think I could bear any more heartache. 

We all stuck with our deal and made it through the week.  There were lots of tears, pouting, and whining but that all comes with the territory of being three.  Sunday came and we were off the to store bright and early for the big reward.  She picked out a tiny plastic bear cub.  That’s it.  Talk about anticlimactic.  I practically dragged the kid through the store and luckily we found something a tad cooler than baby bear...princess walkie-talkies.

“Mommy, come in Mommy.  I’m big now”

So I guess rather than looking for ways to keep her a baby, I need to embrace the fact that, despite all the change she has been through these last months, she doesn’t need a pacifier to bring her comfort anymore. But, if I’m being honest, I may have to go make a Target run and buy one for myself.

A Metaphorical (Half) Marathon

I’m running a marathon.  Well, a half marathon.  No, this is not one of my beloved metaphors.  September 20^th I will literally be running 13.1 miles.  I have never been a runner.  Quite the opposite-I’ve hated running.  Back in high school when we had to run miles and miles with the crew team, I can remember running and waiting for the last person to pass me so I could turn around at whatever point I was at and not finish the whole run (cheating is such a strong word). On an off I have taken up running over the years but never stuck with it long. So, when the gym I go to started a training program for this particular race I was skeptical.

I decided that I would sign up.  People that are runners swear it makes you feel good and I’m all about doing anything that helps in that department these days.  My thought was I would set this as a goal, a concrete, attainable goal.  A goal that I could get up and work towards reaching, every day.  I would do this as an attempt to show myself that I am moving forward after losing Jack. 

I am running a half marathon.  This is not a metaphor.  But it could be…

Getting up early and forcing myself out of bed can be brutal and I often contemplate crawling back into bed, feeling unready to face what is lying ahead. I start slow and feel off balance the first few steps.  It can be incredibly uncomfortable and quite literally takes my breath away.  It hurts something fierce.  I ask myself how I can possibly do this; how will I ever finish?  I have moments where I feel like I may be finding my stride and others where I have to will myself to take just one more step and not stop.  At the end of a day, after I have left everything I’ve got left in my tank out there, I think I just may be able to pull this off after all and I fall asleep exhausted.  Yesterday, I just didn’t have it in me.  I got up with the intention to have a good run but I was just dragging.  I decided to call it quits and go home early.  I beat myself up about it all day, feeling like I haven’t made much progress at all.  But I decided instead to view it this way: It is not going to be easy and it is going to take an insane amount of work but little by little I will get there. 

End metaphor. 

So I, former running hater, have decided to undertake a half marathon.  I will run for my children. I run for Kennedy Egan, to teach her that sometimes really awful things will happen in life and you have to find a way to keep going even when you won’t want to; to teach her to be strong. I run for Jack Holden, to show him I will live on for him and honor him.

Grieving, like running sometimes, isn’t a sprint; it’s a (half) marathon. 

Keepsakes

My parents brought me up a box of stuff I had saved through the years, mostly from high school.  I put off sorting through it because I knew I would inevitable sit for hours pouring over it all trying to remember what was what.  When I finally convinced myself to get it done if for no other reason than that I could tell from Sean’s asking, “Are you going to look at that now?” for the third time that he was sick of looking at it.  As I did I found myself wondering what makes us keep the things we keep.  What is it about certain things that make us hold onto random items?  Are we thinking we’ll reuse them again at some point; that’ll we’ll need an old movie ticket stub, or get to wear a dried corsage on our wrist again?  More likely I think we want to make sure we can hold on a to a piece of those moments in the event our memories fail us.  I have to laugh now because as I say that I could honestly tell you that 8 out of the 10 notes that I’d saved back then from friends and read I had zero recollection of the situations or even some of the people referenced and so really how important could they have been?

It made me feel kind of ridiculous about all of the things I’ve held onto over the more recent years.  Do I really need to be hanging onto it all?  I also felt like a hypocrite because even though my siblings and I tease our poor mother about being a packrat, as a parent I now understand the desperation to hold onto every moment of my babies’ lives.

From Kennedy’s odds and ends that made it into her baby book, to her hair clippings from her first haircut, to the nine Rubbermaid tubs of clothes I convinced myself I saved incase we had another girl (and never got around to going through even after we found out Jack was a boy), I find myself doing the very same things I swore I wouldn’t do because I’m no fan of clutter.  But there’s just some part of me that feels like I can’t let go of anything that has been a part of her.  I’ve learned to take advantage of times when I’m on a cleaning spree and part with things that are obviously less important than others as a means of ensuring our home is not overtaken and featured on an episode of Hoarders.  

It’s different with Jack in more ways than one.  I have the beautiful memory box the hospital made for us, including photos, his bracelet, the little hand knitted hat he wore, the cast molds of his feet, and his hand and footprints, all of which I will obviously always keep.  I kept every single card given to me by all of our loving family and friends.  I have saved every ultrasound picture, and there is probably close to 50 or 60 over the course of my pregnancy with him.  Though he never had the chance to wear any of it, the little guy already had a pretty extensive wardrobe.  It all still hangs in the closet that would have been his.  I couldn’t bear to return it, still can’t bring myself to box it up, but know I will never be able to give it away.  I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to part with anything of his.  In the grand scheme of things and in terms of what a person acquires in their lives, it’s such a small amount that the claim of lack of space is not a sufficient reason to ever let go of Jack’s things, as far as I’m concerned.              

It is silly though, really.  I don’t need any of it to call to mind my children.  I will always be able to close my eyes and physically feel them placed in my arms for the first time and the weight behind each of them.  The way the skin felt on the backs of their hands when I held it for the first time.  These things required no keepsake, nothing to physically tuck away in a book or box.  Sometimes during sleepless nights I find myself worried that when I get old and my memories fade, will I forget these things.  It’s only after I remind myself these parts of my kids are not stored in a box or even my mind, they are kept in my heart and will stay inside of there forever.