Day 25

What do I do now? I still feel normal, more or less like my old self, the person I was just a month ago. It hits me at odd times, like when I look in the mirror to put on my makeup before work in the morning. Like a slap in the face the thought forms in my mind, "I am the mother to a baby who passed away." I feel branded with some invisible mark, when I pass through a crowd. I am like every one else, but inside I am horridly different. There are so many countless others, passing through in silence. If you say your parent or grandparent died-or even your brother or sister-everyone around will nod their head, they can relate to that. But if you reveal that your child died, people are discomforted. That sort of thing isn't supposed to happen in these times of modern medicine. That sort of thing happened to our great-grandparents, but not to us. There is a bubble of false security and protection parents live inside. Stories like mine burst that bubble, and make their own children's mortality too real. I used to live in that bubble as well. When it became apparent that the child growing inside me would have to fight against staggering odds if he was to live outside my womb, I thought that I would have a nervous breakdown if my child were to die. I was certain that I would be discharged from the hospital and admitted straight into a psychiatric hospital in a catatonic grief. I never thought that the morning Dallas passed away that I would demand to go home from the hospital, and to be at work the morning after his funeral. Maybe I am in some sort of denial, and the grief will hit me out of nowhere like a freight train. Maybe I have accepted that Dallas's lungs were not developed enough to ever breathe in oxygen, and am at peace with his passing. I requested antidepressants when the doctor came to speak with me about my demand to go home. I am terrified of slipping into a deep, dark, soul crushing depression that I will have to fight my way out of. I am afraid that I will be too far gone if that happens to know how to ask for help. My older child is too young to even know that she had a brother, much less that he passed away and Momma and Daddy are really sad right now. I don't want to take her mother away from her, the mother that sings little nonsense songs about anything and everything, that giggles with her and cuddles up to her on the couch. I have to keep going. There are things that need to be done, bills that have to be paid, lives that are still being lived, and as unfair as it all is, I have to be present for all of this. I feel like I am living some sort of Alfred Hitchcock nightmare, and none of this ever happened, it was all a figment of my imagination. Tomorrow I will wake up, and be 29 weeks pregnant. I will feel my sweet little boy kick me and I will hold his father tight and cry at how real my nightmare was. Oh how I wish any of that were possible. This wasn't supposed to be my story, this wasn't supposed to happen to my family.