Things I Wish I Was Thankful For

When I woke up this morning around 5 a.m. to feed Sophie, the news was covering the preparations for the Thanksgiving Day parade.  Sitting in my bed at my parents' house, alone with Sophie, I was abruptly reminded that today is my first Thanksgiving without Ryan.  Anyone grieving will tell you that holidays are hard.  This is such a common statement, that "holiday grief" might as well be added as one of the stages of grief.  It's only because it's the holiday I'm dealing with now, but Thanksgiving seems to me like a particularly tough one, because there's so much tradition attached to it.  Ryan and I did something a little different for Christmas every year, but Thanksgiving was always the same.

I have a job that gets very demanding in November and December, and I've always had to work all of Thanksgiving week, often extra hours, with the exception of the day itself.  Ryan's schedule teaching was always much freer.  Thanksgiving week was an exciting week for me, knowing that I'd have a whole day off that Thursday.  And also, I love Thanksgiving - I always have.  It's the perfect holiday, a celebration of food.  This is exactly why Ryan was not thrilled with the day - he was the world's pickiest eater, and Thanksgiving dinner was not on his approved list of foods.  If there could have been a holiday where everyone ate sausages and potato chips with onion dip, that's one he could have gotten on board with.

What he did love about Thanksgiving was visiting with family, which, with his family, started the day before.  Every year his aunt, uncle, and young cousins would come into town, often his grandmothers, and sometimes other famly members too.  Halfway through the day I'd always get a phone call at work telling me to come over to his family's house right after work and have dinner and hang out with the whole family.  He was always in such a great mood when I got there, very festive and relaxed, and attentive to me, knowing how tired I would be after work.  I remember last year I had had a particularly rough day and was on my feet a lot, running around, and I did something to my toe.  When I finally got to Ryan's parents' house, I told him that I thought I had broken my toe.  He was so concerned, he wanted his sister, who is a doctor, to look at it and wouldn't let me stand anymore.  It was ridiculous, it was just a toe, but his concern made me feel so cared for, so loved.

On Thanksgiving morning, I always slept in.  For the record, I love sleeping in, it's the greatest.  My job requires me to wake up extra early on Black Friday morning, so I would always take advantage of not having to be anywhere right away on Thanksgiving itself.  Ryan and I would sit in bed and watch the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day parade.  I grew up watching it, so it's always been tradition for me, but Ryan thought it was pretty ridiculous.  He watched parts of it with me anyway though, just to spend time with me.  This morning when the parade started, I ached to be at my house in my bed with Ryan watching the parade and drinking our morning coffee.

After our long morning in, we'd go over to Ryan's parents' house and eat ourselves silly.  Correction:  I would eat myself silly.  Ryan would eat a lot of cheese and crackers, but then come to the dinner table with a plate of green beans and bread.  No turkey, no cranberries, no stuffing.  It was Thanksgiving blasphemy, but that was Ryan.  The day's saving grace for him was the football, which he could sit and watch with his family for hours on end, regardless of who was playing.  

After the long day of eating and football, Ryan was usually anxious to get home.  I always managed to persuade him though to make a stop at my parents' house to see my family, and maybe play a few games.  We were very lucky to have both of our families nearby, and we could spend time with both of them every holiday.  It was the perfect situation for when we had a family of our own - we knew we'd never have to disappoint either side.  When we finished at my parents' house, we'd go home before too late so I could get to bed - I had to be ready to wake up early for a Black Friday work marathon, a day when I have to work twelve hours or more.  

The great thing about this year is that I'm on maternity leave, so for the first time ever, I don't have to work on Black Friday, nor did I have the crazy hours leading up to Thanksgiving.  I've been able to spend the week at home, relaxing with Sophie, and spending time with Ryan's family and my own.  The bad news is, of course, that Ryan isn't able to enjoy it with me.  When we found out about my pregnancy, and when I would be due, Ryan was incredibly excited that I would be able to be home for the holidays, and not have to work.  In the ten days that we had before Ryan died in which we knew I was pregnant, we fantasized about Thanksgiving week in particular, knowing that I would be able to enjoy the whole holiday without thinking about work.  Like so many other things, it's a fantasy that is left in my mind, never actualized.

Today, I know that I'll feel what I've felt so many times this year - extreme loneliness.  Being around people makes the loneliness somehow both better and worse.  Ryan's absence is felt every minute of every day, but it's often worse when I look around and see the rest of my family with their partners, and I no longer have mine.  I'll spend my day today with my parents, my sister and her husband, and my nephew and his fiancee.  They'll put their arms around each, hold hands, have little couples' spats, smile at each other, and at the end of the day go to bed next to each other.  I won't be able to stop thinking about how much I want to be able to do the same with Ryan.  I'll be missing him being glued to the couch watching football, I'll be missing his pathetic Thanksgiving plate, I'll be missing his arm on the back of my chair at dinner.  

Our family has never been much for the tradition of taking turns saying what we're thankful for, but I know many people feel that's what the day is for- being thankful.  While I'm of course thankful for my beautiful and healthy daughter, I'm having a difficult time being thankful for much else.  I'm still awfully angry, still feeling very much like my chance at happiness was stolen from me.  I feel it worse when the loneliness comes on strong.  I know I'll be feeling it a lot in the next month, and there's not much I can do to stop it.  I don't feel that I should avoid the holidays, because I want Sophie to enjoy them and start to have holiday traditions of her own.  Over the years it will become less difficult, but this year I'm just stuck with a lot of things I wish I still had to be thankful for.

I Had a Baby

On October 5th, 2013, my family and I were working on the Herculean task of packing up and removing Ryan's things from our house.  After a physically and emotionally exhausting day, we went to dinner and then returned to the house to pick up a few last things.  Then, 10 days ahead of schedule, my water broke.  For the second time in a year, I found myself in the midst of a life changing event while at that house.  This time though, the result was much happier.

Sophie Elizabeth was born the next morning, at 5:23, and she is the new love of my life.  I could go into a lot of detail about the labor and the emotions I went through, but a lot of that seems unnecessary to tell.  There was pain, there was excitement and anticipation, and there was a person missing from the room.  Like most mothers, I think I'll always remember every little detail.  At the end, the doctor and nurses put Sophie up on my chest, and these beautiful blue eyes looked up at me, and I don't even have words for that feeling.  It's not what people said it would be, partly because I'd wager they didn't have the proper words for it either.  It also, thankfully, wasn't what I feared it would be in my last post.  It was something all its own, something I will probably never feel again.

It was tough in the labor and delivery room without Ryan, but most of the time I was able to focus on getting Sophie here.  My sister and Mom held my hands, they calmed me through contractions and coached me through pushes.  I felt waves of sadness, but they came and went.  I was mostly excited, full of anticipation.  In the first couple of days after she was born, I was the most purely happy I'd been since the day before Ryan died.  Not completely happy - there was, and is, still such a hole in my heart and in my life.  And I knew, right away, that despite how happy I felt looking at her and holding her, that I should be even happier.  If Ryan were alive, and we'd just gone through all of those weeks of pregnancy and the hours of labor together, and then held each others' hands while holding our new baby together, the joy I would have felt would have been pure and unadulterated.  Thinking of what that might have felt like infuriates me.  I feel like I had a right to that perfect day, and it was taken from me, just like everything else.  But, at least for a while, I could hold off those thoughts and focus on the happiness that I was able to feel.  Joy was an emotion I didn't remember anymore.  All of these months of waiting for her, living for the abstract notion of her, she's arrived- a perfect, fully formed human, created from a tiny little cell from me and a tiny little cell from Ryan.

It's completely incomprehensible for me to think of that - Ryan and I made her, and Ryan isn't here to know her.  In a way they feel like two completely distinct and separate parts of my life, with very little in common.  There is nothing about my current lifestyle that has any semblance to my old lifestyle, the life I live with Ryan.  There's no overlap or shared experiences.  Of course though, without him, there would be no her.  Since she's been here, I've felt a little like Ryan is even farther away from me.  Everybody says how your life changes when you have a baby.  Some people have even told me that I wouldn't remember what my life was like before a baby.  I can say that the day she was born, my world did change.  I hope the second part isn't true though- I don't want to ever forget what my life was like before her, because those were some of the happiest times of my life.  I'm desperately sad that they can't overlap.  Why do I only get to have one?  I want Ryan and Sophie at the same time.  I had eight happy years with Ryan.  Then, 8 months of misery.  Now, I'll have many years with Sophie, hopefully happy years.  It is cruel that fate made it so that I can't have them both at the same time.  Most people say that the birth of their children is the happiest day of their lives.  As joyful as I was that morning, I can't really say that.  I have two happiest days - the day of her birth, which was happy, but marked with such sadness since Ryan wasn't there, and my wedding day, which was a perfect day but I have a hard time thinking about now without crying.

For the time being, I am able to mainly think about my life with her.  I didn't want a new life, but she makes it worth living.  She is the most beautiful little thing on the planet, born a petite 7 pounds, 0 ounces, and 19 inches long, and with a head full of dark hair.  She has perfect little facial features and is full of adorable little expressions and gestures.  I love her more than anything in this world.  In a movie, this would be the ending, a happy resolution to a sad story.  In reality, things don't tie up so neatly.  My story, for better and worse, goes on, and it will often be very difficult.  With Sophie here though, I can see a little more of what that future might look like.

Baby Stuff - Fears of Postpartum

When I tell people my story, or tell people who know my story about how I'm feeling, or just in general when I express myself these days, I very often get some variation of the following comment:

"Once that baby comes, everything will be okay, and you'll have some peace".

This sentiment comes at a lot of different levels- some people are wishing it for me, and praying for it.  Some people just fervently believe that having the baby will make me happier.  And others still believe it so much that it seems as though they can't imagine that I would have trouble believing it myself.

The truth though is that the baby, beautiful little miracle that she is, won't solve anything.  I know that she'll help, but having her is not the finish line - it's not some turning point after which everything will be better.  In the very best case scenario, she'll bring me a kind of happiness I never knew before.  This, I think, is what most people are expecting.  But what she won't do is bring back the kind of happiness I had before, or heal the wounds of losing the love of my life.  Those things are permanent, and there's no changing them. I learn every day to live with the knowledge that my old life is gone and there's no getting it back.  What I stand to gain when the baby comes will be a different kind of happiness - one marked by loss, but full of the hope of a new future.  And just about every mother I speak to feels that this, at least, will be an instantaneous transformation in my life; the doctor will hand me the baby, and I will be aglow.

Reality has taught me though that not everything is always what we think it will be.  Statistics vary depending on where you look, but somewhere in the neighborhood of one in seven new mothers experience postpartum depression.  These women range from those who are susceptible to depression to perfectly normal, healthy women who simply feel no connection to their children.  Or, after the baby is born, they simply don't have the euphoric feeling of the love of new motherhood that so many other women promised they would feel.  I've been going through extreme emotional duress for the past seven months, brought on by the shock and trauma of not only losing my husband, but actually being in the room when it happened.  As one of my doctors bluntly put it, "many women get postpartum depression for no reason.  You have a reason."

Luckily, my doctors and family know my situation and are aware that they need to monitor my closely, so I know that I'll be taken care of.  But it still terrifies me.  What if I don't feel the euphoric new motherhood thing that everyone promises?  What if I feel no connection to the baby?  I doubt that either of these things will happen, but they weigh on my mind and heart as I try to prepare for every eventuality.  And every time someone promises me that I'll feel a certain way once she arrives, I try to put those comments in a little file in my brain that I don't open.  I can't take any more broken promises.

For nearly eight months now, I have been living for this baby, terrified of losing her, of something being wrong, and yes, I've been terrified of what happens when she comes too.  I've always had a picture in my head of having a child, of how my husband and I would tell our families about the baby, how we would go through the pregnancy together, and how he'd be there during the birth and after.  When Ryan died, I had to change the picture in my head- but it's hard to know what to replace it with.  I don't know that what I'll feel will be unadulterated joy.  More likely, it will be extreme happiness mixed with extreme emotional pain. I've gotten somewhat used to feeling opposing emotions at the same time over the past eight months, but this will be a more extreme level of it.

I'm scared about something else too, something difficult to explain.  Ever since Ryan died, there have been different milestones that I've set in my head.  Sometimes they're simple dates (a month after he died, our anniversary, six months after he died, his birthday), and sometimes they're difficult events that I've had to struggle through (the first time I slept at our house, the first time I took a trip without him).  Often I set my sights on a milestone like this, and I think, this is going to be hard, but it will be better once I get through it.  Then, I make it through, and I wake up the next morning, and nothing's better.  In the most extreme circumstances, I  sometimes get my brain locked on the idea that I just need to make it through this particular test, and then everything will go back to normal, and Ryan will be here again.  And of course, he never is.

Having our baby all along has sort of felt like the finish line.  I just need to make it through this, I need to take care of myself so that she can be born healthy.  Once she's here, everything will be fine.  When everything isn't really fine at the end of my labor, and I'm still living in a world without Ryan in it (still), I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to take it.  Even as much as I can prepare myself for it, I just can't explain the depth of pain repeatedly waking up to this life I've been left with.  I can absolutely know and accept that Ryan is gone, but sometimes this little kernel of hope starts to grow inside of me, and when reality proves it wrong, I feel like I sink back into a deeper level of hurt.  The thought of going through that again when the baby comes is too often on my mind.