Mothering Through Grief

Becoming a mother was, hands down, the scariest and most wonderful thing to ever happen to me. I was young, dumb, and unprepared to see the second line come across that test 5 years ago, but looking back, I often think of it as the day that saved my life.
I think of it as that even more, seeing where so many of the people that I filled my life with have ended up.
I think of you as the person who saved me. And I loved you so much, I wanted to do it again and again... and so your brothers came to be, and I have never been happier about something in my life.
The journey of motherhood has, for me, been both the most natural and the absolute hardest experience, filled with the most joy I have ever known, while simultaneously plunging me into the depths of despair as I have struggled through postpartum depression and anxiety.
I have prided myself on rising up and learning everything that I can about special needs programs, about getting through the often complicated process of wraparound therapies, speech, medicaid, and everything else that comes along with making sure you, my kids, have the best chance at excelling and having an easier time when I can't be there watching over you. And I am proud of the faith I have in you, I'm glad I am so confident that you (all of you) really are going to be more than okay as you all grow up.
Things were starting to feel good, you see, it felt like a rhythm was taking place in our life. I thought that things were the way everyone must experience them.

But then.... something terrible happened in my life, and all of the normalcy in the chaos of motherhood.... it turned into just chaos, and I have been holding on for dear life and hoping you kids forgive me someday.
When your uncle died, a part of me died with him. And it has made me unsure of myself, it has put me into a fog of depression and sadness that I only wish that I could say I'd never known. And as much as I have tried to keep everything normal for you, I know that this year has been hard for you because of me.
Grief has made me unpredictable.
Even as I sit here, writing this, you are coming to me, sitting beside me, and you are watching my face. You are wondering if I am about to laugh with you, at you, chase you, play.... or am I going to be quiet, seeing you but not really seeing you, distracted, sad, maybe angrier than the situation calls for when you cause some mayhem.
I hope that you know that I am trying so hard to be normal, and that this is the best I can do right now. I hope you know that if I could be better, I promise I would be.
I spend a lot of time thanking my God for you. I close my eyes and shoot up a prayer, thankful for your distraction, for the bursts of pure joy that come out of you and radiate straight into my heart, the laughter that fills my ears and my soul, the moments of cleverness that astound me and make me smile genuinely, make me forget that I am torn apart, make me feel whole and wonderful and alive. I wonder where I would be if I didn't have you in my life, filling my days with your antics, distracting me from thinking about what I always think about, just not head on.

And then.... I spend a lot of time raging at this same God, cursing him out, screaming with every fiber of my being, every cell in my body, for letting this happen. For letting me have you, for letting me fuck you up, for letting this happen when you need me and letting me be so disgustingly useless. I read these studies about the effects on children whose mothers suffer from depression, particularly at the critical developmental period that you all are in RIGHT NOW, and it makes me weak. It makes me weep. When I am feeling particularly low and alone, it sometimes makes me wonder if you would be better off without me at all. It sits in the back of my mind, dimly lit, buzzing, annoying, just close enough for me to know it's there. It's scary, and I am glad that it makes me afraid, because it shakes my grief and moves it out of the way so that I can think about watching you grow up.
I think about loving you for your whole life, and I find this strength to keep going, to push myself past what I think I can do, and then I do more.
I want your life to be magical.
I want you to be happy.
And so out of this grief, I find love. I find him in pieces of you, I find moments of my life before you shining through in you, and I will myself to shake this fog away, to be here now.

I pray that you remember the good days more than the bad, and so even when I cannot do it, I do.

This is hard. And for me, it always will be hard to look back at this incredibly complicated period of life, where I will always wish I could go back to, to relive you in your innocent toddler stages, and where I will always run away from the heartache that is losing the first and best friend in my life.

I hope, above it all, that you know, that before everything else, you feel the love I have for you before you remember the rest.

Love,
Mom

The first one.

It's my birthday tomorrow. The first one in my entire life without you.
Tomorrow you won't call me, or text me, or ignore me, or write on my facebook wall.
I've been dreading it for awhile now.
Been avoiding it for awhile now, to be honest, but it's here and so now I can't avoid your absence anymore.

You are a tsunami. I have been running away from you for my life, because I know when the towering wave breaks over me, my bones will break, my heart will shatter. The undertow will pin me to the rocks and I won't be able to hold my breath against the thought of you forever, so I will gasp the salty water in, and in will flood you, and all that comes along with it. The guilt, the despair, the never-ending loneliness that I can't seem to shake off, no matter who is with me, will drown me.
I had forgotten exactly how this felt, but I don't know how I managed to do that.
I remember sitting in  a car when I was 16, with a boy I liked, and we were bullshitting around, talking about the number of kids we each wanted to have.
He said two, like him and his sister. The perfect amount.
But I said that you had to have at least three, because if one of them died, and there was only two, then the other one would be all alone.
I wonder if Fate was listening in, and she took that as some sort of challenge.
I apologize, because that's not what I intended.

I have this voicemail saved from you. My phone is shattered, and slow, and the battery dies and the picture quality has lowered significantly.
But you called me after I had fallen asleep already last year. And you said, "I was gonna call you earlier, but I didn't..... and I didn't do the Facebook thing or text ya either, but Happy Birthday, Jaim. I love you."

Maybe this is so hard because I will never get back to the age I was the last time that I saw you. This is proof that time is really passing. Proof that I am growing older and you are dead.
I thought about visiting the cemetery after work today. Maybe I will tomorrow, I don't know. I haven't been there since we buried you in the snow. I think about it, but it never brought me closer to Mia.
I remember you telling me that you went sometimes, like on Halloween when someone watched you the whole time, thinking you were a vandal and not a heartbroken big brother. But I never felt her there, really. And I am afraid to go and not feel you around either.

I wish you were here to tell me that it's gonna be okay.

Shift.

I shoot straight up, in the middle of the night. It's dark and quiet and peaceful, but the hair at the base of my skull is damp and I feel a cold bead of sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades. I can't catch my breath.
To my left, my baby is breathing softly. I press my hand, gentle and firm, on his stomach, to hear him grunt and be sure he's actually breathing and it's not my imagination shielding me. He grunts and snuggles his head into the mattress more.
To my right, my 4 year old shifts slightly, having snuck out of his own bed and across the hallway while I slept and crawled into bed beside me, and I hold my hand beneath his nose to feel his hot breath.
It's not enough, so I quietly slide to the bottom of the bed and sneak across the hallway myself, poking my head in the door and listening to my middle son snore and kick the wall beside him in his sleep, as he does when he's having a particularly thrilling dream.
I hear my dog drag himself from his spot in front of the front door, anticipating my footsteps padding the stairs to check on him next, the only one in the whole house aware of my nightly ritual since the end of February.
I glance over towards my fiance, snoring lightly on the couch, the light from the TV he fell asleep watching playing across his face, and ease down on the bottom step as my dog comes to kiss my face and then go back to his spot by the door, guarding us...... or soaking up the cool air from the crack underneath it.
I stand and go back upstairs, but I know I won't sleep yet, so I wander into the bathroom, sit on the edge of the bathtub, and drop my head into my hands. I am so tired.
I can feel my hands tingling with.... adrenaline? Fear? Rage? Probably just exhaustion. I press my lips together and breathe quietly through my nose because I don't want to accidentally wake the kids up and have to comfort them tonight. My mind wanders to undone laundry, the dishes I was too tired to do that I left in the sink, the groceries about to expire in my fridge, the toys on the floor I'll need to clear before allowing the baby free range... the ones my fiance will likely clean up in frustration with my lack of helpfulness in the morning. It wanders to clients at work, schoolwork, logistics of the day, of the trip to see my best friend in a few weeks, to workouts I need to do, to walking my dog. It wanders anywhere except to you, until it finally does, and I shake like a leaf in the wind at the enormity of your absence.
How do I go on?
I keep trying. I hold it together most of the time now. I laugh at  my kids most of the time now. I don't forget things as much now. I spend the majority of my time avoiding the fact that I am never going to see you again. And I do okay, you know, at that.
And I try to remember that the world isn't focused around my grief, that people die all the time, that my grief is not more than anyone else's, that everything isn't about the fact that you died one night and I am still alive without you.
But then, our brother has a senior night, and you were at the last one in the fall but you aren't now this spring. And they announced his parents and siblings and last time they said your name and now they don't. And I remember that  this is his big night, not mine, not yours and so I push back the tears pricking the back of my eyes, I swallow them down, and in an instant I am transported to a different time, a different place, a different lifetime, where I am explaining to this counselor Mom took me to in the eight grade about Mia and about how I can't sleep because she died and I don't know how to be, and I feel those tears coming up and she notices me swallowing those traitors down my throat, so that I can keep it inside me, a reminder that she was here, that you were here, the pain I swallow proof that something good existed that doesn't exist anymore.
When I try to explain that I'm not doing so good, it doesn't come out right and I feel a little selfish, and so I have been trying to not say much, you know?
I would normally call you because you always knew what to say, or not to say, when I got like this. I'm trying to be like that for our brothers and sister, but I don't think I'm getting it the way you would have.
I keep hoping I'll wake up and I won't feel so.... this way.
How have 3 months passed so quickly, though? At the same time, it feels so long ago already.
As though who I was when you were alive is an entirely different person than who I have become in your death. Like strangers, or old friends who might awkwardly chat over the produce cart if we ran into each other after we had a weird falling out.
I just keep wondering.
Who am I without you?
I don't know, and so I whisper back to my room, slide between the two sleeping children, and close my eyes, pray for darkness to drift from the room to my mind, and will myself to sleep.

Easter Week and Missing You.

I thought Easter would be really hard this year. I prepared myself for the grief to creep up my back and into my skull. I practiced breathing into it, forcing a smile back towards it, so that my boys wouldn't notice anything but the thrill of finding their baskets and over-sugaring themselves at Grammy and Pap's house. 

It wasn't hard. I didn't really feel much. I went for a run and I drank a few beers and the kids had fun and I went to bed. 

So you can imagine my surprise when yesterday, your absence hit me like a ton of bricks, a barreling train, a knife to the throat, no creeping sadness, just crushing hurt at the disappearance of your light from my life. 

Maybe I prepared myself too well for Easter. Maybe I just didn't give myself time to allow you to cross my  mind. 

I hope you aren't hurt that I avoid dwelling on you much, but the thing is.... I can't. I lose so much time. I think of you and suddenly, it's evening and I haven't done a damn thing. I get so lost in it, the overwhelming, all-encompassing, never-ending-ness of your death. It's a lonely and shitty place to be, you know? I would have called you to talk to you about it, to see what you would say, but you're gone and I can't. And so I sit and try to summon the courage to imagine what you would say. 

It just-- it feels like I'm drowning, my body, my head under water with my clothes and hair swirling, dragging me down, and I keep reaching my hands up above the surface, waiting for you to grab on and pull me out. I'm free falling from a tall building, a tower, a ledge, and I'm not scared but I wish you would catch me. I wonder if this is what it felt like to be you. 

And, you know, I thought that the summer days and the warmth and the sunshine would make me feel better and make things seem easier, but the truth is, I miss you so much more in the light of day. I just keep expecting you to show up. I keep thinking I could call you, maybe, you would pick up, maybe I could take the boys to finally see your place and go to the park like we said a million years ago but then things always came up for one of us so I didn't ever make it. I keep hoping you'll text me and tell me you're in the area and you were thinking you might stop by if I'm home. 

And then the tears come again and I am picturing you in a million ages and I keep thinking about leaning over the casket, how I watched a tear fall onto your chest, how if this was a fairy tale, my tears would have brought you back to me. 

I wish I hadn't wasted so much of your life being mad at you. If I could go back in time, I would do it over and over again, just to be with you. 

I miss you. 

Still so heavy.

I keep having this dream. I'm driving home from Mom & Dad's, but I'm younger. Or maybe I'm older. I'm not who I am today. It's nighttime and it's raining, pouring down, so hard that I can barely see the road..... but all of the houses have these ponds in the backyard. And there are helicopters in the ponds. No, actually in them,  underwater, with the thing on top spinning, making small waves, smaller than what they should make. The sound is deafening. They're looking for someone..... Someone is missing. They are looking so hard, and it is such a desperate search, they're in all of the ponds. It has this strange Jurassic Park feel to it.
The thing is, I know that who they are looking for isn't in those ponds. I don't know who it is, but I know that they are gone. I feel a grim and heavy weight in my soul over this, but I don't tell them that their efforts are fruitless. I let them hold onto their hope, even though I know there is no hope. I just keep driving.

I am floundering.
See.... I think, right now, the worst part about grief is when you begin to feel like you should be getting your shit together again.
Has it been too long to be falling apart this way?
I am so lost without you.
I can't concentrate on anything.
I can't breathe.
And I can't fucking feel right, it's like... there't this thin layer of film between me and any real feeling. It's there... but it's like I'm holding it with latex gloves. I can feel it, but I know it's not the real thing. I'm laughing and I am crying and I am raging, but I want to rip these gloves off and touch it with my bare hands.

I don't know who I am without you.
I don't know who I am at all.
I want to reach out but I can't bring myself to actually ask if anyone else feels this way. How could I? I don't want anyone else to feel like this.
 Like a part of me is literally gone, as if a part of who I am has been ripped away and now I am left to question everything I thought I knew.
Like how I knew you were invincible, even when I yelled at you that you weren't.
Like how I knew you would always be there when I needed to call you, even if I wasn't there for you.
Like how when I forgot details about some funny story from when we were little, you would be there to fill them in. Now it's just me, telling a story, not us, sharing a memory.
Like when I thought I might be remembering something wrong, I could always ask you, because you remembered everything.
Like when I thought I was totally fucked, you would always be there to tell me it would work out. And then it would.

But now you're gone, and I just am in total disbelief.... but if I am really in disbelief, then why am I so heartbroken? Why do I cry every night, as quietly as I can, why do I cry in the car, why is your favorite band the only thing I want to listen to, why do I wish I was locked in my room growing up with you across the hall telling me to come out?
Why do I picture you standing here, asking me what's going on, picture you shifting you weight from foot to foot, never standing totally still, and then feel like I have a puncture in my lungs, a slow leak, letting out the air I need to breathe in?
God, I hate this more than I can put into these stupid fucking words that don't mean anything because they aren't bringing you back to me.
And I want to not be mad, and I'm not, but I want to scream at you anyways because I was counting on you, you know? And you fucking let me down.
I'm sorry. Because I hate that I think that, and also because I don't REALLY think that.  I hate that because I let you down so much more and I wish that I could turn it all around, reverse the clock, save you, save you, save you.
When in reality, this probably hurts so much because I always knew you would be there to save me. To say the right thing. To listen to me bitch. To laugh at my kids. To do everything first. To let me know it's not so bad.
And time isn't slowing down, the world doesn't care that I need more time and every day is further away from the last time I saw you laugh, the last time I called you, the last time I laughed at some horrible meme you posted on facebook, the last time I heard you change the words to a song to a version you liked better.
I just don't know how to be without you.
I wonder when I will figure this out.

Messages to my dead brother; part I

When we were younger, after Mia had died, I did this thing. I imagined all of the people I loved dead. Systematically, I went through each loved one. I have continued this weird evaluation ever since. I imagined how it would feel to lose you many times. If I love you, I have imagined how I would feel if you died. I pictured the immediate and I pictured the future. It's not even a conscious thing anymore, it's just a weird tic, a gigantic cry for help, a defense mechanism from the horror of losing a piece of the fabric that holds me together. I have to admit, my imagination must be awful. I never mustered up the shattering heartbreak that is you being gone.

Chat Conversation End

It's Been 4 weeks.

Time is funny now. It's been a month since you died, but my world seems to have come to a stand still, so a month doesn't seem right. I've begun to process how life is without you and I have to tell you, I hate it.
I never knew how much I counted on you being there until you were gone. That's a shitty thing to admit, huh?
I spend most of my time holding it together, because I don't want my kids to have memories of their mom crying all the time. I just want them to have a happy childhood. I want them to not worry.
But the other day, I listened to a song that made me think of you, that I didn't know would make me think of you, and I cried so hard my vision blurred and I felt my body being stretched into a million shattered pieces, and Silas walked into the kitchen and sat beside me until I pulled the pieces back together.
It is amazing how much care a little boy can take with a broken grownup.

I call Mom every day now.
I cry in the car anytime I'm alone.
I wish you were here to tell me it was going to be okay. I wish you were here to be angry at. I wish you were here to cry with. I wish you were here to help me.

I wish I would have helped you.
I think back to a specific night, the one before you birthday this year. You were spiraling. You called me, you had nowhere to go. You had overdosed two nights before, I knew you were still using because you didn't want me to know. I told you to go to a hospital. I told you to go to a hospital and then rehab.
I know you wanted me to ask you to come stay the night.
I wanted to tell you to come over.
But I was afraid. I thought that you needed to do it on your own. I thought that I should listen to what the experts said. I called Mom to tell her what was going on. I wanted to make sure I was doing the right thing, but I know that she wanted you to come over too. But I wanted to be absolved of it, of this sin of turning my brother away.

I wish I would have told you to come over.
I think about that all the time.
I wonder if you would have known that you could always stop by... I wonder if things would have turned out different.
I remember when you came home from Florida, I remember you saying you didn't like being away because it was weird, not having somewhere you could always just go. "There's something about not having anyone," is how you said it, and I remember that made my heart stop for a minute, and I wonder if that's how you felt. It brings an awful metallic taste to my mouth and I hope that you knew that we were all always here, we just wanted you to really be here too.
I hope that you are finding some peace up there. I miss you every day.