I have come to realize that Bennett's life was the one event that my entire life is going to be birthed from. In one way I find myself feeling overwhelmingly lucky to be able to say that I know, without question, the event in my life that defines me. On the flip side, I feel rather unlucky that my particular event is the loss of my son. I have lived in and out of turmoil for almost 6 years while I struggled with my grief. It has also become apparent to me that taking on this challenge, carrying and mothering a baby with a fatal birth defect, would have lasting effects I could have never seen when I made the decision to carry Bennett. In no way am I saying that I wish I had made a different decision, instead I am saying that I wish I somehow would have been better prepared. I wish that, despite other Mom's telling me that it would be tough, someone would have been brutally honest with me. I wish that I would have had a "grief mentor" if you will. I realize as soon as I say that I scoff at myself and think, "As if I would have cared what they said, read their blog or listened to their experience." I am stubborn. It's an integral part of who I am. I don't know if I would have been willing to receive someone trying to 'mentor' me through the grieving process. When I start down this trail of thought my mind immediately jumps at me and screams "BUT YOU DIDN'T WANT ANYONE TO MENTOR YOU! YOU DIDN'T WANT ANYONE TO TELL YOU THAT EVENTUALLY YOU WOULD FIND A NEW WAY TO LIVE! YOU DIDN'T WANT TO LIVE, YOU DIDN'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT LIFE WITHOUT BENNETT" And my mind is right! What I wanted was someone to yell at God with me, I wanted someone who would be willing to say "I had those hard thoughts too" or "You aren't totally crazy" or "Hey, it's okay that you just a complete meltdown almost 6 years later about a children's book." If you take anything away from this paragraph take this: after loss, every thought turns into you finding yourself seesawing between ideas that just happen to be polar opposites of one another. But enough rambling...
When I started this blog I wanted to tell Bennett's story. I started in the beginning and relived some of the toughest points of my pregnancy. However, I have come to realize that Bennett's story isn't just the story of the life he lived here. His story is the story of how one small life impacted so many people. How his life impacted me. I am his story and he is mine. I am tired of hiding the real story. The real story of the struggle to find peace with God, the real story of living with a broken heart, the real story of walking around every day with a piece of my life missing. That's the real story. The real story is that this weekend I was on a committee for a Character Breakfast. I thought, "Sure, why not? This will be fun! I can plan a Character Breakfast!" Do you think I stopped to think for one moment what being a room with 100 children overwhelmed with excitement at the sight of their favorite character would be like? Do you think I said, "Hey Tabitha, are you sure this is a great idea? Have you thought about how this might effect you? Are you positive you can handle it?" If you think I did, well you are wrong. See that's the trouble with grief the further you get from THE EVENT. You start to forget how intricately woven it is into the fabric of your SELF. You start to make decisions without factoring the grief in. I find plenty of blogs and articles about right after the loss, or even a few months to a couple years after, but how many of us really talk about how the grief continues to rock our worlds?
I wonder if we have this idea of time in our heads, like, it's been enough time. Nobody wants to hear me rant about the fact that while at that Character Breakfast I wanted to make a fast break for the door; that I wanted to scream at the mother ignoring her child. What about that in the moment Batman spread his cape out and all the little boys oo'ed and aw'ed I had the intense urge to turn to a little almost 6 year old boy and say "Look buddy! Isn't that cool!"? Let's talk about how I turned only to be smacked in the face with the cold, hard reality that no matter how many times I turn my head that little boy is never going to be there. It reminds me of when I was a teenager and saw Titanic. I watched it again and again, each time hoping, someway, somehow that the ending would be different. That the ship wouldn't sink. That thousands of people wouldn't lose their lives. I feel like I live everyday not knowing anymore when my next Titanic is going to hit. In the beginning I avoided any and all situations that I even thought might be difficult but then you realize that you aren't really living, you are just existing. The shitty (excuse the French if you're reading this Mom) reality is that unless you plan on tunneling in you eventually have to start living. It's necessary.
I had always looked forward to the day that I started living. I had waited with bated breath for the day I woke up out of the fog. The day that I realized life will go on and I am going to be okay. When that happened I greeted it with welcome abandon. Today I would be lying if I didn't say there's a part of me that wishes I could go back to the fog. At least in the fog I didn't really care. All that mattered was taking care of me. Since I have decided to really start to live that means I have to do things I don't want to do. I have to stretch myself. I still have to take care of myself of course. However, no longer can I allot myself the liberty of licking my wounds in isolation. Frankly, that sucks. In the beginning I could have ran out of that Character Breakfast and explained that my loss overwhelmed me. Oh the compassion and understanding I would have gotten. Try explaining to someone that you had to run out because 6 years ago you had a son who had a fatal birth defect, you just tried to talk to the air that exists where he should be standing and that being around all those kids is sending you into an out of control grief spiral. Pretty sure you're getting a one way ticket to the crazy house. I could be totally wrong, but that's how it feels.
My point is, I am tired of hiding. I am tired of pretending. I am tired of saying I am okay when I'm not. While I am grateful that I am living and I am finding a way to see the JOY in my pain, my life isn't the same. It's never going to be. My life is going to go on but not like everyone else's. My life is going to steadily progress forward while my son's does not. I will never get to experience the joys of motherhood that would uniquely belong to him. So while the story of my pregnancy is important and the story of his life is invaluable (we will get back to that, because frankly he rocked it while he was here), I'm also going to tell the story of my now, of a lifetime with grief. Because that's the sticking point, no matter how much I heal, despite the amount of grieving I do, my grief is going to be around, for my lifetime. My grief and finding life in it is my story.
