Missing you

These last few day have been hard.  Not the normal, crazy, stressed hard, but all of that along with a sudden surge of grief.  Out of nowhere, after months of feeling ok and thinking fondly of my girl, I am struck again with that knot-in-my-stomach heartache.  It is as if she left just yesterday, not 9 months ago.  Last night I cried, for the first time in a long time, reliving every second of saying goodbye to her.  There is no particular reason for this onset of grief but it is here just the same. 

The past few months have, of course, had their difficult moments but I was able to take it in stride and go through my day with a smile.  I have had some wonderful moments with my boys.  I love to watch them play together, now that Liam is big enough to play.  He adores his big brother and I love the look of hero worship on his face as he watched Sawyer race around like a superhero, build block towers for him or eat snack.  I love how Sawyer always wants to include Liam in his fun.  He is always asking if Liam can sit on the floor and play with him or if I think Liam is done napping so that he can come play.  He is an amazing big brother and it makes my heart ache to think how much he and Liam are missing without their sister here.  They miss her, I can tell.  Sawyer talks about her all the time.  He plays with his "Addy doll", dressing her in Adeline's clothes, asking me to swaddle her so she can sleep in her Moses basket and snugging it right up next to his bed.  I came into the living room the other day and found him making the doll give Liam kisses.  It was a beautiful, heart wrenching moment but warmed my heart and made me smile. 

Liam has entered the separation anxiety stage.  I know other mom's know what I'm talking about.  That stage where it is pretty much the end of his little world when I put him down, hand him of to someone else or, heaven forbid, leave the room.  I look at his need to snuggle, to be close to me and I wonder if he is missing his sister as much as I think he is.  They would have been inseparable, I am sure.  He so very often looks up at the sky with a great big grin, or catches his reflection in the mirror and gets the cutest, excited expression and I can't help but wonder if he sees her.  Every now and then something weird happens at our house, his musical toy going off all by itself,  a big ray of sunshine on a cloudy day or just a sudden intense feeling that she is here, and he reacts to it.  A couple of times he has actually woken up from napping or gotten a sudden smile for no apparent reason.  Sometimes he just gets really aggitated at the same time that I am suddenly thinking of her.  I think she is here with him in those moments and I think he feels it too.  Usually these moments give me peace and bring a smile to my face.  Usually I am able to think of her fondly and continue with my day, but not today.  Today I sit, looking out the window at the quiet, snowy day.  The whole world around me is a beautiful, peaceful, quiet, white and somehow that makes it harder.  Today I just miss her. 

Mania

It has been a long time since my last post, not for lack of things to write about, but, I think, for fear of facing it.  I find myself lately in a manic haze.  I have been functioning on very little sleep, lots of coffee and little to no down time.  Part of this, of course, is out of necessity.  Being a working and taking care of a house, 3 kids and a husband takes a significant amount of work after all.  A large part of this mania, however is an avoidance.  I find myself avoiding down time, time when I can think things through and reflect, clinging desperately to the shallow sense of happiness that I am precariously maintaining.  I have been wanting for weeks, to look through Addy's memory box, though I keep finding other things to fill up my time, to delay the deep saddness that I know will come with it.   I realized this morning that I have not written in Liam's baby book in 3 months.  I love writing in his baby book, though there is always the pain that I have nothing to add to the pink baby book underneath his on the shelf.  My only real down time during the week is my drive to work and back.  I have over an hour in the car each way with no distractions and noone between me and well, myself.   I drive running through my grief in my head, writing and rewriting journal entries that I never actually commit to paper.  I often find myself crying during at some point during the drive.  Sometimes it is just a few quiet tears and others it is pull-over-to-the-side-of-the-road-sobbing.  At the end of the drive however, I pull myself out of my thoughts, wipe my face and head back into the craziness.  There is a part of me that enjoys this time and part that dreads it.
In my day to day craziness I am able to remain above the surface, to bury my pain and pretend it is not there.  I think of Addy constantly, though in a superficial way that I hate myself for when I stop and think about it.  I think this is because when I stop and really remember her, when I confront all of the should have been's and could have been's and try to reconcile them with my current reality, the discrepancy is just too painful.  I never used to fully understand when other mom's in my support groups would say that they hated seeing other people's babies.  I mean I understood why, I just never felt that way myself and could not connect with it.  I think I finally understand it.  For me it is not so much babies, although baby girls do get me a little, it is healthy twins.  As happy as I am for my friends with twins, I hate seeing facebook posts about their beautiful healthy twins doing cute twin things.  It started out as a little pang, a tiny flip in my stomach as I read.  Now, it has turned into all out anger.  Not anger at my friends or their kids, anger at the universe, anger at the should have been.  That should have been me posting about my twins chewing on each others toes, talking in their own special language, starting kindergarten, etc.  I feel it every time I see a mother with twins at the store.  I am acutely aware that I should have had something to talk about with this mom.  When I was pregnant I signed up for our local moms of multiples group.  I couldn't bring myself to stop the membership and so the e-mails have been coming for the last year.  Some of them I read and some of them I skip but they were an odd comfort.  A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail that it is time to renew my membership.  It hit me all of a sudden that that was it, there goes another piece of the way my life should have been.  Of course I could renew the membership but that would be a little crazy, even for me.  No, I will let it lapse and again mourn a piece of my should-have-been life.
As I sat down to write tonight, I was fighting myself.  I now find that I have found the sense of calm and peace that I always find writing here.  I hope that this means that I will be able to find more time to write and that it will be easier to get started next time.