Stuck in a Moment*

This sounds crazy, but sometimes I imagine my mind being a vast forest, with a meadow and a lake and lots of beautiful trees. And sometimes I imagine a person walking through this forest and finding things deep in the recesses of my mind.

Last night, as I tucked my daughter in, I felt the wanderer walking about in my head, touching on several things but finally resting on a memory that I think of as the last time that my life could be described as easy.

August 15, 2009. The day before my miscarriage. I don’t recall exactly what I did for the better part of that Saturday, but I know that at around 3:30 I took a shower and got myself ready to go to a wedding shower for my best friend's sister. I wore the same dress that I'd worn for our anniversary dinner, the same shoes even. I ate only vegetables and the tiniest piece of cake, and was careful to remember to drink water and not tea because I didn't want the caffeine. It took quite a lot of strength not to tell my BFF what we were planning on telling our families the very next day. I was so excited I almost couldn't contain it! I think before I left I said something like, "I'm going to call you tomorrow and tell you something." She, probably rightly suspecting, asked if it was big news. I just smiled and said "I'll tell you tomorrow." I went home that night and had some special time with my husband. Saturday, August 15, 2009 honestly could be described as having been a perfect day.

Sometimes it almost seems like that was the last perfect day. Don't get me wrong, there have been lots of good days since then, but overall it seems the gray days have outnumbered the sunny. Sure, I'd given birth at age 18, grew up super fast and lived a very grown-up life while most of my friends and peers were in college or at parties. I'd dealt with the loss of my brother and grandma within two years of each other. But August 16, 2009 seems like the day I truly became an adult. Since then, our struggles seem to have increased tenfold. It was like a dark day came and stayed.

Mr. Me assures me that we’ll get back to where we were five and a half months ago, that we will be able to reclaim that innocence and that excitement and joy about life. I know he’s right, but it seems like it will never happen.

 

*U2

It gets easier to deal with, but it doesn't go away.

People still constantly ask when we’re going to have a baby. If they only knew what we’ve been through! Maybe then they wouldn’t ask.

 

But I don’t want the attention. I don’t want anyone to know because I don’t want their sympathy. I don’t want them to say “Oh I’m so sorry” while I nod and say “It’s okay” and follow it up with a moment or two of uncomfortable silence, after which they’ll say one of the insensitive comments I’ve gotten used to hearing from some of the few people who do know what happened.

 

Still, it seems as though people just expect me to be completely over it. Well, I don’t know if that will ever happen. And truthfully, I worry about what it will be like if this should ever happen again.

 

***

 

It’s been five months and two days since we lost our precious baby. In the days that followed, as we held hands and cried in bed together, we resolved to plant a memorial apple tree somewhere on our four acres. We had a place picked out in our back yard, but the proposed privacy fence will get in the way of the sun on our little tree, and then a greenhouse employee informed us that apple trees should be planted as far away from cedars as possible because of something called “cedar rust,” a tree disease that will kill pretty much any apple tree with which it comes in contact. Given the number of cedars on our property, well…then the planting season passed. It looks like we might finally get to plant our tree this spring. I have a feeling we’ll buy our tree from either Lowe’s or a local greenhouse, and I’m quite excited by the knowledge that in a few short months they’ll have their baby trees out.