“January oh how I love you.” A sentence I have used many a time over the past month, I have written about it here, on social media and even made a video sharing my tips for a positive month. And that has been true, I have enjoyed the slow pace of life and have always attributed that to the crazy Christmas period. The calm after the storm. But today, on the second to last day of the month I found myself in a real panic that it was about to be over, annoyed that something small (which really isn’t worth mentioning) had burst my bubble of positivity that I have felt so protective of and I rather abruptly realised why. Why I don’t just love January, but that I actually need to love it, that I need it to be positive and that one small thing cannot jeopardise that. In that moment it all felt so fragile. Why? The truth took me completely by surprise and it felt like that sudden realisation hit me like a ton of bricks.
It isn’t about December at all, it isn’t about feeling calm after Christmas, it never has been. In fact it is about the dread of the month to come. I feel stupid for not realising sooner, like somehow this month has been a fraud and in a second all of it has been taken away.
February is the month that my baby girl turns 3 years old, now of course this is worth celebrating and I cannot wait to do that with her and this in no way means I am wishing that away, on the contrary. I have not wanted it to come around in that flippant overly emotional Mum way of not wanting my last baby to grow up! Joking with her that she isn’t having a birthday because then she will still be my baby girl.
Yet again this has been crushed. That it probably isn’t about that at all and is in truth because February is also the month that my other baby, the one that didn’t make it, the one that I couldn’t protect, or watch grow, or feel emotionally happy and sad about the years passing, should have been born. I desperately never wanted Roma to be born in this month because I know this isn’t about her, and it really really isn’t. Only, I don’t want that happy day of hers to come, to end, because the rest of the month is anything but happy. It is as far away from that feeling as possible and I don’t know how they can mix. I am not in any way dreading it coming, I am so excited, as is she. I am just really dreading it being over, and that makes me shoulder all the Mum guilt in the world.
I hold onto so many moments extra tight now, Christmas, Eva’s birthday, Roma’s birthday they all come in one fail swoop, and they all keep me going. I have enjoyed it all, been happy, been fine.
Yet today it has all unraveled, I don’t feel fine anymore, I don’t feel positive anymore I just feel sad. No, more than that, I feel like I’m falling apart again and I can’t do anything about it. I can’t breathe. I feel sad and blue and as much as I was determined this year would be different I am not sure it will be. My baby should have been four next month. I should be holding them in my arms and telling them not to grow up and hoping I’ve done a good job and not in fact torturing myself about the bad job I did before they even made it into this world. That I failed my baby and each and every year I am reminded of that fact.
I know in my head that I had no real choice. That it was an impossible situation that no matter how hard I try I simply cannot undo. When I was forced upon that decision by Mother Nature, Hyperemesis, medical science, whatever the details may be I naively thought it would make everything better, make me better and stop the hurt….all it really did was make it a million times worse every day for the rest of my life. I can’t turn back time otherwise believe you me I would in a second, fought harder and somehow got through. But I didn’t and my head says give yourself a break and my heart says I miss that baby more than anything else in the world and nothing, nothing will ever help. I live with that pain every single day, there is literally not a day goes by that I don’t think about it, how it has changed me, shaped me, and that sometimes it doesn’t even seem real. Not a day. In four years. Yet I have to live with this still for the rest of my life and some days I don’t know how I will do that.
Sometimes I feel like that is my punishment and every day it just really really hurts. There are days when I feel like I’m done hurting, I’m getting through and then suddenly I’m not and it hurts so much that every part of me wants to run from it and every part of me physically hurts knowing that I can’t. Today is that day. Suddenly for everything I know I have in life, and trust me I am so very grateful for them, all I can see is what is missing. There will always always be something, someone, missing and today I can’t see past it. A piece of me is missing that will never be whole again.
That positive brick wall has well and truly crumbled and I for the life of me can’t pick it up. Not today anyway. No amount of time heals me, no amount of time makes the hurt go away and today I just can’t bare it. My chest feels crushed and I literally cannot breathe as the tears fall unwillingly, uncontrollably over my cheeks and land with a thud on my crossed legs below. The legs that feel too heavy to even move.
But I have to carry on. I have to be strong for the children I have here in my arms and hold them as tight as I possibly can without pushing my hurt onto them. I have to be strong for me but more than that I have to celebrate the most perfect little person I do have here, that I am so very grateful to know and who has helped me in ways she will never understand, and her birthday which so cruelly falls in the same month. By one god damn day. It feels so unfair to her and I am so so sorry for that.
So January as much as I want you to be good, to be the calm in my storm, however much I thought you were, it was all just a front. Today there has been much more storm and maybe I just got it all wrong. Maybe it always was about the calm before the storm. The calm that I really desperately needed but that is undeniably gone.
xx
