Standing Still
Infertility has gotten the best of me. I don't know how I got to this place but it seems as if I blinked and two years is over. Two years since Avery grew his wings. I wish so badly that at this part of my story things were different. That I was different...And in many ways I am, but not in the ways I so desperately have pleaded for. As I sit here tonight I wish that the room beside me was filled with nursery decorations and a beautiful baby that I have dreamed of for so long. Infertility feels as if I am standing still. Standing still while the world around me is on fast forward. I feel like I am in a hurricane, right out in the open with not so much as an umbrella.
Most days I can no longer find words to describe my pain. I feel like a failure and that all of the self-work I did for months and months has come to a screeching halt. How do I teach others about light in loss when I can no longer find my own? So instead I feel like hiding. I have retreated backward to hide from all that circles my life of loss. Because each time I brave forward and try to re-enter into social media there are more and more triggers that I am having a hard time facing. There is so much excitement going on around me. Family members are moving on to greater opportunities, another member has a baby on the way. Friends are having their first, second or third children. Fellow loss families are getting another chance with rainbow babies. And I am alone. I am standing still. And the thing is, I am without a doubt happy for everyone. There are all these new chapters starting with so many people I love, but at the same time, I wish the same was happening to me. But I am not moving forward. I am stuck...without a choice of moving forward.
On Sunday Avery would have been two. I saw a child yesterday that was around the age he would have been and it hit me like bricks. It was so hard not to image Avery starting to walk and learning his first words. To be playing with the other children and getting lots of attention. But then I have to tell myself all over again that my story is different. The sad truth is that I almost have lost the vision of myself as a mother to an Earthside baby. I use to be able to see it in my future, and it seems as if the days turn to weeks and then to months and years...the life I thought I would have has slipped too far away. And a part of me wonders if being a mother to an angel is all I will ever know.
Failure is such a complicated part of having lost my only child. And secondary loss often brings out the darkness...especially when you don't want it to come out. Every day at some point the darkness creeps in and I go back to feeling alone. Some days I can heal myself with affirmations of hope and faith. While others I can't...because the hope seems too far gone. I was told to lose weight to help me conceive...so I am eating healthier and cleaner and the weight is slowing inching off. But I wanted to do more...more for my health and trying a diet that is meant for people who have Hoshimotos (my autoimmune condition) but each day I try and try and can't seem to get a good enough grip on my lifestyle and it causes the shame all over again. It instantly triggers my failures to come out in full force. I then realize that I have spent my entire day putting myself down...telling myself all the bad things that I once was able to overcome. I wonder if I will ever find my light again. I surely hope so.
I hate feeling like this. At some point I was in a good place...but somehow I am in the thick of my grief again. I am standing still and bracing myself for the next milestone in my sweet baby's memory.