A major anniversary that few noticed but me. And my dad, who called me to ask how I was doing.
This has been my first week back at work - by definition, I suppose, a little less than one month after Harper's death. It feels strangely normal. As if nothing has really changed, as if the past ten months had never happened. As if I'd never been pregnant, never had a baby, never experienced the pain of losing her. It's disconcerting - not necessarily good or bad. Just weird.
That erasure, that sense of re-written history, makes it that much more jarring when I encounter reminders. The jar of peanuts on my desk, from when I was bulking up on protein to try to make the baby grow. The onesie, left at the office, a kind gift from a colleague. The blank spaces on my normally packed calendar, cleared in anticipation of maternity leave. The mini-candy bar at the bottom of my purse, taken as a quick snack from the nursing lounge outside the NICU. Standing on the Metro train, because I'm no longer pregnant. Casual inquires about summer plans, when my summer plans have changed dramatically.
The very nature of my job itself.
It's a very different feeling, talking about patient stories, when your life has become a patient's story. The kind with an unhappy ending. Looking at statistics on the number of diseases whose molecular causes have been discovered since they advent of the Human Genome Project is no longer a neutral number exercise. SLOS was one of those diseases.
An issue with such a short life is that the anniversaries of Harper's birth and her death will always be close. Always there will be two days, within a three week period, that will twinge and remind and hurt and summon. Which was more traumatic? Harper's birth and diagnosis or her death? Maybe because it's still too close, but I find that question impossible to answer. They both caused massive pain.
I guess I will forever have a reason to drink too much tequila on Cinco de Mayo. (Although, in my experience, most people don't need much of an excuse to do this...)
Sometimes I still feel phantom baby kicks, imaginary fluttering in my belly. I wonder if I had those with Shea, too? And I was just too busy with him to notice?
I've gone back to read my blog posts from when I was pregnant, and I don't even recognize the person who wrote them. I can barely relate to the emotional roller coaster of worry and fears - it seems so, well, stupid. So small. So insignificant. How could I have been so despairing over club feet? Worrying so much about daycare before and after heart surgery? How could I have wasted so many hours crying on FIXABLE problems? Reading them actually adds to my sense that it all never happened - I feel so removed from that pregnancy, from those emotions, that seemed so intense at the time.
I want to scream at that person. At my pregnant self. You have no idea, I want to say. No idea what's coming, no idea how bad it's going to get. It is going to be beyond your worst nightmares, your worse imagining. Your bean is not going to be OK.
I want to tell that person that instead of birth announcements you will be sending out memorial cards. Beautiful cards with the only picture of your baby girl's eyes wide open. Cards to say thank you for the support and kindness and helping hands.
Someday I hope I can tell that former me, that blogger without a clue, that this too shall pass. You will survive it. You will stop counting the days and weeks and months since Harper was born and since Harper died. The new normal will just be... normal.
But it's only been a month, and I'm not ready yet.
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